‘Stepping Stones’: progression from non-counting provision to counting provision within Skills for Life: Quantitative strand

1. Summary 1.1 Context The government established the Skills for Life strategy for improving the basic skills of adults in England in 2001. Basic skills comprise literacy, numeracy and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages). The government also set targets for the number of adults it wanted to achieve a first basic skills qualification (750,000 by 2004, 1,500,000 by 2007, and 2,250,000 by 2010), and criteria for the types of qualification, and therefore courses, which would count towards those targets. The courses which ‘counted’ were, essentially, all literacy, numeracy and ESOL courses with at least one learning aim for a qualification at Entry level 3 or Level 1 or Level 2 of the (then) National Qualifications Framework (NQF), except that Entry level 3 courses in Speaking and Listening did not count; nor did any courses with aims only at Entry level 2 or below. (For more detail on this see Appendix A.) At an early stage, all learning aims in the Learning and Skills Council’s databases were flagged as counting or non-counting in this sense and, as explained in Appendix B, for this project those flags were taken as the operational definition of counting and non-counting provision. The project explored the amount of progression from adult literacy, language (ESOL) and numeracy (ALLN) Skills for Life provision which did not count towards the national qualification targets to provision which did count towards those targets. The project aimed to provide both some quantitative facts about the amount of such progression, and some qualitative understanding of the factors influencing it. The quantitative strand was undertaken by a team at the University of Sheffield, and the qualitative strand by researchers at Lancaster University and the Institute of Education, University of London. This is the report of the quantitative strand; for the report of the qualitative strand see Hodge and Koutsoubou (2015). One implication of the way ‘progression’ was defined for this project needs to be explained immediately. ‘Progression’ might normally be taken to imply movement up the levels of the NQF, but for present purposes policy-makers and administrators were interested in all forms of progression, including movement sideways or even down in terms of NQF levels. The project was commissioned by the (then) Department for Education and Skills in 2005, and this report was essentially complete by August 2008; the detailed statistical analyses required explain the length of time. To prepare for publication, some further editing was done in November-December 2009 and in March-May 2013. The analyses in this report cover the period 2000/01 to 2004/05, the academic years for which validated Learning and Skills Council (LSC) data were available at the point when the main analyses were being conducted. The updatings in 2009 and 2013 could not encompass carrying the analyses on from 2004/05 to further academic years; that would have required a great deal of time and further funding, and both of the statisticians who had worked on the project had by then moved on to other work. The project as a whole was conceived of as having possibly important implications for policy questions relevant to Skills for Life, for example: Was the amount of progression high or low? What factors might influence adult learners to move on, or not? It was commissioned, and early drafts of this report were available, in time for the findings to be considered during the refreshing of the Skills for Life strategy in 2007-08. 1.2 Research questions For the original wording in the project proposal of the research questions to be tackled by the project, and an account of those tackled by each strand, see Appendix C. This report is organised in terms of the questions the quantitative strand attempted to answer; these are listed below in the order in which they were tackled. They are based on qs.1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 in the project proposal, but re-ordered, expanded and re-worded in order to sequence them more logically and make them more clearly answerable from the available data: 1. How many learners enrolled on ALLN courses between August 2000 and June 2005? 2. How many enrolled with one or more non-counting aims and not simultaneously or previously with a counting aim, and what percentage did they represent of all those who enrolled? 3. How many of those who enrolled with only non-counting aims enrolled for literacy / ESOL / numeracy / any combination of these? 4. How many of those who enrolled with only non-counting aims enrolled at Entry level / Level 1 / Level 2? 5. Overall and within each subject, how many of those who enrolled with only non-counting aims enrolled at Entry level / Level 1 / Level 2? 6. Overall and within each of the subjects and levels, how many of those who first enrolled with only non-counting aims later enrolled with at least one counting aim, and what percentage did the latter represent of the former? 7. What was the profile (in terms of gender, age and ethnicity) of those who progressed to counting, and how do they compare with those who did not progress? 8. What types of course did learners who progressed come from and go on to? 9. What was the average interval and range of intervals between enrolling with only non-counting aims and progressing to counting? 1.3 Method A full account of the methods used is given in Appendix B. Briefly, we analysed the Learning and Skills Council’s databases for academic years 2000/01 to 2004/05 at the level of individual learners. Those databases were based on learning aims, and not on individuals, so in order to identify individuals we used a file supplied by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). We searched for each individual learner’s first appearance in the databases. If on first appearance an individual had a learning aim which counted towards the government’s targets for Skills for Life, that individual was logged but his/her data were not further analysed. If, on the other hand, on first appearance an individual had only one or more non-counting learning aims, we looked to see whether that individual turned up again later with a counting aim. Once all those who progressed (or not) from non-counting to counting had been identified, analyses were carried out of their characteristics, the subjects they had studied (literacy, English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), numeracy), and (for those who had progressed) the interval between enrolling as non-counting and enrolling as counting. We also had separate access to data from one very large College of FurtherEducation in the London area and used these for some comparisons with the national data. 1.4 Headline findings and conclusions In the five academic years 2000/01-2004/05, 3.75 million learners enrolled on adult literacy, language and numeracy courses in England. Of those, 1.35 million (44%) first enrolled with only non-counting aims. The great majority of enrolments were in literacy or ESOL (79%). Most enrolments were at Level 1 (61%). About 13% of learners who first enrolled with only non-counting aims later enrolled with a counting aim within the period covered. The College of Further Education in London had a progression rate double this figure. Those learners who did not progress from non-counting to counting may have achieved their personal goals on a non-counting course; some may have progressed to Level 3. The largest single number of people progressing moved from not counting at ESOL Level 1 to counting at ESOL Entry level. Substantial numbers also progressed from not counting at ESOL Level 1 to counting at ESOL Level 1, and from not counting at ESOL Entry level to counting at ESOL Entry level. Smaller but still quite large numbers moved within levels of literacy. Other numbers were small. By far the most frequent interval between enrolling as non-counting and enrolling as counting was one month, and most of the one-month intervals were from August to September in each year. It seems likely that this represented strategic initial and re-enrolment of learners by providers for funding reasons, which may in turn explain why:- more than half of all non-counting enrolments were at Level 1; - the largest number of learners who progressed were those who went from non-counting at ESOL Level 1 to counting at ESOL Entry level; and - the progression rate was highest each year for learners who enrolled in August. The college in London may have had lessons for other providers. Otherwise, these quantitative findings provided few ideas for increasing progression rates, except perhaps encouraging providers to encourage learners more strongly to re-enrol with a counting aim. The accompanying qualitative report (Hodge and Koutsoubou, 2015) provides more detail.