Creative Approaches to Raising Achievement of Adult Learners in English Further Education

Seventy-two per cent of Britain's further education students on courses funded by the English Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) are adult learners aged 19 or over, yet an average 37% of them currently do not achieve their qualification aims (FEFC, 1999), despite the British government's drive to improve attainment among these cohorts. The price paid by adult learners is disillusion and a feeling of failure, while colleges loose a leg of the FEFC's funding tripod. But a far more worrying prospect is the fact that adult learners will form the bulk of extra 700,000 disciples of learning that the Government is bringing into further education by 2002, at an estimated cost of 2.5 billion over the same period. Will it be business as usual? This paper draws on recent work on improving retention in further education (see Ogunleye, 2000a). It examines the extent of the problem of underachievement of adult learners and the paucity of current colleges' solutions to the problems. It explores briefly the concept of creativity and argues that a solution to improving achievement of adult learners lies in fostering creativity in the learning process through creative curriculum, teaching and instructional techniques. Because of space constraints, readers who are interested in a full discussion on how the current teaching and learning in English education ignores creativity are referred to DfEE (1999b). Also, for a full discussion on examples of good practice and creative teaching approaches that have been tried in particular contexts, readers are referred to Lobuts and Pennewill (1984), Mayer (1989) and James (1999). The words student and learner are used interchangeably throughout this paper.