The Recession - Teachers and trainers make a difference

The Recession – Teachers and Trainers make a Difference

IfL members, over 183,000 teachers and trainers across the learning and skills sector, are making a difference to the growing proportion of learners affected by the recession. Increasingly, people have lost their jobs or are in fear of never getting a job or being made redundant. Many of you have current experience of helping learners train and retrain in order to improve their employment prospects in a cold economic climate. IfL looked back to the recession in the mid 1980s to guidance for teachers and trainers which is still relevant today and can help shape how we respond to the needs of learners who are unemployed.  Click here to read more….. 

Summary from ‘Adult Unemployment and the Curriculum – a manual for practitioners’ by AG Watts and EG Knasel, FEU/REPLAN 1985

Any attempts to respond to the educational needs of the unemployed have to recognise that, in terms of range, they are an extremely diverse group. Indeed, they only share one objective characteristic – the fact that they do not have a job. In other respects they are as diverse as the whole population in terms of their abilities, interests, needs etc. In terms of balance, however, they include disproportionate numbers of people form relatively deprived groups – the young, the old, women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, the unskilled, and those who are personally or socially disadvantaged – and disproportionate numbers of people whose previous experience of education have been unsatisfactory.

The learning needs of the unemployed will not necessary be related to the fact of their unemployment. Their needs may stem from other problems they have, or other interests and opportunities they want to explore.

Almost all unemployed people experience some negative effects from being unemployed. Research at the University of Sheffield in the 1980s suggested nine such effects in particular:

Reduced Income – Among unemployed working class men, about two-thirds have a household income which is half or less than their income when employed. Financial anxiety tends to be high and to be an important source of distress.

Reduced variety of activities – Unemployed people are required to leave their home less often, and their reduced income means that they have less money to go to clubs, pubs, sporting events, the cinema etc. More time is spent in household tasks and sleeping, sitting around and watching television.

Fewer goals and less ‘traction’ Employment often not only offers goals in itself but commits one to other goals and tasks: one becomes drawn along by the structure of one’s work. Unemployed people feel the lack of such goals.

Reduced scope for decision-making Unemployed people may experience greater freedom of choice in relation to small repetitive decisions about daily routine, but in respect of large decisions – for example, about life-style or leisure activities – the range of realistic options available to them is usually severely curtailed by lack of material resources (and, often, psychological resources too).

Increased exposure to psychologically threatening experiences Unemployed people are committed to seeking jobs where they will often be rejected; they have to deal with a society which often appears to view them as second-class citizens; they have to struggle to raise money through borrowing and selling; and they often experience difficulties and humiliation in securing the benefits and allowances to which they are entitled.

Increased insecurity about the future Many unemployed people identify as a major problem not knowing what is going to happen to them in future month. In particular, they are threatened by the possibility that they might become unemployable, lose their self-respect, or have insoluble money problems.

Restricted interpersonal contact Unemployed people tend to reduce the range of other people with whom they have contact, and to confine their social contacts within a much more restricted circle.

Reduced social status On becoming unemployed, a person loses a socially accepted position and the roles and self-respect which it provides. They tend to feel that they have moved into a position of lower prestige.

Most of these effects can be linked to the way in which the absence of employment undermines the six main functions which employment performs in our society:

  • Providing income
  • Imposing a time structure on the working day
  • Involving regularly shared experiences and contacts with people outside the nuclear family
  • Linking the individual to goals and structures which transcend his or her own
  • Defining aspects of personal status and identity
  • Enforcing activity

What Education and Training Can Do

Insofar as it increases the chances of return to employment, education  and training can accelerate the restoration of these functions. Many unemployed people will indeed judge its value and effectiveness in terms of whether it leads to a job. In more immediate terms, however, education and tr4aining can itself fulfil some of the functions. It cannot do very much about the first and probably the most basic one of providing income (although it can help the unemployed claim the full benefits and allowances due to them, to earn some extra money on the side; and to learn how to live within a limited budget). It can however provide:

  • A time structure for the working day
  • Regularly shared experiences and contacts with people outside the nuclear family
  • Links to wider goals and structure
  • A new status and identity (that of ‘learner’) which, while it may not be seen as a full substitute of that of ‘worker’, may nonetheless be preferable to the essentially negative status of ‘unemployed’
  • A stimulus to activity

An important effect of what we do is to give back to unemployed people the concept of ‘leisure’: because they study in the day, they again have ‘free time’ in the evenings and at week-ends as they had at work.

To some extent, therefore, education can provide a substitute for employment. It can also lead unemployed people to develop other substitutes. These may be non-economic:voluntary and community work and leisure activities of various kinds. Or they may involve skills which provide some additional income, and/or can lead in due course towards being able to create their own livelihood through self-employment or setting up a small business or co-operative. More generally, education and training can help unemployed people to move out of the isolation which often accompanies unemployment, and to be more fully integrated into the community.

At times, the lines between educational and training provision and other forms of community work designed to respond to the needs of the unemployed may become rather blurred. This is the case, for example, where such provision starts with the notion of offering support, and leave ‘learning goals’ to be developed at the learner’s own pace.

Such links between community-development activities and more formal ‘educational’ provision can be very creative, and may significantly increase the scope of what the educational system as a whole can offer as a response to unemployment.

In the end, however, unemployment remains a problem which requires economic and political solutions. This provides some of those who work with the unemployed with considerable dilemmas and anxieties of conscience. Is the effect of their energies helping the unemployed tolerate the intolerable? Does it simply patch up the wound, without offering any cures? Indeed, by patching the wound up, does it reduce the pressure on society as a whole to look for cures?

IfL comment - Thinking about the effects of unemployment helps teachers and trainers to develop teaching methods and design curriculum that helps individuals and groups who are unemployed or think they may become unemployed. There are real advantages of individuals becoming a learner - and rapidly - after becoming unemployed. Future issues of On the Agenda will feature articles on teaching and training in the recession and what IfL members find works.