Workshop C - Session 1

Title: Promoting Social Inclusion and Active Citizenship Chair: Haroon Saad, Birmingham City Council, UK Haroon Saad, Birmingham City Council, UK

Introduction by Haroon Saad

We are looking at the whole issue of social inclusion; we are looking at the role of adult education; we are looking at the whole issue around citizenship. There are a number of things that we need to take on board in terms of setting a context for what we are actually looking at.

First of all, there is the whole context of social exclusion and the structural changes that underpin that. At European Union level, there are roughly 57 million people who are suffering from what could be termed as income poverty; about 20 - 21 million people who are unemployed, and about 3 million people who are homeless. I do not want to dwell too much on that situation, because that in itself could be a huge debate, but the crucial thing underlining it, and for me one of the things that is missing from the debate, is to recognise the depth of structural change that underpins it.

For example, if we look at the issue of urban areas - and a great number of citizens of Europe live in urban areas - then urban areas have a unique feature that surrounds them right now and that is one of jobless growth. I mean, the economies of London, the economy of Birmingham, of Lyon, of Lisle, in the Ruhr in Germany, these are all urban areas where there has been economic growth but there has been marginal job growth on the back of it. Alongside that structural change is also the increasing social segregation that is evident in urban areas. These are dimensions around social exclusion which are more than simply the dimension of income poverty. So that is one dimension.

Funding

The second dimension is the whole area of funding and also about the individual accounts. One of the issues here is about a focus around a target group that is increasingly poor in terms of income, and yet at the same time a shift towards individual contribution to funding. I am thinking now of the European level, Agenda 2000, and how it will encapsulate those issues of structural change and social exclusion in terms of European funding and the way the European funding then becomes available.

I think we are all familiar with the institutional barriers, lack of information, time, costs, unresponsive forms of service delivery and the cultural aspects of institutional presentation. If you then look at characteristics of learners, it is important not to have a totally deficit model of adult learners. We need to recognise, and these are characteristics that come up from a number of surveys, that we are talking about learners who have firstly a wealth of experience, who are by and large seeking intermittent participation, who are constrained by work and domestic circumstances. We are talking about learners who are unclear about their learning needs, learners who have very complex motivations and who, a sizeable majority of them, have negative past experience of learning. We are also talking about learners who are engaged in voluntary participation, and characteristics or needs do not sit very neatly with the underlying ideology of vocationalism that underpins it.

THE LEARNING AGE

In your conference packs you were given a copy of the Green Paper that the UK has produced on THE LEARNING AGE. It is quite significant, because you will find in the early preamble a very strong commitment to the notion of learning being linked, not just to the market place or to the labour market and economic prosperity but also to social cohesion. Yet you will not find any measure in that same Green Paper that actually is not other than vocationally orientated.

You will find reference to individual learning accounts not being available for people who will not be entering the labour market after they have undertaken learning. In other words, over 50 year olds are not really eligible or seen as recipients of this form of learning, because they themselves will not be contributors to the economic prosperity or to the labour market. If we are looking at those kind of implications then what are the social exclusion action points? I really do believe that we need far more sophisticated analysis and identification of need. Socially excluded people are not in homogeneous groups; we have to recognise the differences within and between those groups. We need to understand more clearly the routes that lead to social exclusion; they are not universal nor are the barriers to inclusion or the impact of policies which either act as barriers or actually encourage exclusion.

This is not actually addressed in the Green Paper, nor is the need to focus this on local labour markets. Increasingly we are talking more about segmented labour markets and segmented lifestyles and therefore simply having one approach for all people will not necessarily be appropriate.

Social Capital

We also need to be focusing on, what I call, social capital developments. The Kennedy report is very strong on its reference to that, but if we unpack what we mean by social capital development, it is about capacity building for self organisation as well as for community organisation. But we also need to be thinking about capacity building for people to actually become professionals in the community, rather than simply being seen as in need of tuition.

We also need to latch on to the new agenda that is emerging, on the urban level at least, about community governance, and recognising that, if we are definitely interested in the whole issue of social inclusion we need to actually encourage participation far more strongly at that level in terms of community governance. Tom Collins made a very good comment earlier on, when he said, that participation is not a methodology, it is an ideology. Another area is around community enterprise support and development and this is about decentralising service delivery, not seeing the same institutional players as being the players that will carry on delivering services.

Lastly, there is a need in respect of social inclusion to look at infrastructure development and that is about strategic partnerships. It is about holistic area planning and it is also, particularly in areas or neighbourhoods of structural decline, it is also looking at the role of faith and community in those kind of context, and what role they actually have to play in the process of inclusion and providing new contours of solidarity in relation to social inclusion.

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