Government strategies for lifelong learning remain disjointed, but some themes are emerging: more flexibility to move into and across sixth-forms, colleges, universities and work-based options; enabling individuals to accumulate a personal portfolio of qualifications; one-stop access to advice and financial support. But it is impossible to deliver them because the information needed to provide personalised services of these kinds is locked within thousands of different databases and local IT systems.
Throughout compulsory schooling, every pupil has a record of what they have studied and achieved, held by local education authorities under the control of the Department for Education and Skills and identified by a unique pupil number. However, once the learner reaches 16 this record is locked and closed. The learner (actual or potential) moves into a world in which she or he rapidly accumulates multiple 'unique' identifying numbers and associated data records - for course enrolments, financial support applications, examinations, work-based schemes, and so on.
There is no easy of way of verifying, for example, what qualifications a 25-year-old job applicant has accumulated since leaving school, or what happens to the 200,000 people who drop out of higher education each year, or even how many individuals are currently enrolled in the further education system. It is accordingly difficult, costly and uncertain - if not actually impossible - to set up say a national record of achievement.
A starting point may be to follow the example of the supermarkets and other business services that have re-thought their whole operation and organise around the customer as an individual exercising choices. For all the talk of learners as customers, in practice the onus still remains on the individual learner to navigate their own way through the labyrinth of courses, qualifications and support schemes open to them at each stage of their learning career.
A learner-centred system would have three basic features:
First, it would know who its customers (past, present and lapsed or potential) are. The DfES has been trying for several years to move towards the implementation of a universal and unique learner numbering scheme. The unique pupil number lapses at 16, but could be carried forward. The national insurance number has prima facie attractions, but some practical constraints; and a new national personal numbering scheme, to support ID nards, is due to begin roll out in 2007.
Second, it would know what its customers are doing and have done in the past. The information held about individual learners in the various data banks of the Learning and Skills Council, higher education providers, examinations boards and many others must be unlocked, using a unique learner number as the key. It can then be made available to support the mobilisation of services to each learner, where and when they need it to progress their learning careers. There are practical and privacy issues to be resolved here, but none need be showstoppers, given the right leadership and drive.
Third, it would organise services around the customer. This is a major challenge for a sector which has evolved around a limited number of models of post-16 learning - the two-year diploma, the three-year degree and the five-year apprenticeship - each delivered discretely. The greatest force for change within, and increasingly across, these separate models has been the demands of learners for more flexible and personally relevant options.
Perhaps, mobilisation of a truly diverse, flexible and personalised learning system can only be achieved through a centrally concerted and strongly driven national programme.
