Annual Report: WEA Essex Outreach Programme 2000-2001

This has been a year of growth for the Essex Outreach Programme. And often, when my family has been listening to Dr Seuss's cautionary tale The Lorax, I have felt a pang of personal sympathy for his increasingly stressed and demented character the Once-ler who spends most of the story obsessively "figgering on biggering and BIGGERING and BIGGERING and BIGGERING!"

In Essex this year we have run more courses, attracted more students, extended the curriculum, widened the geographical area, employed more tutors, raised and spent more money. Funding has been received from the National Lottery, GOEast (the Government Office for the Eastern Region), Essex LEA, Essex Early Years Partnership, Essex Information Advice and Guidance Partnership, Colchester Institute, Clacton and Harwich Education Action Zone as well as from the District's own core budget. How? and why? has this money and effort been expended - and, in the end, so what?

A good percentage of this year's extra funding has gone straight into additional provision of courses. This accounts for the quantitative growth as course numbers in 2000-2001 rise from seventy odd to over one hundred. Many, but not all, of these extra courses represent our contribution to the UKOnline programme - a government initiative with a particular focus on teaching students how to use the Internet. I wrote last year of the sense of awe I felt as I realised what this global communication network might mean to people who are far away from their homelands. This year I was actually present at a session where an Afghan WEA student found his local paper for the first time on an Internet site and could read of the friends and neighbours he had left behind - and the doings of the Taliban from whom he had fled.

As part of the UKOnline programme we have been encouraged to experiment with new technological methods of linking live to the Internet from any conceivable location. This seems an appropriate challenge for an outreach programme but I cannot pretend that it has been easy. Our technical research continues and already the support of GOEast and BECTA (British Educational Communications Technology Agency) have enabled some useful gains to be made - not least in persuading the telecommunications company Orange to review and reduce its tariff for educational users. There is a small degree of national interest in our attempt to function as a truly mobile learning centre.

If I were to attempt a more grounded answer to the question why? we have chosen to invest effort and resources in trying to teach WEA outreach students this twenty-first skill, it would have something to do with not wishing the financially/educationally disadvantaged to feel further estranged within their own culture. WWWdot may, in the ultimate scale of value, be as ephemeral as the Once-ler's thneeds but just now it is doing its best to convince us that it is "something everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs" - and not everyone is in a position to make an informed choice whether they do need it or not.

In the human scale other 2000-2001 initiatives may matter more. I know I am proudest this year of the small but real progress we have made in running courses for fathers in Chelmsford prison. These sessions offer men an opportunity to think about how they may be able to play some positive part in their families' lives even when they cannot reside with them. Three "lifers" were among the students in our first HMP Chelmsford group. Each "Being a Dad" course leads up to a family workshop session when partners and children are invited in to the prison so that fathers can, just for once, share a story with their children, change a nappy, eat a meal. There are no other opportunities in HMP Chelmsford for a family to sit round a table together.

If this provision seems as far from the WEA's traditional mission as teaching Internet skills to Afghan asylum seekers, we might remind ourselves that we were once a movement with a real concern for children's welfare. And we still commit ourselves "to generally furthering the advancement of education to the end that all children, adolescents and adults may have full opportunities for the education needed for their complete individual and social development." If the child of a prisoner never learns that Dad, too, can play a game or change a nappy, they have not learnt something that may matter to them later. It is a pity that it is still hard to gain acceptance for these courses in the official prison culture. When our tutor Yvonne Peecock lay unconscious in intensive care for two weeks this summer her "boys" Inside were the first students to send her a card.

Playing (sorry, learning through play) has certainly been "biggering and BIGGERING" throughout 2000-2001. We have done lots of serious, undeniably adult-educational stuff: we have introduced the WEA National course "Helping in Schools", entered groups of IT students for CLAIT (Computer Literacy and Information Technology) modules, pioneered the BBC "Becoming Webwise" course in the Chelmsford area, developed our own Open College Network course "Making Choices", piloted a system for individual information and advice sessions, been represented on county committees, made presentations at regional seminars. And we have continued to offer the steady stream of reflective, confidence-inducing motivational courses that have always been the central feature of this programme.

It is, however, the days where we have been able to invite parents and children together to make things, paint things, play a game, use a computer, eat a picnic that have been the most instantly memorable. We have run regular "Time Together" courses for families in the summer holidays at Clacton Family Centre and throughout the year at the asylum seeker centres. Over Christmas & New Year the WEA Essex Federation supported us in gaining lottery money to run five days of family learning activity in Jaywick. At the end of the summer term Chelmsford County High school gave us free run of their premises plus a financial contribution to enable residents and ex residents of Chelmsford's women's refuge to come together for a day of art, games, swimming and ICT. On an unscientific calculation I would estimate that somewhere in the region of 200 children this year have had direct teaching input from a WEA tutor - that's not including the children who are looked after in creches by ourselves and our partner organisations while grown-up courses are in progress.

As the Once-ler's business grew he put in a radio-phone and called all his brothers and uncles and aunts to "get over here fast" and "get mighty rich". It's not quite the way we recruit in the WEA but there have been moments when I've wondered how we were going to find tutors of the quality and dedication to maintain the quality of our courses in a period of such rapid expansion. Thank heavens for e-mail.

From 12 tutors active in 1999-2000 we had 22 taking courses in 2000-2001. We say goodbye now to four excellent teachers and committed outreach programme supporters in Kim Morgan, Lynne Miles, Teresa Ablewhite and Sue Azar. We warmly welcome this year's new tutors and those who will join us in the autumn term - particularly Hong Kong-born Karen Lee who came to us as a student in 1998, has passed every ICT exam which we could offer her, studied with the Community College to improve her English, has worked for us this year as a volunteer tutor and is now ready join the City and Guilds Stage 1 training and take courses in her own right. Similarly, without the administrative help of Jane Babbage, another former student, we would not have continued to progress towards Guidance Council accreditation nor would we have the systematic record keeping that enables us to keep in touch and continue to support our students.

Now we have WEA London District area of Essex to include in our outreach provision. Maggie Freeman takes over this project from Kim Morgan while Peter Reddyhoff has overall technical responsibility for our array of equipment, Russ Mynott acts as our ICT research consultant and Diane Kilgour continues to come up with one humane and innovative idea after another in the Clacton and Harwich area.

By the end of The Lorax even the Once-ler has grasped the difference between "biggering" and what environmentalists would call "sustainable development". This year Diane is poised to use the new membership scheme and new definition of affiliated group to establish our first "community branch". It is our students, not this programme, who will take on the responsibility for growth and nurturing into the future. Because, as the Once-ler explains to his unknown auditor, "UNLESS someone like you/ cares a whole awful lot, / nothing is going to get better. / It's not."

Julia Jones (15.08.2001)