From here to the top

Dame Ruth Silver, Principal at Lewisham College

At Lewisham College, we have a saying about 'ladders down'. In fact, it's more than a saying: it's the motto for our curriculum development.

Begin with a community rich in potential, brimming with impatience to get in and get on; begin with serial disadvantage, in schooling, health and housing. Begin the climb here in Lewisham. We started our project some fifteen years ago, determined to do better and determined to do local. Starting from the people of Lewisham and South East London, the construction of a curriculum composed of simple, short steps from level to level made perfect sense and we have worked at it ever since.

Intermediate stages

Where the gaps were too great, we built rungs in-between. If the reach from level one to level two was a challenge, we fashioned intermediate stages. Not content with the national qualifications framework, we sought to create mezzanine floors between levels and we talked of our students acquiring 'readiness' at each point of transition, defining the idea in learning competences across a range of social and economic contexts: 'classroom-ready', work-ready', 'progress-ready'.

My point here is not the work we've done in Lewisham, but the concept of learning needed to make advantage in the workplace accessible. I contend that the model is transferable and that the organisation of relentless incremental progress for the least hopeful is exactly the principle for curriculum design in the workplace. Success should not only accrue to the successful. Training should not concentrate in the hands of the trained if we are to mobilise the full capacity of the English workforce.

Economic relevance

The mission that Further Education is set by the drive towards greater economic relevance is not to cater for existing elites. It is our role to find solutions that propel working people up the ladder, carrying their families and communities with them. Take some of our newest employer-led work. It focuses on training crowd controllers. Here there are no degrees, no MBAs, but vital training in difficult and stretching work situations. The skills involved make all the difference to a regional economy busy with mass events and the safe ebb and flow of people.

Crafting the recognition of these roles in all their complexity and detail is not simple, but it means something to the people doing the work. The labour of the sector skills councils in defining the learning standards, job by job, step by step, is constructing the stages of ability and letting us see clearly the relevance of a renewed Further Education sector. Between each cluster of competencies lies learning and in each of these gaps we find our opportunities to deliver success.

Remodelling

And so we've begun our newest conversation about change at Lewisham College in terms of remodelling. We understand the learning paradigm I am trying to summarise in a few words here, but shifting it from a community-based, college-centred provision to one wired into the businesses and companies of the future is not simple. I do believe that it is exactly in the professional backwaters and byways that we can make the most difference, adding value and prospects to the jobs millions of people do every day with little or no attention. The complicated and often drudging effort of curriculum development in this context spells the difference between vocational and professional and hands honour to the qualities of the dedicated and resilient.

We do not underestimate this work and we feel justified in describing the nature of the necessary shift as the remodelling of a sector. The scale of change is challenging indeed. From diplomas to Train to Gain, the agenda is fundamentally the same and it will need new practice from seasoned practitioners. Again, the competencies of the new Further Education professional are up for definition and revision. New expectations of our workforce are in the air and the first of LLUK's consultations on a change strategy for the redoubtable personnel of the sector has just closed.

Wanting a chance

Nor should we forget employees-in-waiting. There are young people, people who don't speak English fluently, people with disabilities and learning difficulties all wanting a chance. The ladders still need to reach down to where the learner begins, the first rung finding their hand. Employability is another curriculum definition to be completed with supported opportunities established and funded with zeal as the lynch-pin for an inclusive employer-led development strategy. There is an enormous task to be completed in extending and organising opportunity in this new frame for the sector.

Advantage

Skills are the instrument of advantage and need to be in the hands of many many people if they are to generate benefit. We have to manage our new curricula in this knowledge, describing observable abilities in order to assess them and knowing exactly how our learners will prove that they can do something today they couldn't do yesterday. Superheroes leap from storey to storey; we mortals do it the hard way, inching our way up with a hand from teachers and family. Our job is to get the measure of progress right and see that no one falls off.