Adult Education Slashed in Liverpool

Our education system has been sold off, and sold out, by the corporate state's Blairite clique called New Labour.

And for what?

Setting fire to the Middle East.

Every penny spent on war could have gone on the health and education of our people.

This cannot continue.

The adult education, return and learn, evening schools, access studies, community learning, education in the community have suffered ongoing attacks throughout the 1990's.

It started with the Tories 1988? 'Great' Education Bill known as 'Gerbil', with this bill Higher Education was to be privatised with the Polytechnics taken out of local council and community control and accountability and be turned into private education corporations. Further Education (F.E.) colleges were also to be taken out of local council and community control and accountability, this led to many college sites here in Liverpool ultimately being closed down and demolished, leading to the over concentration on the city centre and greater enrolement of out of town students bringing in more income.

In the North East of Liverpool I was a student union president at the Millbrook College (formerly North East Liver Tech' College) 89-91 and it was a vibrant centre of learning, a vast cross section of students attended it, foreign students attending the highly regarded science courses at the Muirhead centre, which also catered for Liverpool Poly' students as well.

In the Adult Education sector, which included basic reading, writing and numeracy skills, there was art, creative writing courses, computer courses, music courses based in the community within walking distances of many educationally disenfranchised working class communities. The F.E. sector and the Adult Education sector have been variously described at the 'cinderalla' part of education, it has to be said that the sector catered largely for working class people, many of its best staff strived to encourage new learners into the centres and helped boost their morale and displace their negative experiences of organised learning at school.

There was more access and ways of obtaining learning on everyone's level, the basic requirement simply being 'wanting to learn' obtain knowledge and to study a subject. In this ever increasingly commodified consumer society Adult Education is now to suffer the fate of F.E. what business and industry wants and needs comes before the requirements of the students, thus in F.E. for example art and creative courses were moved away from centres providing business and science courses in the early 1990's. Adult Education provided hope and a social environment for many isolated unemployed young people aged in the 1980's when there were jobs for us at all and there was literally nowhere for us to go, it was widely acknowledged as an asset to the city of Liverpool and well regarded nationally. Elsewhere in Britain the Adult Education sector was cast out early from F.E. colleges which had become more commerically and financially driven with their private sector and big business dominated board of governors.

Back in 1995 I put together a leaflet opposing the closure of community college centres in Norris Green, Wavertree, Aigburth, City Centre and distributed it to councillors at the council's full education meeting, it stated that by moving out from the communities the 'Community' college could no longer claim to call itself a 'community' college, it also questioned why the college had millions of pounds kept hidden in an account meant for building upgrades while at the same times sites were being allowed to fall into serious disrepair and students being turned away from certain site and redirected to others which meant those sites had falling attendances. Concentrating the college in the city centre would mean greater travel expense for poorer students having to travel into the city centre. It would mean loss of resources, jobs and access in some of the most marginal and forgotten parts of Liverpool.

The colleges sites have been sold off, demolished and -yet more- private housing estates built upon them. In the North East of Liverpool it meant Norris Green, Fazakerly, Sparrow Hall, Croxteth lost access to it's local college, later on the Adult Education outreach centre in the middle of Norris Green at Welsbourne was also closed meaning the entire North East of Liverpool was cut out of F.E.

Incidently a little known fact: The City of Liverpool Community College has had no elected Student Union since at least 1998, the reason? The Principal Wally Brown didn't think it was needed. In place of an elected student representative the college employs a member staff as the so called 'student liason' officer, in no way accountable to or representative of students.

The ultimate solution:
To end these attacks on our services and rights we have to look at the bigger picture, fight the causes of inequality, destruction of public services due to EU, GATT and other policies supported by this anti-working class New Labour government. Capitalism the system whereby a society is run for the benefit of the few takes evermore rights, services and resources away from the majority - us, the working class. To remedy that situation, we have to firstly abolish capitalism and establish a socialist society whereby the needs of all citizens are the primary concern. Anything less than that is tinkering with inequality, exploitation and deluding the majority that capitalism can be reformed and made fairer - it can't.