HL Deb 18 December 1985 vol 469 cc807-22

2.56 p.m.

Lord Stewart of Fulham rose to call attention to community education in the light of changing employment prospects and needs; and to move for Papers.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, on several occasions in recent years we have debated education but we have never touched on the question with which I am now concerned: the relationship between the different parts of the education process, stretching from the education of children to the educational pursuits of elderly and retired people, and the philosophy of trying to view them as part of one whole educational process. It is with this matter that I want to concern myself this afternoon in dealing with the concept that education should be a process that continues throughout life and that the connection between different parts of it should be stressed.

There is a story about a small girl who when she returned from her first day at school was asked by her parents how she had got on. She replied that she thought she had not got on very well because they said she had to go again the next day. We find that we have not only to go to school again the next day but that, if we are really zealous in learning and in life, we probably have to go on pursuing the process of acquiring knowledge in one way or another throughout our lives.

One of the persons who endeavoured to give flesh to that concept was Henry Morris, who was then what was called county education secretary, but who would now be called chief education officer, of the County of Cambridge in the 1920s. He started from the assumption that it was a mistake to keep education in school separate from education in the later periods of life. He began to develop what was known as the community school.

To begin with, a community school can develop in very simple ways. For example, the parents who took their children to elementary schools, as they were then called, could stay, watch the proceedings in class, and observe how their children were taught. The mothers who had brought their young children to school also had an opportunity to meet one another, discuss problems affecting their community, and as a result possibly start various kinds of community activity.

Again, if one is considering a secondary school, local industrialists can make a practice of visiting the school and can arrange for the older children to visit industries. It is interesting to notice that this is now being urged as part of the forthcoming Industry Year as a way of interesting children and the public at large in industry and curing this country of what is considered to be one of its vices—a tendency to underestimate the importance of industry in life. A community school could also engage in international activities, with some of its pupils occasionally visiting foreign countries and receiving visitors from them.

However, as time went on it was apparent that the growth of the activities of the community school was turning the school into something more than a school. The phrase most associated with Henry Morris's work is that of "village college"—the creation of an institu- tion which not only contained a school in the normal sense of the word but provided opportunities for the education of adults, for sport and recreation, and for the education of people who for any reason suffered in literacy. Today, of course, that would particularly relate to ethnic minorities and the education of the disabled.

The college established at Impington, Cambridgeshire, became exceptionally famous, but it was indeed only one of those associated with Morris's name and later to be imitated in other parts of the country. He found that if one creates an institution of this kind it can be done with a certain amount of economy. Any educational process which throws up the prospect of saving money is always likely to be received with greater enthusiasm by Governments than most educational proposals. If you make it possible for the same building to be used at certain parts of the day as a school, at other times a club and at other times as an evening institute for adult education classes; if you provide such facilities as a swimming pool, and if the schools can be used not only by children but by adults, one is getting an economy.

If I may, I should like at this point to make what appears to be a digression but what I think is not. A good many years ago there was an ill-natured joke about American education to the effect that someone had been awarded a doctorate of philosophy for a thesis on the subject of the duties of a high school janitor in the summer. The story went on to say that later a further degree was offered for a paper on the duties of a high school janitor in winter. The latter part I am inclined to doubt, but the former part requires some consideration.

On the first occasion on which I visited the United States I met a high school janitor in person. I found that not only did he perform the ordinary duties that we associate with that phrase but he was acquainted with almost all the various social, aesthetic, dramatic and political groupings in the neighbourhood. He knew the demands they would make on the school building when it was not being used as a school, and it was his business to see that there was a fair sharing out of the facilities. Surveying the considerable grounds that surrounded the school he was able to say what parts could most properly be used for recreational purposes, what could be better used for the growing of crops and what kind of crops could best be grown in his particular demesne. He was, in fact, an extremely important public official and it seems to me that if anyone obtained a doctorate by writing a full and imaginative description of his work that doctorate was indeed well earned.

The matter stuck in my mind because at about the same time there was a report, in, I think, The Times Educational Supplement, of a doctorate to be granted for a thesis on the use of marine imagery in the religious poetry of the 17th century. I am inclined, with my noble friends, to laugh at that. I am not quite sure whether that proves that I am a barbarian or whether it proves that a certain amount of what passes for learning in this country is, in fact, nonsense. My point is that the task that the janitor is engaged in is one of great importance. If we want to be successful in bringing about any important reform in this world one must have vision, an idea, and some sense of practicality. We are told that the human creature has been described as, "a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting". So he is capable of vision and ideas and aware, also, of the physical limitations of the world in which he lives.

The effect of the village college was to do both of those things: to put forward the ideal of a whole community interested in the educational process and helping each other in it, and a realisation of the economies that could be obtained by the useful application of that idea in the creation of a village college. At first this idea took root in Cambridgeshire, probably because of the exceptional genius of this particular educator Henry Morris. One must say at once that the success of community education is hound to depend on the existence of one or two people who are really zealous and inspired believers in it. It is not something which can be brought into existence merely by an administrative fiat.

From Cambridgeshire we find it spreading to adjoining Leicestershire. I am happy to see that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester is to take part in this debate. But now we find that the community schools and village colleges are to be discovered on the map in Hampshire, Newcastle, Coventry, Nottinghamshire—where there is, for example, at Sutton-in-Ashfield what I think is one of the first purpose-built community schools—in Devonshire, Clwyd, Lothian and in the Isle of Wight.

The result is that a great many different varieties of village college and community school have arisen and some of them have extended their function to link themselves up with, say, the police and with local authorities so that for almost any problem affecting the community as a whole the village college is a forum where a solution may be sought. I notice the recent creation of a Federation of Village Colleges in Ely which makes it possible, for example, to make much greater provision for transport by the pooling of the resources of a number of village colleges.

However, we find that after the initial starts in the 1920s for some little while movement hung back. It has now come forward again. Why is that so in the 1970s and onwards? There is one statistic that helps to provide an answer to that. In 1971 the number of persons of school age was twice the number of persons of pensionable age. By 1991 that proportion will be reversed: that is, we are having to give more attention to the educational needs of the older sections of the population. We are living in a world where we know that for a long time to come a great many people will not be able to obtain work. We have to deal with that partly by retraining, where the connection in the community college between industry and education will help, and partly by leisure-time pursuits, where the activities of village colleges in providing leisure-time activities for older people will be helpful.

We find also at the present time that we have the problem of an increasing number of people whose mother tongue is not English. Here again, the village college had anticipated our needs since the teaching of English as a second language was one of its activities. We are always talking—and I mentioned it before—of the need for taking a greater interest in industry, and we are to have an Industry Year. Here, again, the fact that the village college makes a point of keeping in touch with local industrialists suggests that it has something to contribute to the answer to this problem.

We are, of course, also chronically aware of the problems of public expenditure, as I have suggested. What I am advocating here is not a particularly expensive kind of educational reform. If, then. I am not asking for large sums of money—and I should not like to say that I am not asking for any money because I do not believe that Governments can do anything effective unless they are prepared to spend some money—what am I asking for? First, that the Government should take an interest in the village college and community education movement. They do not take a great deal of interest at present. At Coventry there is the Community Education Development Centre, but I believe that such financial assistance as it receives comes rather more from overseas foundations than from anywhere in this country. I think that the Government ought to acquaint themselves more fully with what the Community Education Development Centre does and with what is happening throughout the country, and that they should endeavour to promote the exchange of ideas between one local authority and another.

Because of the way that community education has grown up, there are different forms of it at the present time. I think it important that nobody should imagine that the particular form which they are used to is the only correct and orthodox form of community education. We still have a great deal to learn about how community education can develop. We want a fruitful exchange of ideas among the various local authorities that are practising it, and the Government could help in bringing that about. I think the Government should also remember that, with the steady decline in the number of people of school age, they will at any rate have something to spare to promote the education of the older people and the greater variety in education which the village college and the community education movement help to bring about.

In this short speech I hope to draw attention to the existence of community education and to some of the promise that it holds. I hope and believe that those who follow me will be able to describe more fully the fruits which it can bring and that at the end of the day we shall have an encouraging response from the Government. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

3.13 p.m.

Lord Ritchie of Dundee

My Lords, I should like first to express the sincere appreciation of the House to the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham, for having introduced this very interesting and very important subject. I think that perhaps appreciation is due particularly because there are quite a lot of noble Lords here and (if I dare say so in your Lordships' House) perhaps some who are a little hazy about just what community education constitutes. We have heard of adult education and of further education, but community education is quite a new idea and a new concept. Indeed, I was told yesterday by someone who is actually working in the field that at the last count there were 112 different definitions of it. I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, for having made my own mind much clearer.

Morris saw what is now generally recognised: that a great many people in adult life want and need education. They may need qualifications or they may just want education for its own sake—which in the mind of an educationist is the best reason. People of any age may feel that their own schooldays were wasted and may long to go back to being taught something, or they may have specialised too early or too drastically. I think we have probably all met doctors who have suddenly conceived a passion for opera, or historians who have wished they knew more about computers or Halley's comet. Or, again, housewives who were condemned to the drudgery of domesticity from a young age may long to rediscover their potential for something other than baby-care and preparing fish fingers, and may go out and learn jazz, ballet, pottery or Russian. Others may have left school illiterate or semi-literate and may be in desperate need of specialised help. One could go on indefinitely.

Community education will fulfil these needs, but it will do more. As the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, has pointed out to your Lordships already, if adult activities can really take place in schools even during daytime working hours, then a whole community of learning and leisure can be built up, so that it can be seen that education does not stop at 16 or 18 years of age but can be a lifelong adventure from the cradle to the grave. That was Henry Morris's dream.

These ideas are indeed becoming actualities in many parts of the country—in Cambridgeshire, as the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, has pointed out, and in Leicestershire, as the right reverend Prelate will no doubt tell us, and in other parts, too, as has been pointed out.

Just for a moment I should like to make the point that the expression "community education" can comprise and should be allowed to comprise an idea beyond these activities that we have been talking about. Bearing this in mind, I should like to say a few words about what is happening in London and in East Sussex, which are my own two chief centres of interest. The much maligned ILEA are, I believe, spending £70 million a year on adult and youth education. They have many problems, starting with the greatly increased numbers of retired people, including people who have retired young or have been made redundant. They are particularly concerned with very large numbers of women who have been imprisoned in the home while bringing up children and who now want to come out and do something else. They are reaching out to old people's homes, to hospitals, to hospices and to prisons—I believe with no little effect—to the physically and mentally handicapped and to the deaf and the blind.

Then, as the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, has said, there is the great immigrant population. Your Lordships will know how desperate is the plight of some of these folk, and how many of them, especially women, because of their ignorance of the world and their ignorance of the English language, do not dare even to go out. There are also the illiterates. They need out-reach help. A few years ago I had a call from a 59 year-old man who was illiterate. He was, in fact, a very successful builder, and it was only late in life, when he had made a big success of his business, that he was finally emboldened to come and ask for help. Until that age he had managed to conceal even from his employees that he could not read. His was an exceptional case, but your Lordships can imagine how there are many young people and not so young people in an area like London who would never dream or dare to come forward.

Of course, Inner London has other special problems; for example, school-leavers. I am told that six out of 10 youngsters, on leaving school, cannot expect to find work, and they are joined by youngsters drifting to London from rural areas who have no money, no work and no prospects. This section of the population is very resistant to any activity which is labelled educational, and presents a severe problem. I believe that the authority is doing all that it can to help these deprived people, who are many in number. It is also embarking on the project of community colleges. The greatest limitation, of course, is economic, and the current rate-capping situation has come as a severe blow. One is almost tempted to say that if more money could be spent on learning and leisure it would be less necessary to spend money on riot shields and plastic bullets.

In a rural area, the problems are nothing like so intractable, but villages do have their problems of isolation, for example. But in East Sussex there are three fully fledged community colleges such as those envisaged by Henry Morris: one at Portslade in the Brighton area, one at Battle and one at Wadhurst near my home. There are others at Crowborough, Heathfield and Uckfield moving in the same direction. Brighton and Hove Sixth Form College welcomes adults into its classes and the sixth formers are welcomed into the adult classes. Hastings Further Education centre has a department of youth work developing 24 village youth clubs and planning to train youth club leaders.

Community education is all those things, and all of them are good. But the essence of what we are talking about today is, I realise, the community or village college as envisaged by Henry Morris all that time ago—of the learning and leisure centre which can offer a welcome to all ages, where all these wonderful things can happen. I quote from the prospectus of the village college of Comberton where the subjects currently on offer are yoga, art, German, French, embroidery, dressmaking, pottery, typing, calligraphy, upholstery, computing, Italian, guitar, photography, welding, Spanish and ballroom dancing.

These are places, too, where that most basic and therapeutic of human diversions, drama, can be offered. That has been my great interest and I want to say just a word about it. It seems to me that the world is full of people, young and old, who want and need to take part in some sort of drama. Usually they cannot because nobody will pay them to do it. The overcrowding in the profession sees to that. Often there is no amateur opportunity. Amateur groups are apt to be closed shops and rural villages are often dead; but many need that outlet. My point is that the therapeutic and educational value of that activity is enormous. I have seen inarticulate, tongue-tied children transformed into confident, articulate youngsters, and potential young trouble-makers creatively diverted from mischief. I believe that activity to be a basic need in many human beings and one that is largely frustrated. I believe that it is the aim, for example, of the Dartington College of Arts to take drama into the community. May its endeavours flourish!

We need to see more and more of these community centres coming into existence—places where the barriers between adults and children and between school and the big world are broken down; where children learn that adults actually want to learn and adults can be reminded how hard learning is; where, as the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, said, there can be links between school and industry, and children can have work experience, and industrialists can support school projects; where the school can serve as a local information centre, help to tackle local problems, manage local enterprises, provide housing for festivals and exhibitions, and, in somebody's words, provide, "a cost-effective use of expensive plant and professional expertise". I believe it to be the education of the future.

3.23 p.m.

Baroness Carnegy of Lour

My Lords, I have special reason to be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham, for introducing the debate from his lifelong experience, beginning, I believe, as a tutor in the WEA in his youth. For the same reason I have to declare a non-financial interest. I am the present chairman of the Scottish Community Education Council, a body appointed by the Secretary of State for Scotland to advise him on matters relating to community education and to promote its development in Scotland.

I want to say a word this afternoon about the close, and increasingly close, link that there should be between all the measures that we are now taking in this country to improve employment prospects through vocational education and training with the educational resources that exist within local communities. I wish to say why I believe there should be a much closer link than there is and what can be done. Through the various Government schemes of which we often speak—the youth training scheme, the community programme, programmes in schools, the adult training strategy, the open tech, and suchlike—much is being done to help people to achieve and maintain competence for life in the modern world. Indeed, we are moving towards a position where every individual citizen of whatever academic ability will have the possibility of possessing portable skills and knowledge which can be constantly updated and which will maximise his or her chances in the labour market.

But there is an important aspect of vocational education and training which, in my view, is still not adequately emphasised. We are teaching the skills but we are doing too little about the development of the person behind them to ensure that he has the confidence and personal ability to put them into action successfully. The way that the labour market is developing makes that more important than ever before. The November Manpower Services Commission Labour Market Quarterly Review confirms that there is a continuing trend towards more jobs in the service sector and fewer in manufacturing, more jobs in small firms and more self-employment.

People who work in those areas and who will do so in the future—in hotels, shops, banks and the like—people who work in small firms and people who are self-employed, come face to face with the public all the time. For them it is extremely important—even more important than in the larger manufacturing firms—to be good at relationships, to be good at teamwork, to be imaginative, personable and sympathetic and to spot when something is wrong for somebody and know how to put it right. In all those jobs the person and the skills are totally inseparable.

The other trend is what is happening in unemployment. The number claiming benefit of 3 million-plus seems to have flattened out; but among those people the number of long-term unemployed has increased during the past year by 6 per cent. to 1.3 million. That increase is entirely among those unemployed for three years or more. For those unemployed for one to two years or two to three years the numbers have fallen. That suggests that among those claiming benefit a hard core is developing of people who have been out of work for three years or more. At present there are some 500,000 such people right across the working age range. To get back into work, or into work for the first time, such people need more than skills. They need confidence, ability to face an interview and renewed ability to apply themselves to work and to discipline themselves; and if they live in our most deprived city areas, as many do, their best hope is self-employment, and so they need even more of those qualities. For the long-term unemployed, vocational training means personal help as well as skills help.

The big problem is how that can be achieved in ways which are acceptable to the customer. Central and local government politicians and officials tend to look for the answer to schools, to further education colleges and to training centres. But who having finally escaped from school, wants to return for the sake of personal development; and who sees college lectures on personal development as relevant to skills training? Those who try to lay such things on find that not many do, at any rate among those who most need the help. It is a problem and at present it is a largely unsolved one.

Yet I would submit that there are potentially available within local communities learning opportunities and help of precisely the kind that many trainees are currently missing, and that these can be mobilised in the manner characteristic of community education to provide what people want in the way they want it, when and where they want it, acceptably and accessibly, with plenty of participation by the learners, and at comparatively small cost.

The noble Lords, Lord Stewart and Lord Ritchie, have indicated some of the contexts in which this could be done. Perhaps I can mention one or two others. Jobcentre staff and community programme supervisors and others coming into close contact with people who have been unemployed for a long time frequently find that a major factor in being unable to get a job is the sense of inadequacy and, indeed, the limitation of not being able to read or write properly or do basic calculations. That exists among people for whom English is not the first language but it also exists among very many for whom it is the first language. This is usually not admitted. It is just a fact. The question is what to do about it.

All over the country there are adult basic education tutors, ordinary people who have volunteered to work one-to-one in their home or in the home of the learner, without anyone else necessarily knowing that it is going on, to help people read, write and calculate. In Scotland alone, during the last 10 years, 86,000 people have been helped by 19,063 tutors. Last year 10,800 volunteers were at work. If their work is calculated out as being worth £5 an hour they have done £1.2 million worth of work in one year. The cost to the public purse is only the co-ordination and the training of the volunteers, which has to be done by a few professionals. It is a proven, possible and successful method and could, if necessary, be expanded. I wonder how many Jobcentre and community programme staff spot illiteracy when they meet it or think of putting people in touch with adult basic education people.

There are job clubs in many city centres, opening, typically, some four mornings a week. They are places where unemployed people can go for advice, information and personal help. They can discuss employment possibilities, find typewriters, get help to fill in forms and apply for jobs. That is community education. As both noble Lords who have spoken have described, adults are turning out to be glad to return to school in certain circumstances. In Scotland, there are community schools, as the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, said, in Lothian. There is another sort in the Grampian Region. In Strathclyde quite recently the schools have been open to adults. In a year, over 3,000 adults have joined young people in the classroom. So far, those adults, on the whole, have been engaged in non-vocational subjects. Many of them probably are not people who are particularly in need of vocational training. But the discussion in the classroom and the way in which they have talked about job possibilities and career prospects with the young people in the schools has completely altered attitudes in the classroom. They are doing community education within the school, it is reported.

For younger people, businessmen within the community are helping in many ways. Grants are being awarded to young people through the MSC, through the Royal Jubilee Trust, through Shell's Livewire Scheme and through other business schemes to help young people set up their own business and to provide them with business advice to help them develop as self-employed people. The Enterprise Youth Scheme in schools, under which businessmen come into schools to help young people to form a company and to manufacture a product, is working extremely well. They work out the costs and the likely return on capital, issue shares and manufacture, market and analyse. That is a very successful scheme that helps prepare the way to self-employment.

Youth information projects are very important in helping young people to find their way into the labour market. YES points, information points manned by young people themselves, that exist in many parts of Scotland are most successful. We have a Young Scot booklet which every 16 year-old receives to help him or her. One could go on. There are, as your Lordships know, many more learning opportunities that can be found within the community. These opportunities can often fill the gap that exists in formal education and training programmes especially on the side of personal development.

I would emphasise, along with the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, that these can be provided at comparatively little cost. There have to be some professional organisers and trainers. There have to be community education specialists and other specialists in this field with the right expertise to get the volunteers going. But the movement of comparatively small sums—very small sums—from the schools and further education budget in this direction can have a multiplier effect, can make big things possible and can redress the balance in vocational education and training.

The noble Lord, Lord Stewart, said that there should be more exchange of ideas. I agree with that. I suggest, too, that in their planning and their budgeting the Government, the MSC and every local authority in the land should consider what more they might do on these lines—and should consider it with urgency, because it is very urgent.

3.38 p.m.

The Lord Bishop of Leicester

My Lords, I am grateful indeed for what has been said by the noble Lords, Lord Stewart and Lord Ritchie, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy. They have well established the subject and drawn attention to some points that I wish to embroider. I am grateful to the noble Baroness who has spoken about the spiritual aspect of the subject and has alluded to unemployment, on which I hope to say something further. I am particularly grateful that we have already had some indication of the breadth of meaning behind the term "community education". I find in talking to those involved in community education in Leicestershire that they have imaginations of extreme fecundity. They are constantly renewing and revising their ideas. Nothing about community education could be more healthy than that.

We do not have in Leicestershire the kind of one-to-one education of which the noble Baroness spoke. That is a matter about which some of us feel somewhat envious. What we do have, however—it is the subject on which I wish principally to speak—are those shared institutions, usually called community colleges and community centres. There are now 320,000 people in Leicestershire actively involved in the work of those communities, chiefly as clients. There are 33 colleges and a number of community centres. Together they employ as full-time staff only 60 people. That is an interesting indication of the kind of resources that have to be put in and also of the results that can be achieved with such small manpower resources.

The variety of the institutions is tremendous. On the one hand, a rural community centre may be sharing buildings with a junior school. It will have a low budget and be geared to the needs of that rural community. On the other hand, we may have an urban community centre, again housed in a large school for infants and juniors with a total turnover of no more than £800 a year, but the value of whose work is almost beyond description.

Then we have the great community college which has more people passing through it than are served by the rural community centre. It may have 1,400 people a term enrolling for various activities and a turnover of £150,000 or more, meeting the need of the inner cities. No wonder it is difficult to make a clear and concise definition of what we are doing with community education.

The old idea of night school persists in the minds of many people. It is surprising how many people in Leicestershire who are attempting to keep themselves abreast of local developments are totally unaware or even confused as to what is going on in this field. We must not be distracted by those smaller institution's programmes which seem to provide a list of varied leisure pursuits—yoga, cake icing, the making of corn dollies and such things. But these are not to be despised—no, not at all—they have a community value far beyond what the mere trivial-sounding list can indicate.

However, it is more than life-long education, though it is essentially life-long education. The essential element about which we are talking is the community: the community taking part, the community taking responsibility, and the community benefiting. Every one of these institutions has its own constitution. There is no common model for that. They vary considerably because they are developed and adapted by the communities which they serve. All the institutions have a high degree of community control. The programme, the curriculum, the actual structure, the handling of the finance, are very largely in the hands of a community association or a community council.

The immediate benefit of this in terms of traditional attitudes towards education as provided is that it removes the sense of frustration for not getting what you want, and it ensures that the community has a chance to say what it wants. Fluctuations and changes in the programmes of community education institutions reflect the changing needs and wishes of the communities that they serve.

However, equally fundamental to the community element in the procedure is the integration of the whole education of all the community into one place, into one group. It is as important that the classroom door is open during the day when the children are there as it is that the adults are coming into the same building that the children use. I find on my own visits to schools in Leicestershire that I rarely go to a school where there are no parents present at whatever time of day that I go. Increasingly, there is a sense of identity between the parents and the school and therefore a sense of responsibility.

The educationists speak of the community relationship as being community provision of classes, sport, and creches—which are essential if there is to be any reasonable provision for women to take advantage of the opportunities offered. Community development—the teaching of people to act together, the forming of groups, and the fostering of leadership—is a matter of intense importance, particularly in some of our inner city areas where people are loth to take responsibilities outside their families, often because they feel that they are unable to carry out their responsibilities very well inside them.

Then the educationists speak of community action: the involving of groups with each other, and the selecting of purposes and intentions by the community itself. There is a religious dimension. The larger, inner city community colleges are providing help to religious groups many of which do not have their own temples or meeting places, or their own equipment, human or in terms of plant, for carrying out what they wish to do. You will therefore commonly find that Asian festivals are held in community colleges. The Church is not worried about this because the Church is immensely more rich in provision for places to hold her festivals and in human resources to carry them out. But where the Church can be involved is in the kind of community where the Church is still a vital part of it, on the whole the smaller place, probably the semi-rural or dormitory village, particularly where the Church has already a vigorous ecumenical element in its life. Then the community lives again in a religious sense when there is collaboration with the teaching resources that are in the Church and the leadership resources that are in the Church with those of the rest of the community. I regard this as an important and all too rare possibility.

The essential unity of all the constitutions of these varying institutions is guaranteed by the fact that every one of them has a single principal who is responsible for all activities taking place in the establishment. The headmistress of the infants' school will be warden of the community centre. The advantages of this to her become quickly apparent because of her renewed relationship not only with the parents but with the people among whom the parents and the children are living. Libraries are commonly shared and they need unified administration. It is interesting to find students and their parents using the same library for different purposes and using different parts of it at the same time. This revolutionises the attitude of many a parent towards what the children are doing in the library.

Shared financing is something on which I wish that I could speak with more detail and figures; but all the courses are paid for. This is not a free gift to the community. The community makes its own contribution. Roughly speaking an average cost is £1 an hour for a course. For some people that is quite a lot to pay, but they pay gladly and of course that gives the institution some leeway, some freedom, in what it chooses to do for itself. It has some of its own money, and therefore the possibilities of choice are widened.

Ordinary education being education by rule even though in modern education there is a wide degree of choice, community education is one where choice remains supreme. It is at this point that I believe that community education is most important in terms of the country's agony over unemployment, because choice leads to self determination. Self determination is one of the most agonising problems for some groups of our Leicester community. Our small Afro-Caribbean community suffers from the belief that it has no effective say in what happens to it. One of the reasons why young people are depressed at the prospect of unemployment is that they will not be provided with money; and money to them gives them some choice to live the kind of life that they wish.

Employment therefore being seen as the basis of free choice, if we put alongside it the degree of choice that can be offered by education, and particularly by this community style of education, we see that it is beginning to answer some of the deeper spiritual malaise which is incurred by unemployment.

I notice that those who work in community colleges in Leicestershire are speaking less of employment than of occupation. This is partly in response to a realistic view which says that however much employment returns, it will never return in the same degree and in the same way to which our fathers were used to it. Occupation, which put more simply means a life with a point and a hope to it, is what the community college can help people to discover and to plan. Of course, as the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy, has said, skills are important. Indeed, the noble Lords have also made the same point. They can be touchingly important. On a recent visit to an inner city community college at which there was a simple ceremony for the handing out of diplomas in advanced English as a second language, it was heartening to discover that the highest diploma was going to a man who could not be there. He was a traffic warden who, because of his new diploma, could now be raised to superintendent, and his duties called him away.

Languages, mathematics and numeracy are referred to by people working in this field—but languages far richer than simply the teaching of better English as a second language. That same college teaches Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Gujerati, and has some things in Polish. These languages are taught in a way which will lead the people for whom these are their primary languages not merely to feel better in speaking them—and that, indeed, is a great thing—but also to achieve something by passing, say, an O-level examination. However, those for whom these are second languages can also learn them there. We should think what that does to increase the sense of community.

This choice of achievement implies self-esteem as well as skill. It makes it possible for people to evolve both short-term and long-term goals in their lives: occupation becomes an option even when employment does not seem to be an option. Self-esteem thus gained inevitably leads in some degree to estimating oneself in terms of one's service to the community, of the esteem which one is earning from the community. It may be that what is earned is the esteem of a good entertainer, of someone who makes life more interesting, who brings more pleasure to it and who adorns it in some way. That is the kind of self-esteem and service which we desperately need in inner city communities.

Let me tell your Lordships a little more about Hazel Street. Hazel Street may be familiar to your Lordships because the shadow of Leicester City's football ground falls over the school in which the college is held. Seventy per cent. of the people attending are single women. Most of them attend in the daytime, at the same time as the children are in school, though of course with separate programmes. The majority are women in their early 20s who became mothers at the age of 15. Very many of them are slightly euphemistically described as being exposed to non-accidental domestic injuries. Others suffer the family stress involved in living with an unemployed father. Another large group comprises divorced or elderly Asian women.

What happens to them when they go to this community centre? They learn about the society in which they live; they learn the things which they cannot readily find out about their dues—in other words, what is available to them in the way of help. They learn how to be better parents and some of the simple skills of child care, and, by working together in what one might call seminar-fashion, they learn some of the more delicate skills of child care. They learn to be less lonely. The noble Lord also referred to that fact. There is scarcely any loneliness greater than the loneliness of a woman living alone not very skilful in English and depressed about the conditions of her life. Therefore, advice takes up part of the work of this community centre.

It would be nice if one could give some kind of quantitative estimate of the effect. I have pushed for this quantitative estimate, and the only one I have been given is that the children in the school have a 98 per cent. attendance record, which astounds me. I can believe that there has been a fall in delinquency, and I can also accept that it has not been possible to quantify that fall. Similar benefits can be found in all these institutions.

A rural community centre has found that, through the community centre alone, the two villages—the new estate and the old village—have been able to come together, to work together and eventually to be cemented. In the largest of our colleges, the one with the widest spread of ethnic constituents, we have a very distinguished programme in the arts. From the money that they contribute to their own activities they are able to invite from outside Leicester groups of the highest quality, particularly those who belong to their own ethnic groups. This is an enormous enrichment, but perhaps the greatest of all is that visitors from Gujerat come to Moat College to see how it works.

I have repeated what was previously said about the full use of existing plant. The school does not close at three o'clock in the afternoon and remain empty until the next morning. There is much more wear and tear, although there is less vandalism. However, there are improvements for the school. The money made available by the community is used to improve the school. Impressive pieces of highly expensive equipment, particularly for physical education and for the use of the handicapped, have been provided in this way in some of our colleges. But, of course, success breeds success. A little more money from other sources would go a long way. I hope that a little more money will be found from outside the system, but I have to say that I do not wish to see too much injected from the outside because I believe that it might be debilitating. The liveliness of the movement as I see it working around me comes largely from the commitment of the community to do its own work.

3.56 p.m.

Lord Ardwick

My Lords, I have been impressed and deeply moved by what the right reverend Prelate has just told us. Many years ago I went to Leicester and saw the purpose-built comprehensive schools, and I thought that there was an absolutely splendid authority. However, I also noticed that the right reverend Prelate had to say that, even with this magnificent work going on, affecting so many people in this area, the work was not known to the general public. Why is that?

I wonder how many of us knew what on earth it entailed when we saw that we were to debate the question of community education? It is a meaningless term. Even more meaningless is "community education development centre". I am afraid that today the word "community" has some very dubious associations. There is "community policing", which means being soft with bad boys; and there is a Community farm policy, which means giving hard prices to farmers. It is a very dubious word. I really think that this splendid movement must get itself a name.

It started off with "village college", which was all very well as long as there was a village. But today if you are thinking of an urban area, the word "village" is inappropriate and the word "college" is too posh, too highfalutin'. Therefore, something must be done if only to find a suitable acronym so that this movement can be publicised and can go ahead. In the discussions which we are now having on the nature of the English sabbath, the term "the fabric of society" has been used more than once. It is a useful term, and, as I have listened, I have often thought that the fabric is rather shabby in parts and is sometimes torn and tattered. Communities disintegrate. I only have to go back to that poverty-stricken district of inner Manchester, where I spent my boyhood and from which I take my name for evidence of that. Today a community can be destroyed even by efforts to improve it, such as slum clearance or the avoidance of the crippling burden of very large families.

In the last century, when the villagers came into the cities—and many of them in Manchester were Irish villagers—they suffered a loss of community. But, over time, communities were built in the cities around the churches and chapels, and around the co-operative movement with its men's guilds, its women's guilds, its mixed guilds, its smoking concerts, and its knife and fork tea parties. Communities were built around themselves and they were built around the factories with their sports clubs and their brass bands.

This old society, this recreation of the 19th century, is fading away fast today (if it has not already faded away) with de-industrialisation; with the disappearance of the extended family; with social mobility; with the geographic mobility of the motorcar. Therefore, we need today more creative efforts to create again this necessary sense of community.

I sometimes wonder whether the success of the radio serial—it is not a soap opera—"The Archers" is not due to an almost universal desire to live in a community as well knit as Ambridge appears to be. Of course, it is true that in radio and television we enjoy a boon that our ancestors never knew but in the end these boons, these blessings, are not a substitute for community. They are simply a means for making loneliness and social isolation more tolerable.

We are not pretending that community education is an answer to all the problems, but it is one of the promising creative efforts being made, and made successfully as we have heard in some parts, and it deserves to be attempted in many more. Most of us over the years have become perhaps vaguely aware of Henry Morris's pioneer work in Cambridgeshire on the village college. But most of us—like myself, I think, until recently—have not learnt how well that concept of Morris's has stood the test of time and been copied, developed, and adapted to various different circumstances.

The idea is basically so simple. You have a school, or a group of schools, which can serve the needs of the whole community from the playgroup, the pre-school children at one end, to the pensioners' clubs at the other; from the re-education of unemployed teenagers to the serious students in the WEA tutorial classes, or attempting the degree courses of the Open University.

Now it is possible to cater for those who feel the need in adult life for more basic education, or who wish to acquire skills, or who simply want to join their neighbours in some hobby, or some social activity, from ballroom dancing to caged birds. None of this needs to be costly. People are willing to pay fees to cover courses which require professional tutors, or they are willing to pay for the rent of a room for their club.

What the community gets out of it is the full use all the year round from morning until night of expensive premises which would normally be used only from 9 until 4 o'clock in the weeks between the school holidays. The centralisation of such services under the general supervision of a warden—I think the noble Baroness stressed this point—creates and feeds a community. For the teachers, school is a different kind of place inside the community and not just an outpost of the community. For the children, school is not for the dissident, difficult, and rebellious children; school is not a concentration camp for the young, but a place where everyone goes and everyone is happy to go. A village college, or a community educational and leisure centre, to use those terrible terms, is psychologically more accessible to the disadvantaged who need it most, to the unqualified, to the unstable, and to the physically handicapped.

There is a college of this kind on the outskirts of London which is doing remarkable work. It is created around a large comprehensive school which is blessed with 40 acres of open space. It is a school which has 80 teachers and 1,200 pupils. Among the things it does today is to provide women wishing to return to work with education which they need at hours at which they can attend, and it provides a crèche for their infant children.

For the manpower services it undertakes training in some needed skills, such as word processing or electronics. It has a youth training programme, a programme for long-term unemployed, and it also trains—I think they are called fire people—firemen and firewomen also for the GLC. The school is equipped with a splendid theatre where recently they have given performances of Gilbert and Sullivan and of Asian dancing, because this is a mixed ethnic area. Their sports facilities are used by no fewer than 5,000 people, and yet almost all of these people come within two miles of the school itself.

I have only touched the fringe of the movement, for it is a movement. It deserves to be studied and fostered not just by the Department of Education but by all government departments whose work would be assisted in this desirable and economic environment.