Abstract
This paper explores the meaning and implications of a policy-driven professionalisation of adult basic skills practice. Written amidst competing theoretical conceptualisations of professionalism, the paper focuses on a particular policy moment in Adult Language, Literacy and Numeracy (ALLN) practice in England: Skills for Life. The paper argues that the possibility of implementation of this policy is limited. The policy is filtered through the fragmented nature of the field, the embeddedness of literacy and what this paper calls an 'anti-professional' stance of ALLN practice. For policy makers, professionalisation is desirable, and its impact is far-reaching. It enables control of a key aspect of the service sector implicated in the supply of flexi-workers required by a globalised economy. In discussing the inevitability of professionalisation the paper draws on a small-scale research project to locate a space for the professional imagination, a space in which ALLN practitioners express motivations at odds with policy imperatives and enact professionalisation in ways that arguably hijack the momentum and resource that the policy provides.
Highlights
In this paper I interrogate the possibility, desirability and inevitability of professionalising adult basic skills practice.The discussion is written amidst an almost meteoric rise in the last 30 years of theoretical conceptualisations of what it means to be a professional (Harper and Jephcote 2010, Shore and Zannettino 2002)
Professionalism is in a state of crisis (Elliott 1996, Robson 1998, Frost 2001, Gleeson and James 2007), a crisis precipitated by a particular policy climate in which issues of trust, authority, moral integrity and expertise – once embodied by the professional – have become disaggregated (Morley 2003:5) or dissolved (Sardar 2000)
In this paper I have argued that the possibility of a professionalised ALLN practice may represent a road along which policy makers and practitioners may travel without ever reaching a final destination
Summary
In this paper I interrogate the possibility, desirability and inevitability of professionalising adult basic skills practice. Professionalism is in a state of crisis (Elliott 1996, Robson 1998, Frost 2001, Gleeson and James 2007), a crisis precipitated by a particular policy climate in which issues of trust, authority, moral integrity and expertise – once embodied by the professional – have become disaggregated (Morley 2003:5) or dissolved (Sardar 2000). In this shifting and diverse terrain, I frame the professional as ‘an uncertain being with disparate allegiances’, but more significantly as an ‘implementer of government policy’ (Stronach 2002:109). The UK experience connects to trends across the English speaking centres of economic power which have all, with divergent formulations, translations and transformations responded to the ‘globalisation of risk’ with a form of policy hyperactivity (Edwards and Usher 2008)
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