From Dr. Patrick Ainley, Reader in Learning Policy, University of Greenwich, School of Post-Compulsory Education and Training, Queen Anne’s Palace, 30 Park Row, London SE10 9LS.

Tel. 0181 331 9755, Fax. 9235, email: P.Ainley@gre.ac.uk

For the Main Conference

Title: ‘Learning Policy, Towards the certified society’

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Sussex at Brighton, September 2 - 5 1999

Individual paper with no media requirements

Key words: Education and training policy

100 word abstractBased on the author’s latest book for Macmillan (1999), the paper traces the recent emergence of ‘Learning Policy’ in England and Wales. The 1988 Education and 1992 Further and Higher Education Acts mark a new and integrated settlement of education and training ending the classic welfare state provision of education. This is illustrated by examining ‘Foundation’ and ‘Lifelong Learning’ from nursery to post-graduate schools. It is argued that ‘lifelong learning’ for ‘full employability’ answers a crisis of legitimacy for the state and is a main locus of social control in the absence of full employment in a post-welfare, workfare or Contracting State.

Epigraph: ‘Seeing that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech.’ 2 Corinthians 3, 12 (quoted in Tom Paulin’s ‘The Day-Star of Liberty, William Hazlitt’s Radical Style’, London: Faber 1998, 272)

Not a paper but an introduction for PGCE students on changes to the welfare state:

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INTRODUCTION TO THE INTRODUCTION TO THE POLICIES AND VALUES READER

Many part-time and distance students on this course do not teach or train in Further Education and many full-time students have come into FE after working in other parts of the public or private sector. This reader however focuses on FE where it argues that the social changes outlined in this general introduction can be seen very clearly. For the changes that have taken place in FE are typical of what has happened in other parts of the public or state sector. They are also central to the change from what could be called ‘an earning society’ to ‘a learning society’. This introduction begins to explain the many changes that have taken place by asking what has happened to the former ‘earning society’ and to the classic welfare state associated with it that was introduced in the UK after 1945.

The explanation given is divided into two sections. The first section describes the welfare state ‘settlement’ that was generally welcomed and accepted in 1945. This state of affairs was more or less settled for a long period of nearly 30 years economic growth and stability that only ended with the international oil crisis of 1973. The second section called ‘Mrs Thatcher’s achievement’ argues that, after a period of crisis and indecision, successive Conservative governments introduced from 1979 a new type of state that accommodated British society with the new global economy emerging at the same time. This has led, it is asserted, to a new ‘consensus’ or acceptance of a ‘post-welfare’ state (especially by the New Labour government that is now running it).

Another way of describing the changes that have taken place would be to say that traditional industry has been replaced by a new service economy related to new communications and information technology. However, it is the way the new state is administered – through what is called ‘franchising’ or ‘contract’ - that is considered crucial; so much so that the new state form which Mrs Thatcher introduced can be called ‘the Contracting State’.

Of course, to try and deal with so many changes over a 50 year period during which so much has happened (the USA won the Cold War while the world’s population increased from 2.5 to 6 billion, for instance) in a short introduction means that much has been simplified. Everything was not necessarily better ‘in the old days’; much has improved, particularly as society as a whole is much richer now than it was then. Nor is everything as simple and clear cut as it is presented; there were elements of private provision in the old welfare state - the self-employed status that General Practitioners enjoyed in the National Health Service, for instance. Another example is the government commitment to maintain full employment that is seen as underpinning the classic welfare state set up after the war. This commitment was only abandoned openly by Mrs Thacher, but had been previously been dropped in practice by the last Old Labour government of James Callaghan. (The even Older Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson also talked in the 1960s of ‘not unacceptable levels of unemployment’.) So, not everything can be sorted out and made crystal clear in a short introduction. There is still plenty to discuss and have your own opinion about because the explanation that follows is only one person’s attempt to make sense of ‘a world which’, as the sociologist Anthony Giddens says, ‘has taken us by surprise’. Now read on and see if you agree or disagree. Hopefully it will make sense to you, whichever section of the public or private services you work in or are familiar with. For ease of understanding, key terms are emboldened throughout.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO POLICIES AND VALUES READER

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE WELFARE STATE?1/ The Post-War Welfare State SettlementLooking back, the twentieth century can be seen as ‘a game of two halves’. The second half was longer than the first half. It began in 1945 with victory over fascism at the end of World War Two. In the developed capitalist countries, the economic system of production for profit was forced to adjust to the social conditions created by this popular victory. In the UK it did so through what is called the post-war welfare state settlement.

A welfare state has been defined as ‘a society in which government is expected to provide, and does provide, for all its citizens, not only social security but also a range of other services, at a standard well above the barest minimum’ (Lowe 1993, 14). Although there had been earlier moves in this direction and Britain was not the first country to have a welfare state, the welfare state as Lowe describes it was new for Britain. This was the first time, for instance that government accepted in the 1944 White Paper Employment Policy, ‘as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment.’ Full employment was the economic bottom line on which the welfare state was founded. ‘The post-war welfare state was legitimated and sustained by a range of settlements’, defined as ‘limited and conditional reconciliations of different interests’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997, 1 and 8). The most obvious of these agreements was party political. The 1944 Education Act was an instance of such an agreement between the two main Parliamentary parties. It came before many of the other measures introducing the new welfare state, being drawn up and agreed upon during the war. Like the Beveridge Report covering the whole field of social security, the Education Act was a product of cross-party agreement in the wartime coalition government.

This party political compromise both contained and reflected a popular, democratic consensus for radical change that had emerged during the war. This was the popular foundation for the classic welfare state, which remains, as Blackwell and Seabrook recorded, ‘the most enduring creation of British Labourism’ and ‘the English working class’s great existential protest against the way they were told life had to be’ (1985, 37). Even though Winston Churchill’s Conservatives were - to their own and nearly everyone else’s surprise - heavily defeated in the post-war general election of 1945, the Conservative Party came to accept the new type of welfare state which was brought in by the post-war Labour government. Consequently, when they returned to power in 1951, the Conservatives did not substantially alter the status quo as they found it. Indeed, they went on to run the new welfare state for the next 13 years.

The classic welfare state settlement was more than party political however. It also involved agreement between the two main forms of ownership and control that had come to dominate developed capitalist economies - private and state monopoly capital. Privately owned monopoly capital continued to go along with much of the state regulation of the economy that had been put in place during the war. The 1945 Labour government then moved rapidly to nationalise 'the commanding heights of the economy', as they called them. These included the Bank of England, coal, gas, electricity, public transport and the iron and steel industries, among others. So, another part of the welfare state settlement or compromise was a ‘mixed economy’ with, on the one hand, the private sector and, on the other, the clearly separate state sector. These two distinct sectors of the economy – the public and private sectors - were brought together by the state as directed by the government.

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The ‘two sides of industry’, as trades unions and employers used to be known, were also brought together by government as the third party in what was called ‘tripartism’ or social partnership, as they still call it in Germany today. This managed model of development for society was common to other developed Western countries. It presented a package with welfarist social policy, Keynesian economics and representative (social) democratic politics.

Management of society was left to the experts. As Clarke and Newman recalled, after the war professionals and bureaucrats in the growing welfare services were seen as ‘indispensable partners in the great national task of social reconstruction’ (1997, 7). They made sure that national provision was equally distributed to all. This was widely welcomed as not only ‘fair’ but as ‘modern’, ‘scientific’ and ‘progressive’. It was an alternative to the arbitrary patronage and corruption of welfare provision before the war, administered through Poor Law Boards of Guardians or the Charity Organisation Society. As Clarke and Newman pointed out, ‘The post-war welfare state promised to replace’ administration by ‘old elites, patronage, partiality and the mixture of laissez-faire, charity and means-testing that had dominated earlier conceptions of social welfare in Britain’ (ibid, 4). Instead, health, education and other public services would treat each individual case according to common rules equitably and fairly. This reflected the Fabian Society ideas of the Labour Party founders of the socially and politically neutral welfare state and also the public service ideal that they drew upon in social administration, involving the application of professional knowledge in the service of the people. Meritocratic selection - also undertaken technically and scientifically through IQ testing - could thus be relied upon to select the best people for these important welfare professions.

Despite this reliance upon expert professionals and bureaucrats, the welfare state settlement was genuinely popular. It was, as Clarke and Newman said (1997, 8), a settlement ‘in which “the people” were represented’ through an ‘identification of people and state.. a unifying imagery of “the people” which aligned them with the state in mutual defence against disruptions to their individual and collective stability.’ The welfare state settlement thus built on the strongly established industrial work ethic to naturalise ‘a set of social arrangements based on gender, age, able-bodiedness and race’, leading to ‘the subsequent growth of the citizenship test for eligibility for welfare’ (ibid, 3). This points towards the most fundamental of all the various internal compromises involved in the UK welfare state settlement, that between social classes.

The way things were‘An older generation usually accepted that our grandparents’ society (like its railway carriages) had its 1st, 2nd and 3rd class: upper, middle and lower. Our world combines this ironic echo. In school uniform the child learns of the teacher-prefect-pupil triad. In army uniform he meets the firmness of the officer-NCO-men structure. The BBC “naturally” postulates three audiences, Third-Home-Light’ (Jackson 1964, 135). The anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, writing to explain ‘the peculiarities of the English’ to their wartime allies also considered what he called ‘ternary systems’, such as parents-nurse-child, king-ministers-people or monitors-leaders-fags (at private schools) to typify the English national character before the war (1978, 69). The vision of such a simply stratified world had a particular attraction to those ‘in the middle’ of it. This is a comfortable place to be between two extremes. ‘Middle class’ people could also feel that they had risen through their own merits since educational selection via the 11-plus entrance exam to grammar schools confirmed their elevation above manual labour into the ranks of the non-manual middle class. This was the basic division of labour and knowledge in society.

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By contrast, ‘the working class..’ were ‘traditionally understood.. [as] the men and women who got their hands dirty at work, mainly in mines, factories, or working with, or around, some kind of engines’ (Hobsbawm 1969, 285). This was the traditional division of male labour between ‘hands’ and ‘brains’ that had served British industry so well in the past and upon which it was assumed that post-war industry would be rebuilt to secure continuing prosperity in the future. Manual workers were subdivided again into the skilled and the unskilled, coresponding to a long-standing division within the industrial working class between ‘the respectable’ and ‘the rough’.

These traditional class divisions were particularly clear and simple in England because since Victorian times they had been the main divisions amongst the mass of the population. There were not the differences between town and country that persisted elsewhere, for example between Highlanders and Lowlanders in Scotland, or with the peasants who survived in other European countries. Also, ethnic, national and religious differences in Britain were relatively insignificant, at least after the partial absorption of the Irish who came to the mainland during the nineteenth century and of the East European Jews who arrived before the first world war. Although small numbers of black and Asian people had lived in the country since Roman times, large-scale black and Asian immigration from the former-Empire did not begin until 1948 to and ended in 1962 with the first in a series of Immigration Acts passed by successive Conservative and Labour governments.

Women also knew their place in this old world. Most women worked only temporarily before they got married and part-time afterwards, so that ‘women’s work’ was considered separately from the real, breadwinning male labour upon which family wages depended. Women, it was supposed after the war, would return from the factories and fields to resume their peacetime role as wives and mothers to replenish the nation's stock. As the Beveridge Report had said: ‘housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British Race and British ideals in the world’ (1942, 52). This naturalised a view of the family and women’s situation in which, to quote Clarke and Newman again, ‘married women and other dependants would gain benefits in times of need via the male head of household.. [Thus] the state would only be a support for welfare needs where “the family failed”.’ (1997, 3)

Whatever its limitations, society after the war was experienced by most people as, above all, secure and predictable. For example, a 14 or 15 year-old leaver completing compulsory schooling, could, as late as the 1960s, as Anderson wrote, ‘with a reasonable probability of being right, have predicted within a very few years the timing of his or her future life course - leaving school, entering employment, leaving home, marrying and setting up home, early patterns of child-bearing and rearing’ (1983, 13). For the majority of people (including ‘dependent’ women) their future prospects depended upon guaranteed full-time male employment from 15 to 65. The ‘front-loaded’ education and training which prepared male labour market entrants for a lifetime of guaranteed full employment, or lifelong earning (rather than today’s ‘Lifelong Learning’), soon came to an end with elementary schooling at 14 or 15. Many boys then began time-served apprenticeships that gave them the status of skilled craftsmen, while even most of the tiny academic elite who went to university took their ‘final degree’ at 21.

Most people, of course, had no formal educational qualifications at all and, until the 1960s, the majority of school leavers had none either. Following the ‘apprentice boy’ tradition established in Victorian times of early leaving to work, most pupils in England and Wales quit school as

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soon as they could (at 14 until 1947, 15 until the school-leaving age was raised to 16 in 1972) and not until the 1980s did this begin to change. Indeed, it was only with the introduction of CSEs, recommended in 1959 for the next third of school students after the top 20 per cent then attempting O-levels who were regarded as examinable by the Crowther Committee, that the majority of English and Welsh school leavers came to possess any educational certification at all (as compared with only one in twelve without any qualifications today). This did not stop them - without any of the formal ‘vocational preparation’ now thought necessary - walking straight into full-time jobs on leaving their school yard for the last time and then changing jobs in the ‘aimless and irresponsible’ pattern much decried by employers and official comment at the time. The demographic post-war baby boom working its way up the age range to reach its all-time peak of nearly a million school-leavers in 1962 did not affect this deplored situation.

Why the ‘crystallised structure’ of society persisted for so long with so little criticism can be explained by what Hobsbawm called ‘the secret weapon of a society of popular affluence, namely full employment’ (1995, 259). Even the government which committed itself to ‘a high and stable level of employment’ in the White Paper Employment Policy referred to above, thought that a prolonged depression, like that into which the economy had plunged shortly after the first world war, would recur soon after the ending of the second. The post-war recovery proved not merely temporary, however, but persisted, though in the UK’s case with much faltering, into the long boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Overall unemployment averaged little more than 1.5 per cent until the end of the 1960s, exceeding the apparently wildly optimistic expectations of Beveridge during the war when he said that if unemployment could be kept down to three per cent the country would be doing very well. The regional unemployment that had characterised the 1930s persisted in rates of two and three per cent only in the North and in Scotland, while in Northern Ireland unemployment has never been less than seven per cent (until recently). As the Plowden report on primary education stated, ‘Unemployment has been almost non-existent since the war.. incomes have risen, nutrition has improved, housing is better, the health service and the rest of the social services have brought help where it is needed’ (Vol.2, 69).

With this general material improvement, British society emerged slowly from wartime rationing and the deadening conformity encouraged by the subsequent Cold War. As a consequence, as Coates and Silburn recalled, ‘During the fifties the myth that widespread material poverty had been finally and triumphantly overcome was so universally current, so widely accepted by politicians, social commentators and the general public alike, that for a decade and more, public controversy and political discussion were engrossed by the new (and fundamentally more encouraging) problems of what people are still pleased to call the “Affluent Society”’ (1970, 13).

30 Glorious YearsThis ‘progressive’, ‘scientific’, ‘technical’ and ‘meritocratic’ model of development for society worked so well that by 1959 the British Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was able to tell the electorate they had ‘never had it so good’. As a result, ‘The period from 1945 to the mid-1970s can be characterised as an era of social consensus,’ recorded Guy Standing of the International Labour Organisation (1997, 8). It was known variously as ‘Welfare Capitalism’, ‘Fordism’ (after the mass production on which it was based), or what the French called ‘the thirty glorious years’ of ‘the long boom’.

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To those who did not live through it but were born after it, or to those whose memories extended beyond it to the poverty and depression before the war, it is obvious in retrospect that the long boom, which for nearly 30 years sustained in the developed capitalist economies more or less full-time, full employment for men aged 15-65, was unique. It was the mistake of those who lived through it and were born into it to assume that living standards for all would continue to rise forever and that the Keynesian mechanisms of economic control had been discovered which could prevent any return to the periodic booms and slumps of the past.

The new settlement and the economic goods which it delivered to the mass of the population rested not merely on internal agreements within nation states like Britain, but globally on what Amin (1997, 47) called ‘three pillars’. These were ‘partly in conflict and partly complementary: (i) in the West social-democracy and Fordist accumulation regulated by Keynesian national policies.. with a coherence between accumulation and the historic capital/labour compromise; (ii) modernisation and industrialisation in the newly-independent peripheries, managed by.. the Bandung Project, a national bourgeois project of catching up [with the West] in a context of circumscribed independence; (iii) the Soviet project, catching up with the West by means of an accumulation strategy much like that of historical capitalism.. managed on the level of the national or multinational state by means of state ownership and the centralisation of political and economic power..’

The military power of the United States and the sustained post-war economic recovery in Japan and Europe were underwritten by the Bretton Woods currency agreements over fixed exchange rates with the US dollar. The Soviet Union and its allies, including China, which as ‘the socialist camp’ covered nearly half the world’s land mass and a third of its people, were excluded from this (yet another but, in this case, international) compromise between the USA and its allies and were largely delinked from the rest of the world’s economy. Capitalism was thus not the global system it had become before 1914 and became again in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the preceding opening up of China. Rather, the world was divided between East and West led by the United States and the Soviet Union. Between these two superpowers, the Third World of non-aligned, underdeveloped and newly independent countries - later joined by China - attempted to manoeuvre but often became the battleground for proxy-wars between the US and the USSR. Partly because of a change in this balance of forces internationally, the ‘thirty glorious years’ after 1945 petered out in the mid-1970s. Their end can be marked by the oil crisis of 1973. Following it, throughout the 1970s the political consensus for a mixed economy of private and state monopoly capital sustained by successive Conservative and Labour governments collapsed as the long, faltering post-war boom finally fell into recession. ‘A major crash began in the summer of 1974. Advanced Capitalist Countries' industrial production fell by ten per cent between July 1974 and April 1975. In the first half of 1975, ACC output was three and a half per cent down on the level of a year earlier, and international trade was 13 per cent lower.. The crash of 1974 was far and away the biggest since 1929’ (Armstrong et al 1991, 225).

‘The party’, as the Labour Party Minister Anthony Crosland said, ‘was over’. The days of full employment could then be recognized, as by Andrew Sinfield (1981, 1), as ‘a part of social history, which we may regard with nostalgia or contempt according to taste, like hoolahoops or spats.’ Unemployment had risen from the level of half a million which had

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panicked Heath’s government to over a million under the last (Old) Labour government of Callaghan, as reflected in the Tories’ 1979 general election winning slogan ‘Labour isn't working’. After 1979, Conservative governments openly repudiated the commitment to full employment that had been shared by all Parties since the war.

2/ Mrs Thatcher’s achievement The Conservatives had been seeking a new way forward for private monopoly capital against any reliance on state capital and its public ownership and control through representative local and national democracy. They had learnt the lessons of the 1972 rebuff by the trades unions of Heath’s brief free-market phase. Under a new leader, they prepared to implement what their chief strategist, (then) Keith Joseph, called ‘a law-abiding free enterprise reconstruction of Britain's social relations of production’ (quoted in Coates and Hilliard 1986, 354). There was, they asserted, ‘no alternative’ to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘British experiment.. the demonstration that Trade Union power can be curbed within a free society, and that inflation can be eradicated within a democracy’, as her Chancellor Nigel Lawson described it (quoted in Ainley and Corney, 1990, 53).

The new post-welfare state settlement which was forced through by Mrs Thatcher’s governments in such a forthright manner also eventually resulted in a number of compromises, just as compromise was necessary for the establishment of the post-war ‘classic welfare state’ settlement. Nevertheless, the former partnership between the public and private sectors of the economy, as in that between trades unions and employers as ‘social partners’, was ended by Mrs.Thatcher. As a result, privatisation has extended the reach of private monopoly capital into new areas of the economy and thus into the lives of all individuals, while the former-public sector values of service to citizens have been replaced by those of quality for customers. Indeed, in the case of schooling, Mrs Thatcher aspired to reverse the old Labour Party’s rhetorical intention for the state to take over the private schools by attempting to privatise the state schools. In this she was only partly successful, although the New Labour government may complete the job for her - by inviting private companies to run ‘failing’ state schools, or parts of or even whole education authorities through the latest Educational Action Zones, for instance.

The free enterprise solution was seen by the Conservatives as a form of modernisation and a way out of the ‘crisis of the welfare state’. So, ‘State induced enterprise’, as Wallace and Chandler (1989) called it, was coming to ‘permeate the franchise sections of the welfare state’, from Youth Training managing agents, to schools, colleges, the health and social services, along with whatever other public services could be put out to contract. Wallace and Chandler pointed out that contracting meant ‘problems can be privatized too’ and ‘whilst responsibility is de-centralized, power is further centralized’. This mirrored, they said, ‘the model of the state as a holding-company which sub-contracts parts of itself at different levels’. Randall (1992, 4) came to the same conclusion when he wrote that Training and Enterprise Council managing boards ‘have the sort of freedom which business people gain through franchising from a Pizza Hut multinational’. ‘A clear advantage of this government by quango,’ as Ainley and Corney called it, ‘is that the government can retain firm control of policy development but distance itself from the detailed day to day management of programmes. Additionally, civil service bureaucracies can be expanded and disbanded "to task", according to the circumstances that arise. This new flexibility of response had allowed government to by-pass and eradicate the remnants of Britain’s corporatist and tripartite past’ (1990, 128).

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Mrs Thatcher’s reversal of Labour’s old slogan of ‘equal opportunities’ into one of ‘opportunities to be unequal’ has been embraced by the New Labour government. So has the new type of state which the Conservative Party introduced, but was too internally divided to maintain. Despite an attempted consolidation under John Major, which exactly paralleled George Bush’s succession to Ronald Reagan in the USA, followed by a Democratic Party restoration under Bill Clinton, New Labour was able to reassert its claim to be the natural party of government by pledging to maintain the new Contracting State introduced by the Conservatives. There is an historical precedent for this in the way that Old Labour introduced the classic welfare state after the war only to lose power to the Tories, who then ran the new type of state for the next 13 years. How long the New Labour government can sustain the new post-welfare state and the new mixed economy which it has inherited from the Conservatives is another question. Both are inherently unstable, not only due to their form of contractual administration, but also because of their dependence on the global financial forces to which the economy has been opened and to which the state has accommodated itself. The end of the Cold War in ‘the collapse of communism’ in the former-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as the opening up of China to the West, left only one superpower, the USA, backed by its allies, like Britain, policing a new globalised capitalism. The new situation favoured the political representatives of one of the partners in the old settlement - private monopoly capital, represented now by vast transnational corporations, - over the other - state monopoly capital. As well as by struggles against unequal development worldwide, this outcome was made possible by the development of new communications and information technology. One way in which technological development affected the changes that took place was the growing cost of the new phenomenally productive machinery. This meant that it became too expensive for any one nation state to update and recapitalise its state owned industries. The amount of money needed was only available on the global financial markets. This was the reason that, for instance, Michael Heseltine as President of the Board of Trade and John Major’s Deputy wanted to privatise the Post Office so as to open it up for private investment.

In the new ‘mixed economy’, private and state capital are no longer clearly separated from each other as in the old, post-war mixed economy but mixed up together. Not only former services provided by the local or national state are taken over and sold off to private companies, other public services are retained by the state as semi-independent agencies to be run at a profit. Citizens are then redefined as consumers with individual rights enshrined in the contractual relations of ‘Charters’. John Major’s ‘Charters’ were not intended to enable individuals to participate collectively as informed citizens in democratic decisions about which goods and services should be provided by society at what cost to its members. Instead, as consumers they merely chose passively between the different commodities that the market offered them, the Charter giving the right to complain when services were not delivered satisfactorily.

This consumerisation of public life with the handing over of public services to be run for private profit is the form of modernisation which was chosen, or rather, was stumbled upon, by the Thatcher governments of the 1980s following the lead of Reagonomics in the USA. Perhaps what Rustin (1998) calls this ‘Perverse Modernisation’ is better described, as he says, as no more than ‘marketisation’ or ‘state-subsidised privatisation’ (ibid). While it eventually led to the relative economic recovery from which the New Labour government benefited in its initial years, this new market modernisation has not provided a solution to deep-seated social problems

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left over from Britain’s industrial and imperial past. Instead, market modernisation has widened the gap between richest and poorest and aggravated the fragmentation between individuals and groups. Also, the outcome of competition for what were previously universal state services available to all citizens is a two-tier health, education, transport, housing, whatever, system. This may not be immediately apparent as public services are split up into their different parts but two tiers of provision become obvious once the initial competition shakes down into new monopolies with large companies holding multiple outlets.

This reconstruction of the state along the lines of a holding company also produces an inherently unstable system. Holding companies suffer particular organisational dysfunctions, managing at arm’s length a complex range of diverse organisations to which self-management has been devolved. Subcontracting can be a way of reducing the price of a product or service by squeezing the contract, but it typically involves loss of detailed control, although financial control is increased - so that accountants run everything. The relationship between contractor and subcontractor is one of mutual dependency but at the same time it is difficult to maintain and enforce standards without considerable interference in the activities of the subcontractor.

This new mixed economy was particularly obvious in schools where the competition for pupils under Local Management semi-privatised state schools, while private schools were state-subsidised through Assisted Places and tax relief on their charitable status. State-subsidisation of the private sector did not end with the termination of the Assisted Places Scheme by the New Labour government but took new forms of ‘partnership’ between state and private schools, as well as through the Private Finance Initiative which New Labour inherited from their Conservative predecessors and greatly expanded upon (see below). Even without this, the hidden state subsidy to private schools and colleges was estimated by Caroline Benn in 1996 at £1.3 billion annually.

The social engine of the expansion of education at all levels which took place after the 1988 Education Act and with the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act is to be found in the new middle of society. Here the previously clear-cut distinction between the non-manual middle class and the manually working class has been eroded by the decline of heavy industry and the growth of services, especially in offices and marketing. The latest applications of new technology have also replaced many of the hard labouring jobs of the past. This reflects the wider economic and social ‘restructuring’ popularly identified with the period of successive Thatcher governments, though the social changes they encouraged were the outcome of long-term trends that have yet to take final form. In this process of class recomposition the traditional, tripartite social pyramid with distinct divisions between upper, middle and working classes has pulled apart.

As noted by many commentators during the 1980s, while the restructuring of class and gender relations increased material inequalities, it also reduced the level of subjective awareness of them. These illusions were sustained by the more or less deliberate political and ideological construction by Conservative governments from 1979-97 of a new division within the working population. This stigmatised a new so-called ‘underclass’ with the poverty that disenfranchises its members from equal participation in society (Jordan, 1985, 8). Building on already existing divisions within the traditional manual working class, this resurrection of the rough has separated a regionally and racially stereotyped so-called ‘underclass’ from the new ‘respectable’ working-middle of society. In this sense, the dismantling of the welfare state and the

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construction of a penal state in the unprecedented growth of the prison population under the Conservatives were two sides of the same coin. The end of full employment and the dismantling of the welfare state in the UK had by the late 1990s reduced nearly 14 million men, women and children, not merely to relative but to breadline poverty (Davies, 1997). Many in this ‘country of the poor’ are malnourished and destitute. As in the USA, this was something new: ‘What most characterizes the “new poverty” is that it affects the life chances of the poor more acutely than in the recent past. It has involved qualitative changes in the status, social relations and expectations of the poor and does not just represent new forms of material inequality and deprivation. These problems derive in part from the declining labour market opportunities for those of limited education’ (Lawson and Wilson 1995, 179). This absolute poverty is, however, relative to a carnival of conspicuous consumption in the rest of British as of American society, which has grown richer during the same period. As a result, even though society as a whole is more wealthy, the gap between richest and poorest has increased. This is, as Davies says, ‘poverty on a scale.. and of a kind that has never been seen before’ (quoted in Ainley, 1999).

The new respectable working-middle class lives in disdain and fear of the new poor, rough ‘underclass’ into which accident or illness, redundancy or the lack of sufficient qualifications and connections can so easily pitch them. Thus, common human values are replaced by economic ones, commercialising human relations and reducing individuals to objectified commodities. This reality is overtly endorsed by theories that are now politically mainstream and which blame the poor for their own poverty. Indeed, it is part of the new consensus and the unreal and virtual world inhabited by the respectable working-middle of society to ignore the realities surrounding them, both in this country and abroad. To disregard also the impossibilities of keeping the present competitive global economy going for very much longer by ignoring the immiseration it has inflicted on the majority of the world’s population as well as the ecological disasters it visits upon the environment and stores up for the future. Yet the new consensus in favour of the unchecked global predominance of private monopoly capital has to an extent succeeded in presenting also a model for social development. This is shared widely enough for the majority of people to see individual places for themselves in its likely future development. This collective mindset was expressed both by the overwhelming electoral victory of New Labour in 1997 and by the long honeymoon which that government then enjoyed, partly through its populist depoliticisation of politics. This latter has been achieved through the Presidential style of government assumed by New Labour, building upon Mrs.Thatcher’s precedent and encouraged by the changes in the administration of the state that have been described. It was also helped by technological transformations in the (predominantly) private monopoly owned media, which played such a large part in winning widespread agreement for the changes that have taken place.

The continuity in policy between New Labour and the previous Conservative governments was obvious before the 1997 election to former-Tory Minister, John Biffen, writing in Tribune (6 February 1997) under the headline ‘We Are All Conservatives Now’, he declared that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were both ‘neo-Thatcherites’. Similarly, the last edition of the US magazine Newsweek before the election (28 April 1997) printed a cover picture of Baroness Thatcher with the title ‘The Real Winner’. While the Adam Smith Institute held an election night ‘Victory for the Free Market’ party without TV sets or other news reports because the

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result was ‘irrelevant’; ‘Whoever wins the poll, the free market has triumphed’, as a spokesperson said.

A new consensusWhat Avis et al (1996) call the ‘new consensus’ on the new policies introduced by the Thatcher governments includes importantly a new neoliberal orthodoxy in economics. This has been described by the magazine Working Brief (August - September 1997) as having ‘three principal tenets’. These are:

‘1/ inflation should be controlled by interest rates, preferably by an independent central bank.2/ budgets should be balanced and not used to influence demand - or at any rate not to stimulate it.3/ unemployment is solely a problem of the labour market.’

These are also the principles underlying the Maastricht Treaty and the convergence criteria for EU member states to enter the common currency. They ‘boil down’, as Working Brief says, ‘to the use of strict demand policies to keep unemployment at a level high enough to restrain inflation’ so that ‘when unemployment falls to six per cent, financial policy is tightened for fear of “overheating”’. Government economic policy thus sustains a reserve army of the permanently unemployed ‘underclass’ and/ or perpetual insecurity amongst a periphery of part-time and short-term contract employees, as admitted by the Governor of the Bank of England (quoted by William Keegan in The Observer 25/10/98).

The new consensus on economic policy, embraces also a major ideological shift amongst mainstream politicians and policy-makers on social security policy in favour of measures to ‘reform the welfare state’ and end ‘welfare dependency’. Thus, former-Conservative government Employment Secretary, Peter Lilley introducing the Jobseekers Act could define ‘the real issue.. [as] how to reduce benefit dependency’ (HMSO: 1995, para 40). While Frank Field, who was Chair of the House of Commons Social Security Select Committee during the same period and then became briefly a Minister of State for Social Security, described the ‘passive benefit system’ introduced in the 1940s as ‘broken-backed’. He resigned when his proposals to ‘transform’ the social security system were rejected (allegedly because of their initially high cost - a dispute over means, not ends).

The necessity for an active benefits system is accepted on all sides, social security spending being described by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, for example, as ‘the price of economic failure’. Like the new consensus on learning and economic policy, this agreement on the future for welfare is endorsed by the G8 group of leading capitalist governments and by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. These advocates and beneficiaries of the newly reglobalised capitalist economy all now accept that on their own the ‘natural’ forces of economic recovery will not remove long-term unemployment and welfare dependency. As the OECD saw The Future of Social Protection in 1988, ‘Changing economic structures and the growing challenge from more open trading systems increase the likelihood that unemployment will exist more as a consequence of structural changes than as a demand deficiency or frictional phenomenon. In these circumstances, social protection systems need to do more than simply provide income while the individual searches for employment.. Education and training are thus likely to become one of the main pillars of social security for tomorrow’s citizens.’

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Whether advanced by the previous Conservative government and the employers’ organisation, the Confederation of British Industry, backed up by the G8 governments and the OECD, or by New Labour and the TUC, the new consensual solution to Britain’s social and economic progress through a learning policy of ‘Foundation’ and ‘Lifelong Learning’, linked to an active benefits system, can be seen as signifying a shift in the balance of forces embodied in the post-war (classic) welfare settlement between capital and labour. This shift in (private monopoly) capital’s favour has gone furthest within Anglo-Saxon dominated countries. It was pioneered particularly by New Zealand - the first country to introduce a welfare state at the beginning of the century and the first to dismantle it in the 1980s under a structural adjustment programme imposed by a Labour government (see Kelsey, 1996).

Australia is, however, preferred by New Labour ideologues as an alternative, third, or middle way between the extremes of the US model and the European model, the latter derided as hopelessly corporatist by Blair. This relates to what Will Hutton in The Guardian has called the European as opposed to the US approaches to the economy, which, as he says, are but ‘two sides of the same coin’, whereby ‘In Europe there is a reserve army of the jobless, in the US a reserve army of working poor’ (18 April 1994). As Ashton and Green (1997) suggest, ‘The use of low cost, unskilled labour can still be just as viable a route to capital accumulation as the high value-added, high skilled, high wage route, especially within protectionist markets..’ (See also Keep and Mayhew, 1998.) Or rather, the two can be combined with a high value-added core contracting to a periphery of low cost, unskilled labour.

There is thus no ‘third way’ ‘between the state and the market’, or the European and American models of capitalism, and New Labour is committed to the latter. In the new Americanised mixed economy of semi-privatised state and state-subsidised private sectors, New Labour ‘stakeholdings’ by private capital investment in public services represent a dominance of private over state monopoly capital. Previous privatisations under the Conservatives have not been reversed but rather taken further, for example, in ‘Brown's £12bn sale’ reported in a Guardian (12 June 1998) headline, where ‘Everything must go’, according to The Times on the same day. All this has extended the reach of private monopoly capital into new areas of public and private life, marking an increased commodification of society and limiting still further the space available for public or civil society and representative democracy, despite some formalistic regional devolution (see below).

The new state form of administration of this new mixed economy through contracting to quangos was also extended by the New Labour government. Contracting was institutionalised by the Public Service Agreements or ‘Contracts’ between individual government departments and the Treasury introduced by the July 1998 Comprehensive Public Spending Review. The ‘contract culture’ thus permeates the whole of the new Contracting State. Instead of an equitable and universal distribution of resources, there is competitive tendering in the new bidding culture with the money going not necessarily to those in most need but to those who write the best bids.

Meanwhile, more than 100 ‘task forces’ (variously labelled ‘ministerial’, ‘advisory’ ‘regional’ etc.), ‘stakeholder panels’, ‘advisory bodies’, ‘reviews’ (‘strategic’, ‘consultative’, ‘comprehensive’ etc.), and other ‘working parties’, ‘forums’, ‘commissions’, ‘audits’, ‘groups’ (‘working’, ‘action’, ‘advisory’ etc.) were set up within a year of the new government taking office, according to a written answer in the Lords’ Hansard for 12 February 1998 (cc. 231-244). At least half of these quangos are manned (mostly) by businessmen (ditto), usually from the top FTSE-100 companies, according to Tony Barker’s wittily entitled record of the ‘Never Ending

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Review at New Labour’s Whitehall Farce’ in The Parliamentary Monitor (May 1998, 27). Predictably, the result of including so many private sector ‘partners’ in Blair’s Presidential style of government was the same leaky sleaze that mired the Conservative governments which pioneered the same approach.

Existing quangos have also been preserved by New Labour, merely some regional coordination of their activities being allowed in order to take advantage of European regional funding. The Training and Enterprise Councils, for example, were given what was for them a long lease of life of three years from 1998, after which Regional Development Agencies were planned to take over their functions. (Though following the latest review of all non-university post-16 education and training, TECs have been merged with the FEFCs, while the RDAs’ future looks increasingly doubtful). A ‘pinking of the quangos’ also took place, as Conservative place-persons were replaced by retired headteachers and sympathetic academics, similar to those drawn into advisory roles to central government in order to co-opt potential critics.

There have likewise been some concessions to national and regional feelings through devolution and promised regional assemblies - a London mayor, for instance. The changes to the local state and the prunings of local democracy made by Mrs.Thatcher remain firmly in place, however. Arguably they will be taken further under the ‘new regionalism’, which echoes the ‘new federalism’ of Reagan and Bush and shadows that of the EU and existing Government Offices. For the surviving democratically elected councils have already had their role recast by central government legislation from being responsible to their local electorates towards becoming slimmed-down boards of managing directors under a Mayoral Chief Executive seeking tenders, issuing contracts and monitoring the performance of separate sub-contractors (see Cochrane, 1993). Such so-called ‘enabling’ local authorities, endorsed by all three main electoral parties, mirror the ‘contracting’ or ‘franchising’ that has occurred in the central state, again with a parallel loss of accountability and democratic control.

Financially, the only way out offered by the central government to hard-pressed public services, like education and health, is through partnerships with the private sector. Like the continuing state-subsidised privatisations of nationalised industries, investment of business interests (and money) in the running of formerly (and formally) public sector services is taken much further by the Private Finance Initiative by which private capital invests in public services. This was limited under the Conservatives who launched it but New Labour is determinedly committed to it despite the reluctance of private companies to invest on the terms they were initially offered. These have, therefore, been dramatically improved, especially in the Health Service.

As Jean Shaoul, an accountancy expert from Manchester University quoted by Francis Wheen in an article on PFI in The Guardian 28/4/99, explains: ‘The PFI means paying more for less.. The consequences for the public, both as service users and taxpayers are enormous. Yet the initiative is going ahead with little public debate and even less informed scrutiny.’ Wheen comments, ‘Labour ministers, in their innocence regard PFI as a wondrous alchemy that produces something from nothing. Look, they exclaim, we’re building all these new hospitals and it doesn’t add a penny to the PSBR! But this is mere sleight of hand. The PFI disguises borrowing by hiving it off to the private sector at far higher interest rates.’ In the 18 months since a Treasury Task Force was set up to co-ordinate the scheme, more than 50 projects worth a total of £4 billion have been signed with 30 more on the way so that annual spending on PFI already amounts to more than one per cent of total government expenditure. This figure is likely to rise rapidly, given New Labour’s evangelic zeal for ‘public-private partnerships’.

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How far the processes of state-subsidised privatisation could go is shown by an article in The Economist (25 January 1997), which described ‘A revolution in the administration of American poverty programmes..’, reporting that ‘Anderson Consulting, the world’s biggest consultancy, is bidding against Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor, for a five-year contract to run the entire Texas state welfare system’ (83). As a result, ‘Almost every aspect of welfare, from determining whether a claimant is eligible for help to preventing fraud and making payments, will eventually be in private hands’, including job-training, drug-rehabilitation and pregnancy-prevention programmes, 30 social programmes in all, ‘whose administration currently costs the state $550m a year’. Even though this proposal was subsequently defeated in Texas, the article added that ‘Oregon, Maryland, and Wisconsin are already working along similar lines.’ It should not be thought, though, that such privatisations occur only under doctrinaire, Republican administrations. The welfare-reform law, signed by President Clinton, ‘ending welfare as we know it’, in August 1996 allows states far more flexibility in the use of private contractors.

Similarly, The Times reported on 8/5/99 that ‘Tony Blair is planning to invite private companies to run the £110 billion UK benefit system. The British government believes that the current welfare system, under which people claim separate benefits from different agencies, encourages duplication and fraud. A confidential paper called “The Vision: A Single Work-Focussed Gateway” proposes instead that claimants make a single application for all their benefits and receive one cheque in return. Two American-based companies will begin pilot tests of the new system in November.’

The ‘new public management’ of increasingly privatised former-public services, borrowing from the ‘new managerialism’ pioneered in the private sector, is also potentiated by new technology (‘management by e-mail’) using indirect quality indicators as performance targets of outputs (‘management by objectives’). A contracting core of management no longer in direct contact with the work being undertaken comes to rely on such indirect indicators of performance. This leads to the well-known All Pigs Flying scenario (Ainley, 1997). As well as new divisions between core management and a periphery of contract workers, this makes it difficult to determine which are real indicators and which are virtual ones. The Contracting, post-welfare State may therefore also become the Virtual State. This is The Audit Society described by Power (1997) with its ‘Rituals of Verification’ run by accountants.

Beyond its virtuality, the new/ post-welfare settlement implies a new correspondence with the economy which is its explicit rationale. In place of the old reproduction of labour for either manual or non-manual employment in mass production factories and offices, ‘Today’s close interaction between technology and international competition has eroded the basic institutions of the mass production system’ (Wilson 1996, 2). In their place, the new hierarchy of employment opportunities is supposed to be much less rigid and more dynamic, even ‘chaotic’. It is a rapidly changing system, amenable to consumer demand and responsive to contributions by individual employees, who - in the latest management-speak - can ‘make a difference’.

In this new ‘post-modern’/ ‘Post-Fordist’ society, human capital is supposed to be decisive over investment of money capital in machinery and materials. Top education advisor, Michael Barber, could thus even assert in one of his many explanations and justifications of government policy in The Times Educational Supplement (3/4/98) that ‘in the future learning society the imagination will be king’. This echoed the National Commission on Education’s 1994 After

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‘Learning to Succeed’ by Lord Walton: ‘We, along with many other countries round the world, are in the throes of a “knowledge revolution” which has already created a society in which the basic economic resource - as Drucker has pointed out - is no longer capital or natural resources but knowledge’. (The reference is to Drucker’s 1993 ‘Post-Capitalist Society’).This claim that in the new postmodern world of New Labour ideologues, capitalism and the power of capital has been superseded by that of individuality and imagination is extraordinarily unreal given a de-/re-regulated global economy dominated as never before by the power of unprecedented amounts of international capital. It is, in fact, the fickle ebbs and flows of unrestrained speculative investment in global financial markets that generates the insecurity reflected in the feverish competition between rival capitalist corporations. Together with the increasingly rapid pace of technological transformation, this results in an unstable employment situation to which it is difficult for the new welfare and education settlement to find a secure correspondence. Individual differentiation and variety of outcomes are but one part of the attempt to do so.

‘Full employability’It has been argued that a wider class recomposition in society has accompanied the changes in the form of administration of the state and the balance of forces within it. It is the latter which has led to the new welfare settlement of which the new learning policy is a part. In turn, the new settlement acts on and conditions the new class alignment. It does this particularly through the goal of ‘full employability’ as the aim and intention of government learning policy. In the new contracting state, education and training for ‘full employability’ has replaced the guarantee of lifelong (15-65 male) full employment. Instead, intermittent ‘lifelong learning’ is provided by the new mixed economy of semi-privatised state and state-subsidised private sectors. This is the new state formation’s answer to the crisis of control and legitimacy posed for it by permanent and structural insecurity of employment. In place of social control through the workplace for a regular wage, social control is diffused throughout society, relying especially upon education and training.

As has been said, a permanently unemployed reserve army of a residual ‘rough’ section of the old, traditional working class represents the collapse of the full-employment ideal underpinning the post-war consensus. The classic welfare state has been effectively undermined by the removal of the fundamental guarantee of unemployment benefit as social insurance. Entitlements to benefits for many claimants and for many items for which they were previously entitled to claim were replaced following the 1988 Social Security Review by discretion and are no longer grants but loans. In place of entitlement, alongside a heightened role for institutionalised charities and the voluntary sector, an ‘active benefits regime’ of workfare has replaced welfare.

In fact, from October 1996 with the introduction of the Job Seeker’s Allowance, the unemployed officially ceased to exist, redefined as ‘Job Seekers’. And, under the 1995 Job Seeker’s Act, the powers of compulsion given to Employment Service Agency staff, who now manage the Jobcentres, make most government training schemes compulsory. This amounts to a US-style work for benefits system and ends any notion of entitlement to benefits as social insurance. As powers of direction now include education courses, this could be said to constitute also a ‘learningfare’ regime.

One can even imagine a ‘learning society’ in which the unemployed are redefined out of existence. Their numbers have already been obscured by the 33 changes made to the way

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unemployment figures have been calculated since 1979 but at any one time average around two million, though some definitions of those ‘wanting work’ (or what in the old days would have been called ‘a proper job’) range as high as five million - depending on whether part-time workers and those on training schemes and in education are included. In a similar way to which the unemployed are thus consigned to a virtual and invisible existence, compulsory Youth Training for 16-18 year-olds ended youth unemployment at a stroke of the pen in 1986 (Ainley and Corney, 1990).

This raises the bizarre prospect of a learning society in which, like actors ‘resting’, no one would ever be unemployed, but only ‘learning’. The New Labour notion of ‘full employability’ gives this prospect a further twist, for if anyone was unemployed in a ‘Learning Society’ they would only have themselves to blame through not having made themselves ‘employable’ enough to be employed, so they should obviously go and take another course! The persistence of ‘skill shortages’ alongside long-term unemployment is then attributable to individual deficiency to be addressed by individual effort and tailor-made new government initiatives.

The new policy of ‘learning for full employability’ is not only one of ‘Education Without Jobs’ (Ainley 1992), replacing what Finn (1987) called ‘Training Without Jobs’ in the 1980s, but also one of ‘Education With McJobs’, as students and trainees work their way through college and on schemes while employed part-time in a pattern that is extending up the age range (Ainley and Bailey 1997). For students - like social security claimants - the former classic welfare entitlement to free higher education has been replaced by loans.

For the mass of five million-plus full- and part-time students and trainees now in some form of Further and Higher Education (F&HE), the new ‘learning policy’ represents a proletarianisation of the professions for which HE particularly previously prepared its students, rather than the professionalisation of the proletariat that is officially presented by the expansion of F&HE. Included in this reduction to the level of workers who are told what to do, as part of the accompanying dismantling of welfare bureaucracies, are professional teachers at all levels. School teachers are a very obvious case in point, not only prescribed the ends or ‘outcomes’ of their teaching by the National Curriculum but also now increasingly dictated the means to achieve them in a merely instrumental or technically ‘effective’ manner.

The current demystification of graduate level professionalism holds teachers, doctors and other professional public servants accountable through more explicit contracts with the consumers of their previously self-regulated services. While this redresses the balance of knowledge and power between professional experts and their clients that was noted in the old welfare state, it is a loss of self-directed autonomy and control as far as the professions are concerned. It runs alongside the devaluation through expansion of the major part of a more differentiated higher education system. And it is accompanied by the dismantling of the traditional welfare bureaucracies (including education) that have sustained the growth since the last world war of the professional, or what some sociologists call the ‘service class’. The security of the former professions, and indeed their very claims to professional status (whether in terms of access to privileged knowledge or of self-regulation), have been increasingly undermined of late, even in the (semi-privatised) public sector and in academia.

For graduates, the CBI produced a document in 1994 called Thinking Ahead. In it they celebrate occupational fluidity alongside the recommendation that graduates ought no longer expect to have secure, life-time employment. Rather, they will build up a portfolio of occupational

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competences moving from project to project on a contract basis. Projects require the application of a set of competences to a set of tasks that have a definite life-cycle. When the set of tasks has been completed the ‘project’ is over. Uncertainty and moving around will thus become routine. Individuals will then be expected to manage their own careers by profiling inventories of their competences, retuning them with retraining on a regular basis. Learning to learn then, the CBI argues, becomes paramount, as this is the only constant in a constantly changing world. As the CBI says, ‘individuals cannot rely on political and economic authorities to provide continuous employment and career opportunities’. They will have to pay for these investments in their own human capital from commercial provider agencies. They will also take out personal insurance schemes against prolonged unemployment - when the insurance will cover any lapse in their pension contributions and mortgage payments - as well as to cover sickness and other accidents.

This vision of individuals competing to raise the overall standards of competence (if not skill) is shared and propagated by most of the management literature. For instance, Management Today ran a cover story in February 1995 under the headline: ‘No Stability, No Security, No Careers. Welcome to the New Deal’, which was enthusiastic in tone. Similarly, Fortune magazine in May 1993 explained ‘How we will work in the year 2000’, declaring that by then, ‘employees will package themselves as a marketable portfolio of skills’. In ‘the virtual corporation’ - a networked organisation connecting customers and suppliers via electronic channels - vertical divisions of labour will be replaced by horizontal ones, ‘not “Where do you stand on the corporate ladder?” but “What do you know how to do?”’ - and, they could have added because it is now more important than ever, ‘Who do you know?’. Charles Heckscher asks in the subtitle to his book White Collar Blues (1996) what will happen to Management Loyalties in an Age of Corporate Restructuring and answers that loyalty to the company should be replaced by loyalty to the project and to the team engaged in it, as recommended by US business guru Ed Lawlor for ‘Competence-Based Organisations’ as opposed to ‘Job-Based’ ones.

At the extreme advocated by other US business gurus, the management core becomes like an employment agency - perhaps themselves sub-contracted by the company that wants the particular project for which workers are required. Those they contract in turn are increasingly self-employed and part-time. According to The Economist as long ago as 12 March 1994, ‘part-timers have already grown to represent 25% of the workforce’. Many of these part-time workers juggle several part-time jobs simultaneously. If they are self-employed, this tends towards forms of self-employment which, it has often been said, are based on self-exploitation.

Yet the rapid succession of policy changes under the Conservatives to accelerate such trends through vocational education and training area did not lead to the vaunted Skills Revolution in training which the CBI had called for ten years earlier, let alone create a Learning Society by the year 2000. Instead, an increasingly polarised economy emerged between a contracting core of knowledgeable managers and skilled experts contracting out to a growing periphery of ‘multiskilled’ workers on part-time and short-term contracts. It has been noted how calls for ‘full employability’ rest on the related assumption of the need for a general ‘upskilling’ in the labour force. Yet, it has been questioned whether the UK workforce as a whole is becoming more skilled and knowledgeable. Academic investigations have come up with contrary findings, sometimes by the same author! (White, 1993; and White and Gallie, 1993). More recently, Green et al. (1998) from the London School of Economics answered their own question Are British workers getting more skilled? in the affirmative, while in the same year Keep and Mayhew from Warwick and Oxford Universities argued the opposite. Keep points out how any

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change at work tends to be viewed by employers as ‘upskilling’ their workforce. For instance, ‘workers are made to work harder and then given “coping skills” to deal with it’!

Conservative governments were often accused of deliberately widening the gap between skilled and unskilled workers. In seeking to attract multinational capital looking to invest in assembling and servicing in Britain as a bridgehead to Europe they emphasised the virtues of a low-wage, deregulated workforce. Consequently, Britain now has the lowest labour costs per unit output of any industrialised country, the USA being second (DiFazio, 1996). Similarly, work reorganisation accompanying the introduction of new technology followed by labour shedding, plus ‘culture change’ and work intensification for those remaining in employment are the usual goals of employer-based in-house education and training programmes. As a result of these policies at both the firm and national levels, it can be argued that a process of ‘skill polarisation’ has occurred at work, together with heightened academic differentiation in education.

Certainly, as Wilson (o.c., 3) wrote to ask, Are American ghetto trends emerging in Europe?, in both the USA and Europe, ‘While educated workers are benefiting from the pace of technological change, less skilled workers, such as those found in many inner-city neighbourhoods, face the threat of job displacement. For example, highly skilled designers, engineers, and operators are needed for the jobs created by the development of a new set of computer-operated machine tools, an advance that also eliminates jobs for those trained only for manual, assembly-line work. Also, advances in word processing have increased the demand for those who not only know how to type but can operate specialised software as well; the need for routine typists and secretaries is, accordingly, reduced.’ The fact that, as corporations contract and computerisation does away with routine tasks, fewer workers are required in place of the less skilled they displace, negates the simple solution advanced by government of educating and training the workforce to switch over from one task to the other.

Nor is the continuation of similar policies to those of the Conservatives likely to change this situation under New Labour, despite the new government’s concern to prevent ‘social exclusion’. For New Labour aims to increase ‘employability’, often also defined as ‘flexibility’ or ‘adaptability’. The workforce must be ‘adaptable’ and labour markets capable of reacting ‘flexibly’ to economic change, leaving employers free to offer insecure jobs at the National Minimum Wage instead of good ones. As Gordon Brown told the annual G8 world leaders’ summit (on 15-17 May, 1998) in Birmingham, ‘A new employment agenda is vital given the background of intensified global competition and technological advances we all face as the 21st century approaches.’

‘We are placing work and the reintroduction of a work culture at the core of welfare reform,’ stated New Labour government adviser, Geoff Mulgan of the think-tank Demos, at a seminar on Welfare Reform at the London School of Economics (7/7/98). This explained, he said, the insistence that there would be ‘no fifth option’ of remaining on benefit for 18-25 New Dealers. Similarly, Alistair Darling, introducing the Welfare Reform and Pensions Bill to Parliament on 10/2/99, echoed Blair by stating ‘There is no unconditional right to benefit. People have a right to expect help to get into work and security if they cannot. In turn they have a responsibility to take up that help.’

This represents a major change in the safety-net provision of the classic welfare state. It confirms the ‘fundamental change in the responsibilities and rights of the unemployed’, which Dan Finn saw in the Job Seeker’s Allowance introduced by the Conservative government in

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1996 and ‘designed to make it clear to unemployed people that there is a link between receiving benefit and looking for work’. The connection between the rights and responsibilities of the unemployed was also made by Tony Blair, who declared his policy was to provide ‘work for those who can and security for those who can’t’ - once again discriminating between the deserving and undeserving poor. New Labour’s approach is thus consistent with the Conservatives’ Victorian emphasis on the work ethic and fears for its loss amongst wayward youth and long-term unemployed alike. This learning policy for ‘full employability’ is thus more like one of ‘work, work, work’ than ‘education, education, education’.

Towards a new alternativeThe changes required for human survival in the next millennium are vast and the choices facing humanity demand wide and informed discussion and debate. Just as we cannot return to the bureaucratic management of the old corporate welfare state, so we cannot return to its professional paradigm in which knowledgeable experts acted on behalf of their ignorant clients. The welfare state can only be saved by decentralised reform in terms of its management and local control, even though its financing will still involve national redistribution according to priority of need. The marketisation of the state and society that has been allowed to happen in recent years must be reversed to return public services to popular democratic control, extending that control so as to really serve the people. Faced with the awesome power of the state and the global capitalism it sustains and supports to call on the latest discoveries of science to attempt medical, pharmaceutical and genetic solutions to economic and social problems, there is an urgent necessity to turn society from its present destructive course of development.

Despite the deepening poverty of the majority of the world’s population, there has been progress in the struggles for survival of people worldwide. Above all, the possibility of catastrophic nuclear war has been lifted for the first time in more than 40 years. The future remains open though its possibilities are daily foreclosed. The science and technology on which the West has relied to create the affluence envied by the rest of the world can now be used to confront the threats facing humanity.

The only historical precedent for the current challenge presented to human survival worldwide is that faced by society in the last national emergency during the second world war. This time, however, no nation can hope to meet the challenge alone; and within countries alliance on terms of equality, co-operation and democratic planning will be required, now as then, merely to survive. In particular, if educational institutions at all levels could be returned to the democratic control of their localities and regions, this would serve to generalise science and raise awareness of the radical transformations required to avoid ecological catastrophe through a genuine modernisation of the economy and society.

The loss of old certainties has at least entailed overcoming restrictive limitations. For example, in place of reliance on a male breadwinner, women are moving towards relative economic equality in the labour market. This has resulted in women playing a greater part in public life, bringing into it the knowledge, skills and values of their experience. For, with the decline of heavy industry and the rise of services - both associated with new technology which makes physical differences at work irrelevant, the persistence of so-called ‘men’s and women’s work’ is now open to question along with the whole social construction of gender. In a tendency working its way up the age range, the pay-gap between female and male 16-24 year-olds has narrowed to a negligible 4.3 per cent (Deakin 1996). However, this has been at the expense of a fall in the relative value of male income, so that wages for the same age group have fallen as a

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proportion of average wages by 10 per cent over the decade to 1995 (ibid). What has been called ‘the feminisation of male labour’ means that more and more men are coming to share the conditions of part-time, intermittent working which most women were long used to accepting. (‘Feminisation’ should not be seen as necessarily bad for men – some fathers have more time to spend with their children nowadays, for instance, and ‘new men’ are supposed to be sharing housework. Nor should women be blamed for it but the fact that, as far as employment is concerned, ‘feminisation’ has meant a levelling down for men, rather than a levelling up for women, means that traditionalists tend to blame women - or at least feminists - for it.)

In relation to age also, about half of all students in further education, excluding those in sixth-form colleges, are over 26, less than one third 16-18. Indeed, most FE students have always been part-time and adult. In higher education, proportions of adult and part-time students are also now increasing towards majorities. Nevertheless, most full-time further and higher education students are younger due to the extension for all school leavers of the period of transition into the labour market - if not into work. This protracted transition has raised the threshold of adulthood and lengthened what is regarded as ‘youth’, ‘adolescence’, or even the ‘permanent adolescence’, or ‘post-adolescence’, in which many young men particularly are allegedly trapped. (See Adamski and Grootings, 1989.) All these life stage definitions are shifting in life courses disrupted by economic uncertainty.

Changes in childhood and youth impact in turn on older people. Images of youth and adulthood have become blurred and confused because, for example, whilst students become older, many adults engage in activities previously associated with younger people - by enrolling as students, for instance. They also stay single for longer, for another instance, so that the average age of first marriage has risen from its all-time low of 20 for women and 22 for men in 1971 to 26 and 27 today (Irwin, 1996). Simultaneously, there is a lowering of the formal adult threshold; for example, the voting age has come down along with the age for marriage without parental consent and for undertaking hire-purchase agreements, etc. Confusingly, other legal measures raise the official age of majority (to 22 for entitlement to the full National Minimum Wage, for instance). So the various phases of life in which age was linked to status have become ‘uncoupled’ and, despite the vocational emphasis in schools and colleges, education no longer relates necessarily to work.

Lack of employment opportunities may have encouraged many people to remain in or return to education or training for lack of alternative options or, more positively, to gain the qualifications to increase their employment opportunities in the future. As a result, expectations have increased generally, encouraging young people to raise their aspirations for education. A wide range of new courses have been offered which are now marketed more attractively by schools and colleges competing with each other for dwindling numbers of recruits. Yet, as employment - particularly the prospect of one occupation for the whole of a working life - becomes increasingly less relevant for defining social identity, many young people now have periods of education and training in which they move from one course or scheme to another without ever entering full-time, secure employment. This pattern of life is reaching steadily up the age range to include wider social groups beyond those for whom it has for long been habitual. Young people - whether they are students or not - increasingly form part of a large casualised labour market, one whose patterns of contract and often part-time working are also extending up (and down, through similar employment of the semi-retired elderly) into the whole

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of employment. This combination of education with what have been called ‘McJobs’ (above) not only makes it harder for students to complete their studies but detracts from much of the personal meaning they might once have had for the smaller numbers previously pursuing them. Learning post-16 has become just a part of a pattern of learning and earning that is established early by work-experience and part-time work while at school, through sixth form or FE and on into higher education, with recurrent returns to full- or part-time learning from employment or unemployment thereafter.

Despite - or perhaps because of - the relentless vocational pressures for conformity to which education at all levels now subjects students, alternative youth cultures generally oppose the whole work ethic, or what Aronowitz and DiFazio (1994) called ‘the Dogma of Work’, which derives identity from occupation. It is a commonplace to remark that as employment loses its centrality in social life, consumer and leisure identities become more important. There is a contradiction, however, in that conventional consumer and leisure identities are harder to sustain without regular income and this has been widely held to partly account for the proliferation of counter-cultures amongst the young and not so young (or amongst the young at heart). Many in the new mass of students working their way through further, higher and continuing education and training are beginning to shape such a challenge in the ways in which they struggle to make lives for themselves in the circumstances in which they find themselves. Teachers and trainers at all levels of learning can help them to do this at the same time as they help them to achieve learning goals that all too often relate to illusory promises of employment.

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c.13,000 words end.

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