Foundation or fantasy? Foundation skills in context Allie Clemans

Overview 1. Lifelong learning: a policy choice 2. Learning and employment prospects 3. The fantasy of learning and employment

1. A policy choice In the Japanese community, lifelong learning is not limited to career and upskilling education of people to help them improve employability and face changes in the employment structure, nor is it confined to key competency education for the development of the potential of individuals. Lifelong learning is a framework for people to find ways to change the way this community is and to recreate their being as citizens (Makino, 2014, p. 45).

 ….”For residents, ‘learning’ doesn’t simply mean acquiring knowledge and skills and developing one’s potentials. More importantly, it means the perpetual regeneration of each member’s self in relation with others, which in turn strongly drives him or her to work with others to build up a new community” (Makino, 2014, p. 52)  The activities of the community learning centre … helps the birth of a new self …this cycling gives birth to a new relationship of gift and return, and this process further promotes exchanges in the local community and dynamically modifies this community.

Our choices  An ‘education and economic productivity dynamic’ (Shore and Searle, 2009)  A system responsive to industry needs  Late 1980s, education seen to be at fault for our economic woes and education was seen as key to revival  Proliferation of education and training  Yield positive outcomes –recognition, funding, prospects 6

2.Learning and employment prospects

8 The research  Multiple disadvantage and location affect workforce participation  Effects of low skill is more marked for men in terms of education and workforce participation  Women– with no post school qualifications – have increased in numbers of those participating in workforce. But in feminised labour markets – retail, hospitality, community care.  Women’s participation in workforce lower than men’s - 72% males vs 59% women in 2010.

9 Experience and qualifications  Skills mismatch/ underutilisation – 30% of migrants have university degree working as taxi drivers compared with native born counterparts.  Relevant experience – novices find it hard to find jobs. Yet dominant proportion of VET students work part time or full time – they do have experience.  Post VET – 2/3 of graduates from lower paid occupations do not move into a different occupation level after training or gain higher pay

3.The fantasy of learning and employment

Foundation skills More than 7.5 million Australian adults do not have the literacy and numeracy skills needed to participate fully in today’s workforce. We have set a target that, by 2022, at least two thirds of working age Australians will have the literacy and numeracy skills needed to take full advantage of opportunities afforded by the new economy (and to survive and thrive when opportunities are not forthcoming??) (SCOTESE, 2012, p. I emphasis my own).

Slavok Zizek

If this fantasy space is to be perceived as possible, it requires something to explain its failure to come about… It helps them having to face the impossible nature of what they are pursuing, the traumatic kernel of the real, by constructing the other as what stands in the way of its attainment. It is in this sense that the other is necessary for the construction and maintenance of the fantasy. (Hage, 1999, p. 74)

The decision of what to make the basics of education... depends not simply on the way the world is but on the way we think it should be, on the kind of life we believe to be worth living, and on the kind of society we believe to be worth living in. (Jean Martin, 1982, p. 19)

From learning through life to learning for life