Promoting Social Inclusion and Active Citizenship - Report Back

Reporter Fiona Blacke, Scottish Community Educational Council, with John Humphrys

Our group had three workshops with three themes. There was one on general issues, one on work with under-represented groups and one which looked at overcoming barriers. From those, I have identified 5 key issues which have emerged across the groupings.

The first issue which came up in all the groups was the nature of citizenship. The groups agreed that citizenship and the role of the citizen was multifaceted and multilayered, and that we needed to recognise the demands placed on individuals to be citizens of communities, of regions, of countries, of Europe and indeed of the world.

We need to be clear about what we mean by the active citizen and place that within the changing political context which we find ourselves in today. Active citizenship is definitely about people doing it for themselves; it is not about us, the professionals, setting up systems and structures to do it for them. It is critical that we support people to become effective workers, animators - choose your terminology - within their own communities. The other agreement within this area was that critical thinking is a key tool for any individual who wishes to be in active citizenship.

The second issue which we identified as important was the nature of exclusion. We had to ask ourselves: who are the excluded and who defines them? One member of a group gave us a very pertinent warning. He said, “Don’t confuse non participants in learning with the socially excluded”. Some people just don’t want to be part of learning programmes, and I think it is important that we remember that. We also need to be aware that ‘the excluded’ is not a homogeneous group, that conflicts arise between excluded groups in communities and often, when we work with particular groups, we generate those conflicts.

There was a recognition that approaches need to be long term, but that they were urgent and we need to act now, and that we need to focus on incentives and develop positive role models for people. Finally, we need to recognise that exclusion is strongly linked to other issues in people’s lives and context, and that family health and literacy are critical factors when we wish to tackle exclusion.

Funding

The third issue is funding. There was a general feeling that this area of work suffers particularly from a lack of funding and from short termism. The EU in particular is seen as bureaucratic, favouring large organisations who are often actually not best placed to deliver learning in communities. The analogy of the foraging animal comes to mind, I think, when we spend so much time looking for money that we actually don’t have the time to deliver what we are supposed to be doing.

The next issue was marginalisation of provision and this is probably linked to the funding issue. There is a general sense that social exclusion and citizenship provision are marginalised within the mainstream frameworks of lifelong learning. It is not recognised as important by politicians or policy planners and this has led to funding difficulties. There are also problems in ensuring that the lessons that we learn in pilot programmes are actually transferred into mainstream practice, not permanently lost. We need to recognise that work on citizenship and exclusion impacts on employability and the economy as a whole.

Finally, outcomes. This probably does actually have a major bearing in relation to the marginalisation and funding of this provision. There was a real and realistic recognition that we need to get smarter about measuring the outcomes of this particular kind of work. We need to develop frameworks to measure the social and economic returns of investments by governments and policy makers. But we also need to recognise the issues of confidence and self esteem greatly influence people’s ability to participate and become active citizens, and there are great difficulties in measuring this.

John Humphreys: That last thing, talking about confidence and self esteem, what we have is a vicious circle. If people are excluded by definition, they are not going to want education, because they are excluded. It is not until you give them education they begin to feel included, but they are not likely to want education. The question is question of how you break through that vicious circle and the difference between exclusion and employment.

Structural Change

Haroon Saad

I don’t think it is just simply a question of devising ways which you break the circle. Essentially we have to recognise first of all the scale of social exclusion that we are actually dealing with. Consider just three facts: at a European level, there are 55 million people who suffer from income poverty, 20 million people are unemployed, 3 million people who are homeless.

We also need to recognise the structural nature that we have actually gone through, and I think a lot of the speakers have really emphasised the kind of transformation we are actually going through. That structural nature of change in terms of employment also relates to the fact that we have jobless growth now, and we need to recognise that as a feature of thriving economies.

There will not be lifelong work for a sizeable minority of people, I think that is a fact. There will also be people who will be caught up in periodic crises where they do not have work. Now, how do those people then maintain some degree of linkage with wider society, because work has generally provided that kind of linkage. With the failure of economies to generate the level of employment that is required, I think the need to look for new ways of engaging people to active citizenship becomes increasingly important. In fact I would say that it is a key feature of developing sustainable economies in the 21st century.

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