[This past summer, after learning of the Adult Literacy Resource Institute from our website, staff at the Victorian Adult Literacy and Basic Education Council (VALBEC) in Australia e-mailed us to see if someone here would be interested in writing an article for their journal, describing the field of adult basic education in this corner of the United States. David Rosen and I agreed to write an article for them and asked if, in response, someone there could write a similar article for our newsletter. So the following presents a picture we seldom get to see--a view of adult basic education as practiced in another part of the world, specifically the Australian state of Victoria.--Ed.]
Hello Boston! I'm Bob Keith and I work for the Victorian Adult Literacy and Basic Education Council (VALBEC) in Australia. This brief article is in response to an account of adult literacy and basic education (ALBE) in Boston written for our journal, Fine Print, by David Rosen and Steve Reuys. Inevitably, it is impossible to capture the complexity of any field in such a short space, and these comments are entirely idiosyncratic, but I hope you get some sense of ALBE as it is in Australia.
VALBEC is a professional body, based in Melbourne, that seeks to represent providers of ALBE throughout the state of Victoria. Our main aims are to provide policy advice and lobbying around ALBE issues and to link dispersed ALBE centres through professional development services such as an annual conference, professional development networks, and publications (the quarterly journal Fine Print, the VALBEC Newsletter, the VALBEC Directory of Language and Literacy Providers, and occasional papers).
Linking such a geographically dispersed field is no easy task. Victoria has a population of something like five million people, with providers stretching from Mildura (about 700 km to Melbourne's northwest) to Mallacoota (roughly 500 km to the east). As you can imagine, there are a range of different needs across such an area. City providers, although this varies across suburbs, have high rates of ESL as well as ALBE provision whereas rural centres are much more likely to exclusively provide ALBE for speakers of English as a first language--although there are a number of fruit-growing areas which attracted ESL speakers in the immigration "boom" of the 1950s and '60s and which have significant ESL/Literacy needs.
Classes are held in a number of different venues. Language and/or Adult Education Departments in Institutes of Technical and Further Education (TAFEs--similar I think to the US community college system) are a major provider of classes. They have the advantage of linking learners into other vocational courses run by TAFE and smoothing the transition back into mainstream education. As in Boston, Victoria also has a well established community sector which provides classes in "Neighbourhood Houses" or "Community Learning Centres" (the naming is significant for funding reasons which are too arcane to go into here). These classes might be held in converted houses, local libraries, converted shop fronts or in local halls. TAFEs tend to have access to better educational resources, such as campus libraries, computer facilities and general classroom space, but the neighbourhood centres are smaller and generally more "user friendly" for those more wary of the education system. Neighbourhood provision is also more adaptable as communities shift; in Melbourne, for example, there has been considerable outer urban growth in recent years and it is community centres which have been first to provide classes there. As well as these, there is a good deal of workplace-based ESL and ALBE training going on. This might be in the form of classes for workers in which the focus is on general language and literacy needs (albeit with materials based on specific workplace practice) or, increasingly, there is language and literacy support for workers attempting to gain workplace certificates.
Funding comes from both federal and state governments. This funding was relatively stable throughout the '80s and up to the early '90s (i.e. it wasn't much, but it was regular), but due to changes at both levels of government and consequent changes in funding priorities, the field has been quite volatile throughout the '90s. There was an initial spurt of funding in the early '90s. The International Year of Literacy (1990) provided a community focus on literacy issues and certainly smoothed the way for changes that literacy workers had been advocating for some years; however, a large part of the funding changes were linked to a national policy on industry restructuring. As key employment industries--Victoria has an above-average share of manufacturing output in Australia--sought productivity gains and reduced staff, funding was quite dramatically increased for re-training.
As a consequence, the field grew from one largely operating out of small community centres and staffed mainly by volunteers to one quite central to Australian public policy and increasingly professionalised. Among other things, this professionalisation (and increasing government scrutiny) led to calls for curriculum frameworks which would allow for greater consistency of ALBE provision. For practitioners, this was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the resulting Certificates of General Education for Adults (CGEA--pronounced something like "seejah" by those who know it) grew out of existing good practice and provided a useful guide for those teachers entering the field. Also, as the CGEA was introduced, there was a concomitant injection of professional development funding--the like of which the field had not seen before--and ALBE workers were increasingly discussing their work together. The growth of university graduate programmes specialising in adult language and literacy added to the depth and scope of debates within the field.
However, government demands for accountability led to the addition of nominal hours for completion of the various stages of the CGEA, i.e., if someone remained enrolled in the same level for longer than their allotted time, funding could be withdrawn. As you're aware, learners don't all learn at the same rate, and this requirement led to many imaginative deceptions so that students could remain in classes. (I should add that, though this standardisation took some getting used to, the CGEA has been flexible enough to allow for a broad range of teaching initiatives and a recent survey suggests that it is generally accepted as a useful planning framework.)
The nature of the field was altered considerably by two key changes in government policy in the mid '90s. Firstly, as part of their policy for the rationalisation of public expenditure, the Victorian state government instituted Compulsory Competitive Tendering, under which all government programmes had to be put out for tender. ["For bid," I think we would say here.--Ed.] The theory was that this would lead to a reduction of "the fat" in the system. Certainly it led to cheaper provision of ALBE, but safeguards to ensure the quality of provision were less than rigidly enforced, and there has been considerable concern in the field that tenders have been won based solely on cost rather than on an understanding of the deeper educational issues (although this would doubtlessly be denied by the then-government). Another upshot of this change has been that the field has become increasingly casualised and deprofessionalised&emdash;attempts by teacher organisations to require that all ALBE staff have a teaching qualification were ignored in government tender documents&emdash;so that teachers are increasingly likely to be working at multiple sites with few workplace protections and benefits. Those who have some tenure are teaching longer and have more responsibilities.
The other bracing experience was the change of government at the federal level in 1996. Based on a much repeated need to repair a gaping "black hole" left in the economy by the previous government, there were funding cuts across the board in education and other public services. Funding was redirected from the unemployed in general--a lot of these being older migrants made redundant by industry restructuring--to the young unemployed in particular, i.e., those aged from 16 to 25. As school retention rates dropped and youth unemployment increased, this was a necessary focus that few questioned. Yet, as fate would have it, the take-up rate by youth for the literacy training (it was one of a number of options) was so low that the age range for training had to be raised to fill the classes.
So, it's been a tough time in Victorian ALBE recently (and I should add that the federal system here leads to sometimes considerable differences between the various states), and what happens in the next funding round is anybody's guess. ALBE appears to be something of a black hole in policy terms; repeated attempts to get either of the major political parties to state a clear commitment to the field have been fruitless. But, for all the doubts expressed here, ALBE provision continues to adapt to changing times, teachers continue to create innovative curriculum materials, and learners continue to learn. New partnerships between adult education and the schools sector--for example, some classes provided for "students at risk" within the school programme and some classes held out of school but accredited within the school--are one particular area being developed at the moment. We continue to lobby and wait for the political tide to turn.