SUE PEMBER CBE
in picking up the pieces. “Adult education was important anyway but it’s going to be even more important this year,” she says. “There are two parts to it. One is we have this legacy of adults with poor basic skills, so one in five has literacy issues and they probably have numeracy issues too. Then we will have maybe 2.5 million unemployed by the winter, and it’s no good just looking for jobs. We have to retrain people and put them into jobs for the future, so adult education is going to be even more important going forward.” Since 2011, providers in the sector have been encouraged to target specific local issues, she adds, such as high levels of unemployment or working with those with issues around language. She’s been impressed with how the adult community education sector has responded to the Covid-19 crisis, particularly its ability and willingness to embrace live online learning. “The main issue was to get devices to learners,” she says. “Many centres have done all sorts of things to do that, from approaching charities to putting a call-out in the locality for people to give up old kit and have it refurbished and upgraded.” The sector has been keen to get back up and running, she adds, knowing that those it helps are often escaping difficult home lives.
College calling Adult education hasn’t always been the focus for Pember. After qualifying as a teacher, she left her home town of Pontypridd and ventured to the east end of London in 1977, where she taught textiles at Redbridge Technical College and then moved six years later to Southgate College as deputy head and lecturer. “At that point I started working on a Manpower Services Commission project, which was all about matching the needs of employers and the actions of colleges in north London,” she says. “That has been with me ever since, based around the idea that our education system should be about getting people a job but also about giving employers what they need. That’s where I got my love of apprenticeships from.” This “second strand” saw her move into the Education Department of the London Borough of Enfield, where she took on
ADULT EDUCATION IS A GROWING BUSINESS, EVEN IF IT IS ONE WHICH SHOULDN’T BE THERE the role of deputy director of education across four colleges, the adult education service, and the youth and careers service. “I felt my key strength was that I was a trained teacher, so when we wanted to bring interventions in I knew how we could operate, because I understood how a college worked and how teachers reacted to certain things,” she says. She believes she’d still be in that position today had it not been for the 1992 Education Act, which made colleges independent of local authorities. “I really didn’t want to be a schools officer,” she says. “I loved the world of FE and at that point I thought I could go back to college.” She returned as the principal of Canterbury College in 1991, where she stayed for nine years, transforming a failing college into a highly successful establishment. It was there that she took on a project designed to widen participation in education across Kent, which would ultimately land her an OBE in 2000. “Whatever people enrolled, we’d assess their literacy and numeracy skills,” she
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says. “If they had low literacy or numeracy we’d work really hard to ensure they took that as well as their course, so they had a better chance of a job afterwards.”
Skills for Life The success of this project not only led to the OBE but also saw Pember move into government, working for the Department for Education and Employment, tasked with implementing the Moser Review and developing a plan to boost the literacy and numeracy of millions of adults, resulting in the Skills for Life agenda. “That was probably one of the highlights of my career because over 14 million people went on one of those literacy and numeracy courses, and it’s made a huge difference to getting people to Level 2,” she says. “Much of the legacy is still in operation today and has been embedded in the system, including the National Entitlements, which are written up in statute offering free literacy and numeracy for adults.” A later project was to drive the first Apprenticeships Review in 2005/6, which paved the way for getting apprenticeships back on the skills agenda. Pember says she believes the skills she picked up around building an evidence case and convincing people on the back of it have proved invaluable in her current role with HOLEX, which she describes as “gamekeeper turned poacher”. “In a way everything I have done in the past has built up to this role,” she adds. Away from the day job, Pember is currently a governor of both the University of Bedfordshire and Oakwood Secondary School in Horley, although both are due to come to an end in the near future. As for the adult education sector, Pember is hopeful its ability to tackle some of the issues that may manifest themselves in a post-Covid-19 landscape will help raise its profile and allow providers to expand over the next few years. “We just want the adult education sector to support the recovery plan,” she says. “It’s a growing business, even if it is one which shouldn’t be there. If young people were doing better at school, we wouldn’t have to teach numeracy and literacy to adults.” NICK MARTINDALE is editor of inTuition
AUTUMN 2020 INTUITION 15
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