Keith Forrester

Trade union modernisation and lifelong learning

Abstract This article reviews recent developments in trade union education in the United Kingdom. It considers policy developments in response to the governments lifelong learning agenda, and also initiatives from within trade unions themselves. The article is structured in three sections which consider consecutively the contexts of trade union education, current developments in trade union education including the interface between trade unions and expert systems, and the location of the developments analysed in the article in a new phase of modernity characterised by risk, democracy and reflexivity. We conclude that among the many difficulties in moving the trade union education agenda forward are the emphasis in lifelong learning rhetoric and policy on individualism, the policy emphasis on full-time younger learners rather than part-time older learners, and the reluctance of many employers to engage in a more than formulaic fashion with the lifelong learning agenda.

Lifelong Education and the Workplace: A Critical Analysis.

This paper contains an analysis of policy formulations which underlie the work of the ‘Leeds Adult Learners at Work’ project (1991‐93). The overall aim of the project was to assess the contribution that broadly based Employee Development training schemes organized through the workplace can make towards achieving the internationally recognized goal of ‘lifelong learning’. The paper follows Ball (1990) in seeing policy as a contested arena in which different actors struggle to impose their views. This involves an analysis of competing discourses. However, the discourse interfaces with a socio‐economic system in which individual adults find their day‐today lives increasingly constrained. First, an analysis is made of the economic context of education and training policy in terms of the international division of labour, the apparently contradictory processes of deskilling and reskilling, and mass unemployment. A critical analysis follows of the rhetoric which identifies education and training as a panacea for...

Modernised learning: an emerging lifelong agenda by British trade unions?

Argues that trade union education has tended to mirror the wider fortunes and complexities both within the particular union (or unions) and within the wider socio‐economic environment. The present period is, arguably, one such “moment” where the conceptions and practices informing trade union education are strongly informed by wider societal considerations. This paper examines this “moment”.

Learning for revival; British trade unions and workplace learning A shorter version of this article appeared in 2004, as a Research Note in Work, Employment and Society, 18(2), 413–420.

Against a background of declining union significance and falling membership, this article reviews the recent development of trade union workplace learning in Britain. It is argued that the dominant framework within which this learning is currently undertaken is one of ‘employability’. Instead of an employability framework, it is suggested that an educational framework informed by ‘democratic citizenship’ better serves the need for unions and their members to engage with changes within the workplace and within the wider societal context.

Work-related learning and the struggle for employee commitment

Abstract Workplace or work-related learning represents an important and expanding area of interest for adult educators. Encouraged by a variety of recent government policy developments within a framework of ‘lifelong learning’, adult educators and trade unions once again are seen as having an important contribution to make towards work-related learning initiatives. However, this article raises a number of concerns and worries about the underlying assumptions and purpose of much of this learning. Against a background of recent research and developments involving the author, it is suggested that an uncritical analysis of ‘learning’ within the workplace by adult educators and trade unionists risks aligning these activities to new forms of oppression and managerial control.

Leaving the Academic Towers: The Council of Europe and the Education for Democratic Citizenship Project.

In recent years, there has been a revitalized interest in conceptions and practices of citizenship. This paper outlines and comments upon the first stage of the Council of Europes Education for Democratic Citizenship (EDC) project that ran between 1997 and 2000. Involving the creation of ‘Sites of Citizenship’ in different countries, the EDC project sought ‘to actively engage in the process of finding out the new shape of democratic culture and the means by which individuals can creatively participate in its reproduction’. Although the EDC project is not yet completed, it is suggested that there are a number of distinctive, ‘risky’ and innovative features to the project that merit closer attention.

Unemployment and Europe: an Adult Education Perspective

(1991). Unemployment and Europe: an Adult Education Perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 154-167.

Learning in small- and medium-sized enterprises: time for a reappraisal?

Abstract This article follows Engeström (2001) in suggesting a new approach to learning in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on the social and cultural realities of the workplace. The article briefly reviews the theoretical status and practical standing of work on lifelong learning in SMEs, and suggests that Engeströms work may help us to understand the complex interplay of formal and informal learning with other features of the workplace. Most of the article is taken up with a case study of learning in one English sub-region that has experienced substantial social and economic change in recent years, and explores the views of a variety of social actors positioned at different points within the workplace. The article concludes that a reappraisal of learning in SMEs should include policy areas such as further education, workforce development and lifelong learning, and be informed by contemporary learning theory.

Trade Unions and Changing Practices of Workers’ Education

For millions of workers throughout the world today, the trade union often remains the primary, and sometimes the only vehicle of their adult learning. For some trade unionists, worker education today involves engaging with the knowledge, skills and capabilities seen as necessary to economically survive within a late capitalist environment. Elsewhere, such as in post-colonial Africa, worker education has recently involved or currently involves the learning necessary to challenge apartheid regimes (South Africa), forms of political injustice and dictatorship (Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe) or in the case of post-communist countries, union members learning once again, to create workers’ organisations that defend workers’ interests within the workplace