We shall consider providers of educational media, teaching, courses, institutions, territories, assessment and accreditation.

Schools

The UK’s three online schools opened in 2005 and collectively have approximately 200 full time students. The schools group learners into classes of up to 15 and use visual presentation tools alongside ‘Synchronous computer-mediated communication’ (SCMC), that is, voice and text based communication that works at the group and 1:1 levels. All schools report a steady increase in demand. Online schools are now also seen in, for example, the US and Canada.

Home schooling is increasing in the UK and the US. In the UK, an estimated 16,000 children are now educated at home, a three-fold increase since 1999; various studies suggest that home schooling is growing at 10-18% per year. In the US, growth is estimated to be 400% in ten years. Increased availability of digital learning resources and dissatisfaction with mainstream education provision are plausible drivers of this growth.

A further relevant trend is the rise of schools governed totally or partially by non Local Authority actors including parent groups, companies, Universities, and third sector organisations such as the RSA.

Universities

‘Corporate Universities’ are a growing phenomenon in the US. In practice they range from training departments to degree-granting branches of major companies, and in 2001 they were estimated to number 2000 in the US, up from 400 in 2003. Among the most famous are those of Boeing, Motorola and Walt Disney; Apple University is due to launch in California in 2009. Corporate Universities tend to be well-resourced, media-rich environments and as such could be potentially interesting sites of emerging next practice.

Corporate accreditation has arrived in the UK, with McDonalds, Network Rail and Flybe being the first companies to be given accreditation powers by the QCA. This could be said to reflect a growing disconnect between what is learnt in formal education and the skills required by major companies.

While Universities and Higher Education institutions have long been making use of ICT to offer distance learning opportunities, entirely virtual Universities are a new phenomenon. Among them are the US Army’s Virtual University (eARMYU), Duke Fuqua School of Business, Canadian Virtual University, Virtual University of Pakistan, Jones International University, the Open University of Catalonia, and the Virtual University of Applied Sciences in Germany.

Some campus-based universities are now offering ‘traditional’ courses alongside ‘reduced seat-time’ courses and fully online courses, reducing institutions’ bricks and mortar needs per student and thereby potentially expanding capacity (Bonk, 2005).

Professional training organisations are also employing a greater blend of face-to-face and distance learning. For example, “military training for captains in the National Guard now employ blended learning with combinations of asynchronous exercises for perhaps a year, synchronous tactical manoeuvre training for another 4-6 months, and face-to-face training at Fort Knox for a couple of intensive weeks.”

Open learning content

Web 2.0 enables platforms that broaden opportunities to participate actively in content creation and editing. Some consumers have become producers whose work can in turn be accessed by far larger audiences than was previously possible. Some examples of resulting forms of education provision are as follows.

The Connexions Project from Rice University enables volunteers to contribute courseware for the formal learning of any subject at any level. Users can reproduce and modify the content, or contact the creator with editorial suggestions. Creators can make ongoing amendments directly and instantly. Both administrators and users can assemble personalised compilations of Connexions material into bound collections printed on demand. The project is funded by Hewlett Packard and the Hewlett Foundation, and claims to have nearly one million unique visitors a month.

Curriki is a US website to which any US teacher can submit content for the K-12 Curriculum. Successful contributors are paid $500 – $1500 and their content is put online for free use by other teachers. Curriki is run by the GELC, a non-profit company founded by Sun Microsystems and funded by Nortel, a major infrastructure company, and has 46,000 registered users.

Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopaedia that “anyone can edit.” It has a number of relevant elements which can all be contributed to and edited by users, including: Wikibooks (a free library of educational textbooks), Wikiversity (educational and research materials and activities), Wikispecies (a directory of species data on known life forms) and Wikimedia Commons (a repository of images, sounds, videos and general media, containing over three million files). English-language Wikipedia is consistently ranked among the top ten most visited websites in the world. It is owned by the charity Wikipedia Foundation and grant-funded. The German-language Wikipedia has state funding. Other wiki encyclopaedia projects have recently launched, including Citizendium and Knols.

Finally, MIT Open Courseware provides free learning resources for all MIT courses online. Unlike the other examples, only MIT staff can contribute content, and users cannot amend the content. The project costs MIT US$4million a year to run, but attracts 25 million visitors annually whose feedback confirms to MIT the value of its ongoing investment.

Open learning content providers such as these support new types of relationships between the consumers and producers of educational media. Social software supports new types of communication and exchange between learners, teachers and peers.

Social software

“Each day, consumers upload 100,000 videos, watch more than 200m video clips and view more than 1.3bn web pages at social networking sites.”

Web 2.0 collaboration and many-to-many communication tools are used for learning in a variety of ways. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype offer synchronous voice, text and video communication between individuals and groups, mostly free of charge. VoIP is used for language learning, media sharing, and communication among students, teachers and their contacts. Skype uses excessive bandwidth and for this reason at least one University has attempted to ban it, but relented following protests from students and faculty. However, tensions between institution and technology, and the debate around Skype, persist on many campuses.

Blogs are widely used for peer learning on informal and informal subjects. Some interesting examples are stackoverflow.com, a highly active Q&A site for the web developer community. People who are stuck post their questions to the ‘crowd’ – and helpful answers usually return. As all members of the crowd get stuck at some point and can only be helped by other crowd members, mutual need and reciprocity sustain active engagement. Ask.metafilter.com is a popular Q&A site of unbounded subject matter; the knowledge exchanged ranges in topic from pure mathematics to parenting, spirituality and car ice scrapers.

Alongside these demand-led peer learning sites where activity starts with a question are supply-led peer learning sites where activity starts with an answer, often offered in video form. Sites with a specific learning angle include 5min.com and videojug.com, which offer short, free ‘how to’ videos on a range of subjects. Youtube has very broad user-generated video content that contains some items with learning value, such as a rap about physics that has been viewed 3.7 million times and lessons in playing the Mbira thumb piano.

While the broad trend is for content to be free, some pay-per-download sites thrive. Peepcode.com is a video tutorial site that is highly valued by developers working with the programming language Ruby on Rails. Tutorials made by a closed group of experts are downloaded for $9 each. These packets of knowledge – produced swiftly in response to a rapidly developing subject such as a new programming language, and accessed by the learner in response to a real-time learning need – present interesting examples of new digital provision of professional learning support which will be further explored in part two.

Two new sites connecting people who wish to learn with people who wish to teach have launched this year. The School of Life enables informal adult learners to contact experts on the database to arrange “an hour of chat in exchange for a fee.” The School of Everything is a matchmaking site for self-defined learners and teachers of unbounded subject matter, who arrange face-to-face meetings. The site is used to support life-long learning, informal learning, private tuition, and home schooling. Some learners use the site to self-organise into classes and share a teacher, and school teachers in other countries have used the site to find experts to invite into school. Membership is growing at 50% a month.

Other social software tools worth attention include collaborative design tools where users post ideas for the crowd to develop – for example, crowdspring.com. Google’s collaboration tools include shared documents, calendars and blogs. These make it easier for communities of learners, be they formal or informal, local or distributed, to work together. Some institutions – for example the six Bloomsbury Institutions within the University of London – are developing their use of Google’s free collaboration tools for teaching, learning, administration and research.

Finally, in the space between social software and institutional software is the rise in the provision of open source and free learning platforms. At the forefront is Moodle, recently identified as the most popular VLE in UK secondary schools. While Moodle is free, adaptable and developed by its users, other learning platform providers have gone further in enabling users to put together their own learning platforms. Unsurprisingly, there is “a fierce debate between proprietary suppliers and open-source supporters.”

ebooks

There is current trend towards personalised, ‘cut and paste’ arrangements of knowledge in discreet units, regularly updated and printed on demand. Some publishers are moving towards a new form of provision, away from printing ‘books’ and towards producing ‘playlists’ of short discrete topics. O’Reilly is one of the biggest publishers of computer books. It sells topic-specific PDF documents, usually of fewer than 100 pages, and custom books made by splicing in chapters and topics from the whole library. The modular format enables O’Reilly to publish new material before there is sufficient content for a book if demand is there.

CourseSmart is a year-old service owned by five publishers. It allows students to subscribe to a textbook and read it online, with the option of highlighting and printing out portions of it at a time.  The Connexions Project’s user-compiled print-on-demand collections have already been mentioned. Content formed in this way challenges traditional publishing in both agility and price. Introduction to Economic Analysis is on reading lists at Harvard University and has a market value of around $200. Its author put it online for free download in word or PDF, and two print-on-demand companies sell bound copies for $11 – $60.

Devices

The range of devices through which people digitally access learning experiences continues to grow. Professional training organisations are providing multimedia learning content for iPods; developers have created interactive physics simulation games that school children play on phones; in November 2007 Amazon launched its Kindle electronic ebook reader, and the Japanese market for mobile phone ebooks is now worth US$83m. Personal computers continue to get smaller, lighter and more powerful, while the trend towards single devices that perform a variety of functions remains strong.

Learning in virtual worlds

In 1992, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coined the term ‘metaverse’ to describe an immersive 3D virtual environment “in which everything from business to entertainment could be engaged in by any user, anywhere in the world, with access to a terminal.”

Sixteen years later a number of 3D ‘metaverse’ territories exist, and the most popular, Second Life, has 15 million registered members. Learning sites within Second Life now include:

• The Virtual University of Edinburgh
• ‘Second Health,’ Imperial College’s Hospital Polyclinic
• A Sexual Health SIM in Second Life from the University of Plymouth
• Harvard Law School’s Austin Hall
• Ohio University’s Second Life Campus.

Universities are using virtual worlds to provide distance learning, and learning with simulation. Students at Harvard Law School practice in virtual courtrooms, a US graduate student researched and ‘defended’ his thesis in Second Life, and some scientists are working within Second Life to create and observe 3D models and simulations. 3D virtual environments are also being used by professional training providers, particularly for the military.

Teen Second Life (TSL), a separate site for 13-17 year olds with carefully policed access, hosts a growing number of youth education projects. Global Kids, a New York-based non-profit company, was the first mover at the invitation of Linden Lab (creators of Second Life). They provide summer camps on global issues in TSL, and director Joseph Barry describes learning in Second Life as “on the cutting edges of progressive pedagogy.”

Like ‘first life’, Second Life plays host to a wide variety of education providers, from the anytime-access weather visualisation simulations from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Authority, to identikit representations of real world classrooms that have specific value when attended at specific times, to an island created by a psychiatrist to help people experience how it might feel to have schizophrenia. They may have Second Life in common but they represent a broad range of pedagogical approaches for formal, informal and social learning.

Assessment

Simulation assessment technologies are currently used in pilot and medical training. In diagnosis training and formative assessment, for example, computers describe symptoms and ask the learner to make a diagnosis. They track performance by recording how quickly an accurate diagnosis is made.

Computers are marking students’ essays perhaps as competently as the average human. The US Graduate Records Examination essays are marked by a human and a computer using ‘e-rater’ software from non-profit e-assessment provider ETS. Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education, reports that if the marks differ by more than a grade, a second human marks the paper and more often agrees with the computer’s score than the first human’s. Pearson Digital has its own rival technology, and Angela McFarlane points to similar interesting innovations.

It is noteworthy that Pearson, a leading publishing company, is diversifying into intelligent assessment technologies as one of many digital products and services provided by Pearson Digital. The fundamental challenge that new media presents to the publishing industry was clear from the 1990s: between 1990 and 1997, Encyclopedia Britannica experienced an 83% drop in sales as the internet began to provide people with free knowledge. Now that the internet and cheap, print-on-demand publishers are providing free and low cost learning materials of competitive quality, the giants of publishing must diversify and digitalise in order to survive.

Further new and potentially disruptive technologies are emerging on the horizon. ETS’ ‘c-rater’ software analyses paraphrases and compares student phrases to 100 possible good answers to judge their quality. Dylan Wiliam imagines that this may develop into what he terms ‘third generation’ digitally enhanced pedagogy, in which software analyses a group’s work and assists teaching and learning by identifying key themes and common errors more quickly and accurately than an average unassisted teacher could do.

Cambridge University’s Local Examination Syndicate (UCLES) has experimented with conducting physics ‘O’ level examinations online. They found a relatively poor correlation between paper based results and digital results, suggesting the need for further research and development if the use of digital technologies for formal examinations is to be developed.

Public services broadcasters

The new Channel Four Innovation for the Public (4ip) website summarises its position succinctly: “interactive media not tv”; “networks not broadcasters”; “a post-broadcast world”.

Channel Four sees itself in “a critical process of evolution: from a publisher broadcaster into a multiplatform network, from a commissioner of TV programmes into an investor in original interactive media products & services.” It plans to develop a cross-platform approach to delivering educational and schools content and services, along with a new pilot fund for creative output aimed at older children. Over the next two years Channel 4 plans to invest £50 million in providing public service content through digital media with 4ip.

Like Channel 4, the BBC is constructing its strategic response to a changing climate for public service broadcasting, characterised by declining audience satisfaction and a gradual shift in usage hours from television to the internet. The BBC aims to share more of its content and expertise, while providing its core educational content across platforms. Foster and Terrington (2008) argue that the full potential of cross-platform, ‘360 degree’ delivery won’t be experienced until bandwidth is expanded significantly by fibre to the home.

While both the BBC and Channel 4 comfortably inhabit the intersection between formal and informal learning at all ages, the BBC has a more formal curriculum association while Channel 4 claims to occupy a more ‘edgy’ space. In the short term, Channel Four plans to move from targeting teachers to targeting students directly, partly because learners’ access to multi-device web connectivity is better outside of school.

Part 2: Discussion

The trend towards free, open and peer produced learning media

The trend towards “what may prove to be the most powerful industrial model of the 21st century: peer production” is seen by some commentators to be part of a broader economic trend where “closed groups and companies give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.” Technology has reduced the cost of enabling groups to communicate and co-ordinate, making it cheaper to facilitate voluntary or nominally remunerated contributions than to pay and manage professionals.

As participation opens up, power to influence the contributions reduces, and many commentators argue that this reduces reliability. Some argue that Wikipedia, for example, is vulnerable to abuse by those pursuing an agenda, and to error and bias.

Others argue that all knowledge production is open to some degree of bias and error, and emphasise the importance of critical thinking skills and source appraisal for all learners. Research published in Nature compared the accuracy of Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Britannica, and found an equal number of serious errors in each (four), and a slightly greater number of minor errors in Wikipedia (162, compared to 123 in Britannica). Others see this as evidence that formal publishing is also vulnerable to error and that the ‘crowd’ is fairly good at correcting itself: “Wikipedia works in most cases because errors are often clear, and, where they are not, collective wisdom can usually remove inaccuracies over time.”

Wikipedia and Connexions report that they continually invest in quality improvement mechanisms, and Wikipedia in particular is carefully controlled by a tight hierarchy of contributors. Critics point to the contradictions between the power hierarchy and the “myth” of open-ness. Yet policing is necessary in liberal systems: if the open liberty is valued, the policing must also be accepted. The criticisms may be seen as an invitation to open content providers to describe themselves more accurately.

Alongside issues of accuracy are questions about quality. Contributions in unconstrained social systems tend to follow ‘the power law distribution’ in which a few people contribute a lot and a lot of people contribute a little. Some argue that there is fresh value in that “long tail” of micro and amateur contributions. Indeed, when before was a rap about physics viewed 3.7 million times?

But for every rap about the Large Hadron Collider, there are countless items of poor quality. Navigation and time efficiency have become key issues. Virtual Learning Environments may help, but the response is still at the institutional level; a music teacher in Suffolk may have similar needs to a music teacher in Dumfries, but the resources stored by one won’t be accessible to the other. The same work is reproduced thousands of times.

Open source and user-generated learning materials are like a new landscape we have no shared map for yet. Investors and innovators are rumbling around in search of the new navigation applications, and projects like LikeCube are starting to emerge. Some go as far to declare that navigation will define the internet’s next phase: “Web 3.0 will be about mass content navigation.”

In the age of navigation, Foster and Terrington suggest, users will rely heavily upon trusted navigation brands. “Time Berners-Lee, widely regarded as the inventor of the World Wide Web, has argued that the future of the internet – the so called semantic web, or Web 3.0 – will hold the expert, the aggregator, the brand, as key.” They argue that Public Service Broadcasters, among the most broadly popular brands in the country, are well placed to play that role.

Implications for professional content producers

Despite the rise in user-generated content, audiences still value the professionals. A recent survey found that 62% of people questioned reported preferring professionally produced content, with just 19% preferring amateur productions.

But Dutton (2002) argues that a sustainable stream of professional content cannot be expected if the revenue stream is not also in place, and others agree that there are “real challenges ahead in finding viable business models to drive the next stage of internet content provision.” Colin Hughes, Managing Director of Guardian Professional, holds that “where content is essentially generic you are no longer going to be able to charge for access to that content.” He looks for future revenue to new markets and unique content that cannot be easily reproduced, such as Guardian Newsdesk. The UK’s major education publisher, Pearson, is expanding its work on digital services such as intelligent tutorial and assessment systems described in part 1. New business strategies are required and emerging.

Open and shared content raises complex Intellectual Property issues. In the music industry, the ‘rip, mix and burn’ model that Connexions applies to educational content is illegal. “We have to find an IP framework that makes sharing safe and easily understandable,” argues Connexion’s creator, Richard Baraniuk. Colin Hughes is working to create exactly that: a Business to Developer (B2D) IP model whereby Guardian Professional shares its data but retains the rights and a share of any revenue made by a third party using it. Hughes perceives an imperative to create the model. “Heaven knows what’s going to happen with this technology, but whatever we do we need to go with it. We have no option but to keep going with it.”

Lifelong learning and the learning society

Contemporary discourse on workplace learning is shifting away from a focus on training – “an instructor-led, content-based intervention” towards learning, “a self-directed, work-based process, leading to increased adaptive capacity.”

“The rise of wireless, wearable and mobile technologies puts increasing emphasis on offering short bursts of learning when and where the learner needs it,” suggest Bonk et al. As described in part one, we see this starting to happen in, for example, ipod professional learning resources and bite-sized instructional videos for web developers.

The literature suggests a shift in responsibility for learning from employer to learner, and learning as “a diffuse and dispersed activity taking place across the organisation.” Bonk suggests that the role of the trainer remains critical, yet becomes an on-demand mentoring and navigation service.

The language speaks of a learning society. Information is a site of power and its opening causes the erosion of hierarchical authority structures. In its place rises the network organisation and the knowledge worker, “agile professionals referred to by Robert Reich as ’symbolic analysts’. They are learning-oriented, because their unique human capital derives from continuous learning in their professional endeavours.”

Bonk predicts that “the differences between workplace training and formalised learning environments will … begin to shrink,” with company workers learning and studying while University students embedded in the workplace use ICT to report back. Paul Miller, creator of the School of Everything, argues that “for the school system to be the main thing we think about when we discuss education policy is outdated. Schools will be ten per cent of education policy in twenty years time. Learning will have to focus on helping you continue to learn throughout your life.”

For Yang (2008), the debate is characterised by “over-enthusiasm and underestimation.” 70% of professionals surveyed preferred face-to-face to e-learning activities. Noble (2001) raises concerns over the quality of distance learning, arguing that as reach increases, richness decreases, and the resources required to deliver good quality e-learning are underestimated. Chris Collins points out that virtual worlds are limited by their lack of interoperability, and many are concerned about transferring human activities from territories ruled by democratic governments to a territory ruled by Linden Lab Inc.

Research by Sugata Mitra suggests that learning functions as a ’self-organising system’ where motivation is sufficient. Leitch (2006) argues that motivation is frequently insufficient, and points to broad low aspirations in the workforce. Alongside the rise of the knowledge worker, just 30% of UK jobs require degree level skills. Stoll argues that we should “keep computers out of schools,” and McFarlane (2008) reminds us that the evidence that ICT benefits learning outcomes is thin, and of the evidence that points to the converse.

It is possible that, at this early stage, the main beneficiaries from embedding ICT into learning may be the companies that provide devices and infrastructure. The Infrastructure company Nortel, which funds the US ‘open source’ learning website, Curriki, had profit margins of 43% in the second quarter of 2008, on a quarterly revenue of $2.3bn.

Finally, many commentators point out that we lack a shared national sense of the purpose of education. Hock (2005) argues that greater motivation, engagement and activity can be elicited from people in an organisation when power and ownership are localised as much as possible, with one key condition: that the purpose and principles of the endeavour are understood and bought into by all, and defined as collaboratively as possible. Hock was the leading creator of Visa, named the largest business organisation in the world: 1/6 of the world’s population is its customer. Though Visa provides a less complex service than the governors of learning, its scale may make it a valid subject of study.

Part 3: The Future

The first possibility when considering the future is always that very little changes. “You know how long [schools have] managed to resist the kind of organisational change which every other part of the economy now regards as ordinary and normal.  So it continues to be a fair bet that they will carry on doing that I think.” Yet it is also reasonable to expect some degree of change. Some possibilities are as follows.

We could witness the arrival of effective ‘intelligent tutor systems’ (ITS) “in which every learner will have an expert system helping them learn.” Like GPS, the system would monitor a learner’s position and aims, and suggest activities to assist progression. “We’re trying to move towards a position in which assessment is indistinguishable from learning,” says Dylan Wiliam of the Institute of Education. “What I’m looking forward to over the next twenty to thirty years is a focus on the design of effective learning environments in which assessment is integrated into instruction.”

Wiliam imagines that such a system could have several implications for assessment. The exam form could become irrelevant as the ITS would monitor a broader range of skills over a longer period, providing more reliable data than a few short examinations. This would disrupt the ‘teaching to the test’ phenomenon. What would learning look like if daily practice were assessed rather than, or as well as, the knowledge and writing skills displayed at the end of a period of learning? “Within five years we could have these systems up and running. The barriers are political, not scientific,” says Wiliam, who identifies conservative attitudes towards assessment as the main barrier.

The ITS is one example of a technology that potentially enables more personalised learning. In more deeply personalised learning environments, in which learners pursue their learning ‘journeys’ at their own pace, the grouping of learners by age can become unmanageable. New ways of grouping and supporting learners may emerge. An interesting aspect of the growing sophistication of distance learning techniques is whether and how those practices will permeate traditional education providers. A few universities are beginning to use distance learning techniques to provide new kinds of learning experience to campus-based learning communities alongside face to face instruction.

Some schools could, for example, use distance learning techniques to enable learners to take personalisation to the next level. When a learner becomes too specialised in a topic to find an appropriate learning community or teacher within their school, they could find it online. A ‘School of Everything’ style platform could be used to find like-minded peers and a learning facilitator; they would meet together in a virtual learning territory such as Second Life, and use the virtual world, digital learning materials and social software to explore their subject matter. In this scenario, students would work with a kaleidoscope of physical and virtual learning communities in a given day. Such a scenario would raise complex questions about resourcing of teachers in virtual learning territories, alongside issues of inclusion and exclusion in a given group of learners, that is, where the lines are drawn on age, nationality and so on.

Alternatively, it may be that the decoupling of age from stage would enable closer groupings of students by interest, level and pace within a single institution, such that virtual meetings become less desirable. Or institutions may not reach the stage of offering that degree of personalisation. We shall probably continue to observe the current combination, with most people learning and working within physical communities, while others in more remote areas or in need of greater flexibility make use of and help to develop increasingly sophisticated distance learning techniques.

These future potentials bring into question the balance between different purposes and principles of education. For example, distance learning techniques enable students sitting beside one another to connect with specialised and non-spatial learning communities rather than their neighbour. But just such a scenario appeared in one of the ‘Worst Learning Environments’ modelled by a group of fourteen year old boys in a Beyond Current Horizons consultation. In the boys’ model, people of all ages were in the classroom together sitting in rows, facing their computer screens and wearing headphones, with no connection to their physical neighbours, and no physical teacher or learning community to speak of. This prompts us to articulate the principles by which we navigate new technological affordances alongside a broader range of elements that are valued by learners and society as a whole.

Agile education provision that groups learners by interest, level and pace rather than by age and place would produce more diverse clusters of learners than are currently found.  If the range of learning opportunities broadens, would curriculum and accreditation follow suit? Joe Elliot, Head of Learning and Children’s Media at Magic Lantern Productions, is one of many commentators who advocate a reduced core curriculum and greater freedom for learners and teachers to pursue their particular interests, or a more diverse curriculum to select from.

In the US, the explosion of new accreditation providers and corporate universities has focused on post-16 education. A more diverse curriculum at any stage may invite a diversification of accreditation providers, and vice-versa. However, this potential sits alongside the powerful social and structural desire for consistency in the experience of pre-19 education, and the meaning of its certification.

It seems reasonable to infer from present trends that the range of players accrediting learning will continue to increase. Quality Assurance and recognition will become more complex. This is one element of a broader trend towards increased complexity, suggesting that navigation will be the key theme of web 3.0.

Bandwidth is reasonably likely to become the next frontline of the digital divide. Large global differences in bandwidth provision are already emerging.

In the publishing industry, “There is an impending disintermediation happening … that will be reaching a crescendo in the next few years” argues Baraniuk of the Connexions project. Perhaps intermediaries such as publishers will become new types of navigators in a digital future. The experiential value of a paper-based novel may have a secure place in our future, but for non fiction texts our contemporary ‘cut and paste’ or ‘playlist’ approaches to accessing knowledge online are likely to keep working their changes into publishing.

As we discuss the growth of ICT in our learning, it may be unwise to completely ignore its carbon cost, particularly as the prices of oil and carbon rise and the availability of oil falls. Some estimates have put the carbon footprint of the global ICT industry as equal to the global aviation industry, and the average carbon footprint of a Second Life avatar as equal to that of a Brazilian. Ubiquitous digital technologies may not be financially or politically feasible in a carbon-constrained future.

Alternatively, greener technologies and energy sources may move centre stage, and distance communication tools may have to take over from a dependence on flying. But how many international business and social relationships would we maintain in a future where the cost of transporting goods and people is very high?

Contextually, our regional strategic narrative around the development of a knowledge economy competing in a global marketplace may shift in the phase directly following the scope of this paper, that is, from around 2035 onwards. With reduced transport capacity, national economies may need to develop more mixed, localised models. There is also some likelihood that climate change will render vast areas of inhabited territory uninhabitable, and vice versa, over the course of this century. This would lead us into a new era of geopolitical relations. This is worth mentioning because it may alter our notions of the priorities for education in coming years.

Part 4: Key Issues and Conclusions

Web 2.0’s theme of participation has brought a powerful and disruptive trend of open-ness and peer production, and with it have come new approaches to the creation of learning media, new kinds of learning communities and peer relationships, new kinds of professional training and even new kinds of school and university. Innovative practice is not expected to dry up.

As choice and complexity slowly explode, the need for effective navigation comes to the fore: indeed, navigation is likely to become a defining characteristic of the internet’s third phase. Learners in future may navigate through, for example, peers, new navigation technologies, and actors such as Public Service Broadcasters who may take on the role of navigator.

The rise of free and cheap learning resources presents traditional production and publishing industries with a challenge. At the same time, demand for professionally produced, high quality content remains strong. Good businesses are adept at navigating changing markets, and winning players will be those who successfully find new markets, and new models of revenue, business and IP. The pressure on them to innovate may be to the benefit of many.

Public Service Broadcasters face a similar challenge. If we continue to value their quality and unique position in education provision, more future funding may need to be directed towards cross platform delivery of public service content.

With literally millions of websites offering useful learning resources and connecting learners with useful people, there’s a rich world out there for those who know how to find what they need and manage their own learning. For this to translate into improvements in engagement and attainment, and more high quality personalised learning experience for the majority of learners, the organisational response is key.

In the workplace, the successful organisations will be those who balance connections to the community beyond the organisation with the quality of the community within the organisation, and who help their people develop their professional practice in dialogue with mentors and peers developing similar practice within and beyond the organisation.

In the school, the picture is similar, with the addition of a local and national demand for a personalised learning experience alongside manageability, security, and reassurance that learners are getting something very similar to those at the other end of the country. The most feasible way of meeting these demands may be to group learners within a school by level, pace and interest rather than by age and subject, reorganising within. Once that happens, the potential to plug whole groups of similar learners into the world beyond the school becomes less threatening and more of an interesting opportunity for learning communities to manage together.

One can become quite playful speculating whether the new diversification of organisations offering accreditation will continue, and if so, where it will go. From the McDonalds Award for Restaurant Management, will we see The Apple award for ICT Proficiency, the JK Rowling award for Creative Writing, or The Guardian award for School Journalism? Again, if and when the landscape becomes increasingly complex, navigation and quality recognition become central issues.

At the meta level, the overarching theme from the reading and conversations that have fed this paper is that the purpose and principles by which we navigate these new and unfolding education landscapes are not currently clear or shared among stakeholders. Today’s education system is largely designed upon ideas formed by a more narrow group of people in and for a different era. A national conversation about the purpose and principles of learning today and in the future, at all levels, may be a useful next step.

Our education system is not something to be ashamed of. But it could be even better. It may be that by holding control so centrally – by placing the decision about what is learnt and when mainly with the government rather than mainly with the teacher or the learner, for example – we are holding education back. There is a possibility that by organising the system differently, much higher levels of engagement, motivation and attainment could be released. The point made by Visa’s creator Dee Hock is that it is precisely by agreeing upon its purpose and principles that a system can release power from the centre and distribute it more evenly, and that it is the more even power distribution that gives a system its energy.

The lack of shared purpose and principles may simply be a reflection of a healthy plurality; on the other hand, perhaps like a good national learning support system, purposes and principles should be able to accommodate some diversity. A conversation about purpose and principles can start with a conversation about values.

For example, it may be fair to say that we all value open-ness, participation, communication and collaboration, and that we value professional expertise and quality assurance. We value individuals and their free pursuit of ideas and interests; we value communities and the compromise that they necessarily entail. We value knowledge and innovation; we value health, the body and genuine sustainability. We value our economy and the role for education policy in ensuring a good fit between what is learnt at all stages of life, and what is needed to sustain a healthy economy run by competent, confident, adaptive people. We value the classics, the arts, and learning for the sake of personal development and wellbeing. We value diversity and flexibility; we value cohesion and manageability. We work together, with hope, towards a future of physical and social technologies that reflect these values.

Bibliography

Alvarez, Manny (2007) Second Life and School: The Use of Virtual Worlds in High School Education. Texas, Trinity University San Antonio

Anderson, Chris (2004) The Long Tail. Wired magazine, Issue 12 October

Anderson, Chris (2006) Jimmy Wales. Time Magazine, 30 April

Au, James Wagner (2007) The School of Second Life: Education Online. Edutopia, 02.01

Blackhurse, Rob (2008) A class apart. FT.com, 21 June

Bolge, E. and Sukkarieh, J. (2008) Leveraging C-Rater’s Automated Scoring Capability for Providing Instructional Feedback for Short Constructed Responses in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 5091, pp.779-783. Germany, Springer Verlag

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Cohen, N. (2008) Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free. New York Times, 14 September

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Harris, M. (2002) Virtual Learning and the network society. In: Dutton, W. and Loader, B. (eds) Digital Academe: The new media and institutions of higher education and learning. London, Routledge

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Murphy, J. (2008) Balls pledges to set up 100 co-operative schools in parent power battle. Evening Standard, 11 September

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Press Association (2007) Home schooling ‘triples in eight years’. The Guardian, 23 February

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Shepherd, J. (2007) It’s a world of possibilities. The Guardian, 08 May

Shirkey, C. Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality. Available from http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

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Nature (2005) Special Report: Internet Encyclopaedias go Head to Head. Nature, 438, pp.900-901, 15 December

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Woo, S. (2006) Professors and students ask colleges not to hang up on Skype. Chronicle of Higher Education, 53 (16), p.A28

Ya-Ting C. Yang and Ling-Yin Chang. (2008) No improvement; reflections and suggestions on the use of Skype to enhance college students’ oral English proficiency. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39 (4), pp.721-725

Yang, Min (2008) Rethinking lifelong learning through online distance learning in Chinese educational policies, practices and research. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39 (4), pp.583-597

Experts Consulted

Dylan Wiliam, Assistant Director, Institute of Education

Collin Hughes, Managing Director, Guardian Professional

Paul Miller, CEO, School of Everything

Joe Elliot, Head of Learning and Children’s Media, Magic Lantern Productions

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

See, for example, CompuHigh and Virtual High School.

Press Association, 2007

Hopewood et al, 2007

Waks, 2004

Hearn, 2001

Kane, 2008

Elliot and Woolcock, 2008

Digital Academe: The new media and institutions of higher education and learning,

edited by William H. Dutton and Brian D. Loader. London, Routledge, 2002

Bonk, 2005, p3645 (Bonk et al, 2002)

See Cohen, 2008 and http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

www.curriki.org

This phrase is controversial, as discussed in part 2.

http://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-enters-top-ten-most-visited-sites-10536.php

Email correspondence with the MIT OCW External Relations Director, October, 2008

User Generated Nation, 2007

Woo, 2006

See, for example, the Large Hadron Rap – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM and Mbira Lesson One: KarigaMombe on Gwara Nyamaropahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upRR9UgXjS8

www.theschooloflife.com/

According to the co-founder and CEO, Paul Miller, during an interview

http://sites.google.com/a/jiscapt.net/project-plan/Home

Besa, 2007

See, for example, Excel Soft, identified by Guardian Professional as the leaders in this area http://www.excelindia.com/index.html

Kenny, 2008

http://safari.oreilly.com/home

Cohen, 2008

Business Wire, 2005

http://sodaplay.com/creators/soda/items/newtoon_microgame

The Economist, 2007

Collins, 2008

See, for example, the Second Life Education Wiki. http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Institutions_and_Organizations_in_SL#UNIVERSITIES.2C_COLLEGES_.26_SCHOOLS

For readers unfamiliar with Second Life, Ohio University has a video demo on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA. Institutions purchase land on Second Life (with real money) and then construct their presence there.

PRLog, 2008. ‘Defending’ your thesis is like a viva.

Shepherd, 2007

http://ict.usc.edu/about

Au, 2007

http://www.metaversedl.org/NOAA.htm

Elliot, Jane (2007). What it’s like to have schizophrenia. London, BBC News, 19^th March.

See, for example, www.hmsgilbert.com and http://harvardmedsim.org/cms/

http://www.ets.org/portal/site/ets/menuitem.1488512ecfd5b8849a77b13bc3921509/?vgnextoid=e1b42d3631df4010VgnVCM10000022f95190RCRD&vgnextchannel=5416e3b5f64f4010VgnVCM10000022f95190RCRD

McFarlane, 2008

http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549125.htm

Bolge and Sukkarieh, 2008

Harding, 2002, and Harding and Roberts, 2002.

Foster and Terington, 2008.

Enders Analysis estimate cost of deploying fibre to home of 90% of UK households would be approx 14bn Euros. ‘Very high speed broadband: a case for intervention?’ Enders Analysis, January 2007

Anderson, 2006

For example, Shirkey, 2003 and at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051204-5682.html

Nature magazine, 2005

Foster and Terrington, 2008

see, for example, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357054.1357214 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_contributors and http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1187286,00.html

The power law distribution describes a number of phenomena that follow the 80:20 rule, for example the Pareto law that 20% of the population earn 80% of the wealth, the idea that 80% of a businesses’ sales come from 20% of the customers, and the project management idea that you can get 80% of the job done for 20% of the cost. For more information see, for example, Anderson (2006), Surowiecki (2004) and Shirky (2003) http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

The Large Hadron Rap – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

http://www.likecube.co.uk/

Foster and Terrington, p176

ibid

Pew Internet and American Life Project: Online Video, 25 July 2007

Foster and Terrington, 2008

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

Colin Hughes of Guardian Professional in interview, October 2008.

Sloman, 2008, p4.

(2005, p3649).

Sloman, ibid

Dutton,2002; Castells, 2000 and 2001; and Harris, 2002.

Waks, 2004, p573

Bonk, 2005

Paul Miller, CEO and co-founder of the School of Everything, in interview, October 2008.

http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=research&article=5-1

Discussed in Dutton, 2002

Collins, 2008; Shepherd 2007

Mitra, Sugata. The hole in the wall: self-organising systems in education. New Delhi, Tata McGraw-Hill Pub. 2006. See also http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Discussed in Sloman, 2008

Sloman, 2008

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

I calculate that to be a quarterly profit of $1.13bn http://www.nortel.com/corporate/investor/events/q2earnings2008/

Colin Hughes, Managing Director of Guardian Professional

http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/IntelligentTutoringSystems

Wiliam in interview, October 2008

McFarlane, 2008

Foster and Terrington, 2008

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hh_4eJ8N4PXuE6TToc3Zq_7sf05Q http://blog.enterpriseitplanet.com/green/blog/2008/04/freedom-to-connect-verizon-carbon-negative-internet.html

http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/graphics/2001syr/small/01.17.jpg

There are three main narratives underpinning most discussions on the future of work. The first is that the formalisation of work is gathering pace, whereby products and services are increasingly being produced and delivered by the formal economy. Conversely, informal work, such as subsistence production, informal exchange and/or mutual aid, is rapidly becoming less relevant to everyday life. The second, known as the ‘commodification thesis’, suggests that capitalism is spreading into almost every corner of human activity. For example, this could include the marketisation of state functions or the pricing of environmental pollution such as carbon trading. The final narrative is that globalisation is gaining pace and that the path to development is the way of the free market, with nation states declining in economic importance. In other words the formal market knows the best course of action. Simultaneously, informal work, here taken to mean work that is not declared to the state but is legal in all other aspects, is seen as a brake on development and a residue of previous times.

Thus a binary division is constructed whereby the formal economy is seen as a positive, and thus the way to economic prosperity, while informal practices are cast in a negative light. For example, Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, argued that the best way to formalise Latin America’s informal economies was to legally establish property rights (to allow people to borrow against them) and for the state to withdraw from everyday life. This echoes the policy prescriptions given in the late 1980s and early 1990s to Latin America and the former Soviet states by organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF. Central to these policies, which became known as the Washington Consensus, was that the formal market ‘knows best’ and as it grew people would be drawn into it. Formal work is also equated to ‘decent work’ as a recent report stated: “On the balance: The informal sector is dominant in developing countries … though its reduction is crucial for securing decent work”. This is, of course, not to say that all informal work is positive, as will be discussed further below, but such statements demonstrate the persuasiveness of the formal economy. Indeed the very terms used to describe informal work demonstrate its negative construction. Such practices are commonly referred to as ‘non-official’, ‘non-organised’, ‘hidden’, ‘black’, ’shadow’, ‘non-visible’, ’submerged’, ‘irregular’, etc. Thus informal work is almost always defined by what it is not, ie its lack of engagement with the formal economy.

Despite the widespread acceptance of the above narratives there is a growing literature that refutes such discourses. The prime reason for this is the recognition that in fact the informal economy is not disappearing and for many plays an important role in everyday life. Across the world informal economies are a significant percentage of GDP and there is evidence that their size is in fact growing. Friedrich Schneider estimated in 2006 that the size of the global shadow economy (as a percentage of GDP) was 35.2%, an increase of 1.6% from 1999/00. Of course within these figures there are wide variations between countries, ranging from the United States with a figure of 8.4%, to Bolivia with 68.3%. Only two countries have a single digit figure (the USA and Switzerland) with the vast majority over 20%. Very few countries have experienced a significant decrease in their shadow economy over this period. While the averages for the OECD countries are lower than the global figure, they still demonstrate the importance of informal economies in ‘developed’ regions of the world. Furthermore, Schneider states that between 1989 and 2002 the average size of the OECD countries’ informal sector rose by over a quarter. The International Labour Organisation has gone so far as to say that in the last thirty years the growth of informal economies has been ‘phenomenal’.

Most commentators accept that such figures are probably underestimates as people are, understandably, reticent to reveal the scale of their informal work due to fear of detection. Furthermore, surveys often fail to observe the full range of informal work, as respondents are unaware that some of their practices could be included. For example, people who provide unpaid care for others rarely state this in informal work surveys. What is clear, however, is that non-formal work is not decreasing in relevance: as Table 3 shows, in relation to the percentage of total work time devoted to unpaid work many major economies are moving towards informalisation.

Thus it can be seen that the formalisation and commodification theses are rather problematic. Not only do they ignore the fact that the informal economy is still significant but they also take a very narrow view on what constitutes economic activity. The following section demonstrates the wide variety of informal work practices, and some of the motivations behind them, in operation today.

The spectrum of informal work

As noted above, work is often split into a binary division, formal and informal. Such a narrow definition is very unhelpful when conceptualising informal practices, as it often leads to the assumption that it is only referring to ‘cash in hand’ work. However, forms of informal work are much broader than this. Discounting illegal activities the spectrum of informal practices includes unpaid work, volunteering, the exchange of goods, intergenerational transfers, mutual aid, ‘not for profit’ schemes, subsistence production (which includes not only growing your own food but also making/repairing clothes, etc), informal micro-enterprises and, of course, ‘cash in hand’ work. Gibson-Graham (two prominent geographers who critiqued the nature of the formal economy from a feminist perspective) developed an ‘iceberg’ analogy to show the diversity of the economy beyond the formal.

Within many of these practices profit is not the main goal, if it is a goal at all. Environmental and social justice concerns are often given priority and there is a sense that people wish to operate outside the mainstream economy. There are many reasons why people wish to do so. Of course the state, and most economists, would argue that people undertake such actions simply to avoid tax and/or that people from economically marginalised communities have no choice but to undertake such work. Again we can see that binary divisions are in operation (tax payment/avoidance, rich/poor); however, the motivations for engaging in such practices are far more diverse. Williams and Windebank have shown that in many instances it is those in higher income brackets who undertake cash in hand work (both as consumers and providers) as a means of increasing their income. Furthermore, it is not just about saving money. While the reduced cost of cash in hand work is a major attraction, other issues, such as reliability or not being able to afford the formal price, are important.

Enterprise formation is a major driver of the informal economy and again it is assumed that firms that operate in this manner are doing so solely to avoid taxation payments. Many micro-enterprises operate informally in the first instance, as the entrepreneur wants to see if the idea will work and become profitable before taking the step into the formal sphere. This is mainly due to the bureaucracy, time and costs involved in registering a formal firm. Migrants, for example, might find it difficult to obtain the information needed to register a firm or they might be unsure of the length of time they will be in the region. If the firm does become a success then the initial period of informality becomes a barrier to formalisation, as the entrepreneur might be unable to pay back taxes or is fearful of prosecution. Often enterprises that are not motivated by profit do not see the reason for formal registration as they do not want to spend time filling out forms or to be monitored by the state.

At the household level again there are many motivations for undertaking informal practices. Often it can be to save money; for example, there has been a reported increase in domestic food production in response to the recent rises in food prices. But in reality the motivations go much deeper than this. Growing one’s own food can have environmental and social considerations as well as cost benefits. It is also reported that there is a significant increase in intergenerational transfers and mutual aid, for example, parents helping their children raise a deposit for their first home or helping out with repairs. Although services such as childcare and household repairs are increasingly commoditised (right word??) many people prefer to keep such services within their social networks. Again the issue of cost is important but people also wish to ‘employ’ people they know and to use such exchanges as a way of building their social capital. For example, if you undertake some unpaid work for an acquaintance then they will be obliged to do some for you in return in the future. There is evidence that informal intergenerational support is increasing with young adults increasingly dependent on their parents. A study in the USA by the Institute of Social Research, found that between the ages of 18 and 34, young adults receive, on average, $38,000 in cash transfers, and perhaps more surprisingly, the equivalent of two years worth of full time labour. These figures, the researchers found, have increased dramatically over recent years.

Unpaid work within the home must also be considered within this spectrum. Such activities can take many forms such as childcare, caring and household jobs. While there has been some commodification of these processes, with, for example, an increase in ‘live-in childcare’ it is still not the norm. It is common for friends to group together to provide childcare to allow the other members to undertake formal work, an unofficial form of kindergarten, and there is an observed rise in the number of people providing ‘long distance granny nanny’ assistance. A time use survey conducted in 2005 by the Office of National Statistics found that on average people in Great Britain spent 142 minutes per day on unpaid housework. The survey found that 77% of men and 92% of women spent time each day undertaking such practices. This demonstrates both the gendered aspect of this informal economy and its importance to households.

Unpaid care giving provides perhaps the clearest example of the scale, and importance, of the informal economy within households. The Carers UK organisation estimates that almost six million people provide unpaid care within the UK and that the number grows by over 6,000 people every day. Buckner and Yeandle (2007) have calculated that this informal care giving has an economic value of over £87 billion per year. This is considerably more than the cost of formal health care in the UK with the cost of the National Health Service audited at £81 billion for 2006/7. Thus there is clear link between the formal and informal economies as the state, and the tax payer, would find it extremely difficult to provide health care without this informal support. As one of their interviewees states ’society would collapse without carers …’.

Volunteering outside the home is also an important factor in the relationships between the formal and informal economies. The 2001 Home Office Citizenship Survey found that 39% of people had volunteered formally in the previous 12 months and that 67% had done so informally. These are obviously significant figures and again demonstrate that for many people the formal economy is not their sole sphere of activity. The Community Service Volunteers organisation, applying the minimum wage to the unpaid work their volunteers undertook, estimated that the commodified value of their unpaid work was over £28 million in 2006/7, a significant input into local communities.

This necessarily brief overview of the forms of informal economic practices demonstrates that rather than a formal/informal economy there exists, as noted by Gibson-Graham in table below, a ‘diverse economy’. Many individuals/households employ a ‘livelihood jigsaw’ that comprises a range of both formal and informal practices. This is not a static relationship, as people move in and out of formal and informal spheres on a constant basis. However, it is clear that the informal economy is of vital importance to many people and often it provides the platform from which individuals are enabled to operate in the formal economy.

Sites of resistance or exploitation?

Although the above discussions detail the often positive aspects of informal work practices, when moving away from the traditional formal/informal definition care must be taken not to over romanticise informal work. Within the social sciences there is a trend to see informal work as an alternative, or resistance, to capitalism. While for some people this might be the case, for the majority of people the formal sphere still plays an important role in their everyday lives. By merely highlighting the positive another over-simplified dichotomy is put in place. As Smith and Stenning (2006, p3) state, ‘existing work on diverse economies … runs the risk of failing to problematize the forms of exploitation and inequality within the alternative, “non-capitalist” economies, despite theoretical cautions to the contrary’. Thus it is even more important here to realise that informal economies take many forms. Many of the practices described above can often be personally rewarding but they take up a great deal of time and, particularly in the case of care giving, there is little support and relief.

In many cases people wish to move their informal work into the formal sphere. Although intuitively it might seem a positive to avoid tax payments, in reality it provides many barriers. Such workers, or entrepreneurs, find it difficult to obtain credit and the lack of social security is a constant worry. In a similar theme it must also be remembered that in numerous cases workers have little choice but to work in an informal manner due to the actions of their employers. It might be that they are forced to accept cash in hand wages so the employer can avoid payroll taxes, or that informal payments are demanded to secure employment. The negative aspects of such work are numerous. Firstly, the worker has very little long-term security as he/she can be dismissed at will and there is no recourse if wage payments are not made. Secondly, such work is often exploitative, characterised by long working hours with no holiday or sick pay entitlements. Migrant workers might find that large deductions are made from their wages for their accommodation or they find themselves ‘tied’ to an employer to repay a transport or arrangement fee. Perhaps most seriously, however, is that such work often breaches Health and Safety regulations and is not subject to inspections. This can often lead to tragedy such as the deaths of twenty three Chinese cockle pickers in Morecombe Bay. While this is an extreme example, across the globe vast swathes of production are undertaken by economically marginalised ’sweatshop’ workers in dangerous conditions. By no stretch of the imagination could any of this paid informal work be construed as an alternative to capitalism in a positive way.

This is not to say that all informal work is negative. For many people it does provide a positive alternative to the formal sphere, be it for economic, ideological or environmental reasons. However, these positive/negative aspects again demonstrate the need for a much broader approach to the relationships between formal and informal spheres.

Virtual economies

In recent times new phenomena have developed in the informal economies – one of the most visible has been the rise of the car boot sale. This is semi-commodified as people have to pay for a pitch but the sale of goods is informal. This has also coincided with an increase in ’second hand’ shops on the high street – either for charity, exchange or sometimes profit.

Increasing internet use has led to the rise of sites such as eBay where people can sell goods on an informal basis. Often though such sites become mirrors of the formal economy with people setting up virtual shops – though of course one can speculate how much of the trading is still done informally (ie no tax is paid). There are numerous sites, however, dedicated to unpaid exchange and informal selling such as Craig’s list and Freecycle which demonstrate the importance of informal economies within virtual communities.

An interesting link between informal and formal economies is provided by online virtual world games such as Second Life, Entropia Universe and IMVU, for example, whereby currency earned in the game can be transferred out and converted to real currency – thus allowing people to earn money in virtual worlds. Conversely, items for game play, such as virtual ‘clothing’, ‘weapons’ etc can be purchased online on sites like eBay and transferred into virtual worlds. Also there is evidence of people being paid to play games in order to accrue experience and items for their ‘employee’ – thus the distinction between virtual and real formal/informal economies is becoming increasingly blurred. Furthermore, many real world firms are setting up online in Second Life, as are advertisers, etc. Universities also have a presence both in order to attract new students and teach current ones – therefore an informal space can easily become a formal site of commerce. Of course informal real world activities such as the distribution of pornography also take place in virtual worlds.

Probable futures

As the above has demonstrated, the informal economy is much more than merely a leftover from a previous time. It is clearly still of importance to many households and there is little evidence that it is declining in size. Given that informal economies have flourished during an era of rapid globalisation and the alleged commodification of everyday life, there is no reason to assume that they will diminish in importance over the next twenty-five years. If the current ‘credit crunch’ leads to a long period of recession then it can be expected to grow. This might be linked to formal work, such as ‘cash in hand’ work, in order to maximum household income. More likely, however, it will involve practices such as domestically produced food, the mending or making of clothes and an increase in domestic work, caring and childcare. Even when the economy grows rapidly as during the period from the early 1990s to 2007, this sustained economic growth has not led to a decrease in informal activity.

Despite the fact that the informal economy is not going to disappear it is probable that the state will continue to struggle to conceptualise the various forms of informal work and their relationship to the formal economy. This is somewhat understandable given the negative connotations of some spheres of the informal economy, as discussed above, and the fact that in certain situations it is exploitative, dangerous and illegal. Therefore, the relationship between the formal and informal will continue to be seen in binary terms, positive and negative respectively, for the foreseeable future. It would be very hard, for example, for any government to state that micro-entrepreneurs who are working ‘off the books’ have a positive impact upon the formal economy. Hence it is probable that government policy will concentrate on ’stick’ methods for trying to contain the informal economy, such as penalties for ‘cash in hand’ work and fines for previous tax evasion, rather than using incentives, such as ‘forgiveness’ for the previous non-payment of tax or ‘tax free’ or ‘tax deferment’ periods, to encourage micro-enterprises to move into the formal sphere.

Demographic changes will also impact upon the nature of informal economies. As Europe’s population ages then more people will perform unpaid caring roles as parents and friends require assistance in their later life stages. Furthermore, as life expectancy increases people will have more time to devote to informal activities post-retirement age. This will see an increase in grandparents providing childcare and other assistance to their children. Intergenerational transfers between parents and children will become even more important as student debt levels increase and first-time buyers continue to struggle to raise a deposit to purchase a house. Therefore, it is probable that children will remain at home for longer, often returning after university, receiving the informal support of their parents. This trend can also be seen in the rise of what is termed ‘helicopter parenting’ where the recent rise in communication technology has made it much easier for parents to remain in contact with their children, and conversely, children find it much easier to contact their parents if they need their support or a job done.

It is probable that there will be a growth in the importance of informal economies in, and around, virtual worlds. This will involve the growth of games such as Second Life and Entropia and the continuing importance of social networking sites. Sites such as Facebook will be used to share information and to alert people to opportunities in both the formal and informal economies. As environmental concerns grow over the next 25 years, the recycling and sharing of goods, such as the gifting of unwanted goods or car-pooling, will become increasingly common and will be facilitated by online communities and websites. Although the expected rise in home working, as a result of more effective ICT, has not materialised it can be expected that in 25 years time more people will be able to work from home. This, if working time does not increase correspondingly, will reduce the amount of time required for formal work (for instance, commuting will no longer add to the working day), leaving people with more time for leisure and informal activities. Such home working will also spur the creation of consultancies and micro-enterprises, which may begin in an informal fashion.

On a more negative note, if economic polarisation continues to grow at current rates then over the next twenty-five years increasing numbers of people will turn to informal economies in order to ensure the economic security of their household. This will be a mix of illegal and legal activities and will see people move even further from the formal sphere, and will possibly see an increase in levels of exploitation and unsafe working conditions.

Preferable futures

The most preferable vision is one where the meta-narratives surrounding the informal economy are broken down. It is hoped that there is a more widespread realisation that there is a wide spectrum of informal activities and that there are both positive and negative aspects to many of the practices. Perhaps the most important recognition is that in many cases the informal economy supports the formal economy. For example, without informal childcare some people would be unable to undertake formal work. It must also be realised that there is a deep social aspect to many informal practices that strengthen networks and often fulfil the formal role of the state, such as unpaid care giving.

If the varied nature of the informal is unpacked then it will be much easier to develop appropriate blanket policy responses rather than a ‘catch all’ approach. At one end of the spectrum, dangerous, criminal and large-scale informal activities such as drug and people smuggling should, obviously, be targeted with the full force of the law, while at the same time informal micro-enterprises should be incentivised into moving into the formal sphere. This could be facilitated by various policy measures such as a longer period where they can go unregistered, tax forgiveness or deferment, greater support, advice centres, access to accountants and tax advisors, etc.

A shift in culture towards rewarding entrepreneurship would also support such measures. For example, in the USA and Japan, entrepreneurs and innovators have a much higher public standing and as a result there is more of an entrepreneurial culture. The informal economy has an important role here as there is much less risk in operating informally in the gestation period of an enterprise – ie less money is invested, payments/time for registration are much lower. Furthermore, less punitive bankruptcy laws (and reduced stigma, which would arise from the culture change) would encourage people to take the steps into entrepreneurship and to try out ideas in the informal sphere before moving them into the formal.

In this preferable future employers who force employees into informal practices are clamped down upon, allowing those who wish their work to be formalised to do so. Furthermore, those undertaking informal work to support those in formal work, such as childcare or care provision, should have their efforts recognised and rewarded. This could be through direct payments or tax credits. Moving these roles into a more formal sphere would allow for training and support to be given. This is particularly important for those undertaking such work, such as school age children supporting parents. Increased social support facilities, such as childcare, would allow people to undertake formal work who otherwise would not have the time to do so – or who would be spending so much of their formal income on support as to not make it worthwhile to do so.

The preferable future would harness a more socially orientated economic model, where profit is not the main goal, which would assist all sections of society and harness the activities of both the formal and informal spheres. Volunteering and mutual aid would be promoted as key functions of society and Local Exchange Trading schemes (LETs) would flourish. While some of these actions might seem utopian in thinking and would cost the state money, the increase in tax revenue from the formalisation of informal enterprises would go some way to covering these costs. In short, informal economies are here to stay and the preferable future will be one that is able to harness their positive aspects for all of society.

The implications of the growth of the informal economy on education

The informal economy has a number of implications for education, especially in relation to lifelong learning. It can be argued that within schools there needs to be more discussion on the nature of informal economies and work. This would help promote the positive aspects of practices such as volunteering, mutual aid and the role of family and friendship networks in everyday life. On a more practical note as discussed above, there are a significant number of school age children who have to provide care to family members. The Education Network estimated in 2005 that there were around 175,000 school children who are devoting a significant amount of their time to caring for others. The Princess Trust for Young Carers notes that there are many problems that these carers face, such as a lack of time to do school work, limited social opportunities, unhealthy lifestyles (such as a lack of sleep due to night time care or limited shopping opportunities), amongst many others. All of these issues impact on their ability to enter the formal workplace when they leave school. While there is some attention paid to this problem there needs to be a greater understanding of the issue; for example, some schools believe no one attending their institution has to perform these roles.

Within the Higher Education sector, especially in Business and Management Schools, more attention needs to be paid to the varied nature of the informal economy. Business education would be an ideal place to start a broader rethinking of the ways in which informal economies could be drawn into the formal spheres. For example, entrepreneurs and managers in the formal sphere act as mentors to micro-enterprises, providing guidance on how they can formalise their work.

Arguably the biggest implication of the growth in informal economies on the education sector is in relation to lifelong learning. Workers in the informal economy develop many important skills that are relevant to the formal economy but often they are not recognised by formal employers. Furthermore, it can be difficult for informal workers to access courses aimed at developing different skill sets, for example the use of ICT in the workplace. While the government has set up numerous schemes aimed at helping people develop such skills they are often aimed at people who are not in work. This means it can be difficult for people who are working informally to access them, for example, because of a lack of time or childcare problems. This issue has been identified by the International Labour Organisation, which argues that such training must fulfil the following criteria:

• Training must be demand-driven
• Training must be targeted and needs-led
• Skills training for the informal economy needs to go beyond technical skills training
• Training has to be short, modest, and competency based
• Training should recognize complex livelihoods
• Training should be monitored and evaluated on an ongoing basis
• Trainers themselves should be adequately trained and capable of delivering quality training
• Both public and private training providers have important roles to play
• The level of skill adaptation impacts on the extent to which new technologies can increase productivity in the informal economy.

Another form of education/training that informal micro-enterprises would benefit from is the provision of centres that could provide confidential guidance on the procedures needed to move into the formal economy. This would include, for example, advice on tax, employment rights, and health and safety regulations. The confidential nature of such guidance would encourage entrepreneurs to come forward without the fear of penalties.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Norwegian report on informal work

see Gershuny,2000; ILO, 2002a, b; Schneider and Enste, 2000; Williams, 2004a, b, 2005a, b; Williams and Windebank, 1999a, b)

2315 Schneider, F., Shadow Economies and Corruption All Over the World: What Do We Really Know?

Schneider, F., (2002) The Size and Development of the Shadow Economies of 22 Transition and 21 OECD Countries

http://www.cinterfor.org.uy/public/english/region/ampro/cinterfor/temas/informal/

On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (MacArthur Foundation Series) (Hardcover) by Richard A. Settersten Jr. (Editor), Frank F. Furstenberg Jr. (Editor), Ruben G. Rumbaut (Editor)

listen to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/02/2008_19_thu.shtml

Oughton, E., Wheelock, J. and Baines, S. (2003) ”Micro-businesses and Social Inclusion in

Rural Households: A Comparative Analysis,” Sociologia Ruralis 43(4): 331-348

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/4088650.stm

Bender, 2004; Castree et al, 2004; Espenshade, 2004; Hapke, 2004; A. Ross, 2004; R. Ross, 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/apr/13/schools.children

http://www.carers.org/professionals/young-carers/articles/transitions-to-adulthood-for-carers,3167,PR.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/apr/13/schools.children http://www.t-e-n.co.uk/index.php

http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=793

There are two deeply entwined themes at the heart of this essay. First is the question of how the ‘geo-social’ relationships of learners, homes, communities, non-formal learning spaces, regions, schools, nations and the globalised economy may or may not change to offer different kinds of learning processes, experiences and activities. The essential argument here is to explore how different kinds of social relations, especially those which are located in reconfigured and/or virtual spatial relationships create different kinds of possibilities for learning. But there is also a second reflexive and more theoretical theme at work in the construction of the idea of sites and contexts for learning. It is only really socio-cultural understanding of the transactions involved in learning which place a premium on, and an interest in, sites and contexts for learning. From this point of view we need to explore how ideas about how we learn are bound up in our attempts to conceptualise the role of space and place within the learning process.

Some of the key ideas relating to the first theme were laid out in the Beyond Current Horizons challenge by Gill Valentine. Valentine identified three important trends which have underpinned recent policy interest in learning (especially in relationship to ICT). These include:

• The Changing Relationship Between the Spaces of School, Home and Community
• The Future of the School as a Physical Offline Space
• What New Sites of Learning are Emerging?

The other paper in this series by Andrew Harrison asked a series of questions within these frames, probing in more detail the relationships between the physical (and virtual) institutions of schooling as the place for learning and learning in other sites.

The essay is organised into four parts. The heart of the essay, Section 3, will take up these challenges, exploring in more detail the literature which is concerned with analysing learning from a spatial perspective. Quite what the spatial means and/or adds to our understanding of learning will, of course, form a key part this section. And whilst the challenges described above are concerned mainly with home and school and, to an extent, community (in this context primarily considered in terms of locality rather than affinity grouping), I will additionally attempt to look at larger scales (region, nation and the global) considering a series of ‘locations’ which may act as determinants on learning. Each part of this section concludes with an explicit consideration of how each ’space’ might play out in future scenarios.

The final part of the essay will then consider the implications of how this analytic frame (derived, as I have said, from socio-cultural formulations of learning) may or may not limit our ability to consider the meaning and function of context in learning in the future. However this essay begins by considering the role of context and site in learning in general (Section 1) before examining theories of formal and informal learning in Section 2, which is the most common way in which learning across different contexts is usually understood.

1. Sites, spaces and contexts: stories about learning

As is appropriate for an essay attempting to imagine possible futures, I want to begin by considering one of the most powerful narratives about education from the past, namely Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure. First published in 1895, it tells the story of a young rural child desperate to learn and study but excluded from university – symbolised by the distant spires of Oxford – by class and poverty. The novel makes a great case for the virtues of informal learning, in what we might call, different sites, and describes the early years of Jude hunched over books, reading surreptitiously and subversively as he delivers milk, for example.

The book exemplifies some key themes for our purposes and implicitly sets up a contrast between out-of-school learning as characterised over a hundred years ago and contemporary processes. Jude is a good example of a motivated, engaged learner. He learns outside formal schooling structures and systems (albeit obviously aping them at a deeper level, as shown in descriptions of him learning bits of the classics he does not ‘understand’). If Jude described a young boy playing his PSP under a desk we would, I suggest, categorise it as a subversive, transformative experience – which is what Hardy does. Indeed, the way Jude’s learning mimics forms of inclusion (reading the classics exemplifies the way that the possession of knowledge creates status, for example) is also a very contemporary educational concern. Yet, paradoxically, learning for Jude only reinforces his class-based exclusion just as it appears to open doors for him, and in the narrative of this novel such aspirations lead to tragic consequences. Although Jude is a fiction, studies of working class auto-didacticism unearthed by Jonathan Rose, place his existence and these principles in very solid historical fact (Rose, 2001).

Although not examined as such, spaces of learning like the milk cart and above all, the dreaming spires of Oxford, are also important. On the one hand learning only takes place in the space of the mind and so (like the milk cart) context is unimportant: it’s what happens cognitively that counts. On the other hand, Oxford, its architecture and colleges, is a profoundly embodied and material place from which Jude is physically excluded. It is difficult to separate Oxford from what Bourdieu, writing years later, would call its ’symbolic power’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990).

These twin poles of context (as both immaterial and embodying power) have been modified by more recent theory and again it is primarily through narrative that we can apprehend the deeper processes at work. In one of the classic studies of ’situated learning’, Lave and Wenger (1991) describe how Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia learn through apprenticeship. Rather than offering an account of learning as a disembodied cognitive process, they describe learning as a profoundly social process where it is indeed the materiality of interpersonal, contextual and linguistic interactions which provide the engine for learning. Building on notions of affordance offered by physical, social, linguistic and semiotic resources (Wertsch, 1997), these scholars represent a tradition which pays attention to context as the preeminent influence on learning. Shirley Brice Heath’s classic socio-linguistic ethnographic study of language acquisition and use in two different communities in the US is another well known narrative which shows how language learning is integrally related to context and is produced over time through social interactions and reflection (Brice Heath, 1983). Whilst Brice Heath may acknowledge the kinds of symbolic power represented in Jude, for her, as with the scholars of situated learning, context is all.

Clearly, as can already be seen, the notion of learning, as used across these narratives is not a uniform or monolithic concept. Indeed, whether there is a meta-process of learning (as a singular process) as opposed to the kinds of learning (as plural processes) that takes place across different contexts is open to debate. In this essay it is already two-faced. Learning looks to describe processes for people and at the same time represents a set of values and a broader social function. This inherent duality will continue to bedevil discussion in generalised speculation about the future, and certainly its fundamental ambiguity underwrites my next story.

The next ‘fable’ comes from a prominent American tradition deriving from a mix of constructivist epistemology and utopian idealism. Seymour Papert’s call to arms argues that if we compare a contemporary classroom and a hospital with those in existence a century earlier, the fundamental elements of a schoolroom are much the same as they were (both in terms of process and transactions as well as curriculum content) whereas, he argues, a modern hospital is virtually unrecognisable from its historic counterpart (Papert, 1993). This is a critique of learning theory as much as it is of schooling. The main response to this kind of challenge has been to proffer technological solutions to the perceived immutability of the classroom and indeed the wider role of schools. A recent report by the National Science Foundation offers this vision (NSF, 2008):

Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher can track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her performance across a lifelong “digital portfolio,” making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns. What makes this possible is cyberlearning, the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning. Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic – from anthropology to biochemistry to civil engineering to zoology. Learning does not stop with K-12 or higher education; cyberlearning supports continuous education at any age, space, beyond the classroom and throughout a lifetime (p1).

Here the learning contexts are material but assumed to be kind of semi-transparent, unlike the social contexts in Lave and Wenger or Brice Heath. The NSF vision takes up Papert’s vision and offers a kind of distributed, networked institution. The same power relations represented by Jude’s Oxford remain, but the question of symbolic power has been circumvented by offering a more mellow and accessible world. Learning is here is fun (not a value that came into Jude), not very social in an interpersonal sense although clearly relying on a range of affordances and contextual cues. It is active and interactive and takes place in a continuous present (again in contrast to notions of ossification implicit in the city of Oxford).

Whilst an extreme psychological version of learning may imagine a mind in isolation, it is true to say that most theories of mind underpinning ideas about learning, especially those drawing on forms of ‘new learning ‘ (Kalantzis and Cope, 2008) now conceptualise social context as part of the learning process. However, like the NSF example above, sometimes that context is assumed to be what I called ’semi-transparent’; that is, a neutral unobtrusive medium through which the learning can take place. On the other hand the theorists of situated learning suggest that meaning is made in context and that forms of behaviour, attitude, and indeed all the other affective dimensions of learning, are constructed by specific social circumstances. In other words, learning isn’t just what happens in the head but is bound up with a host of other dispositions, attributes and orientations. Indeed current research is especially interested in how learning is bound up with deep questions of identity and identity formation (Lemke, 2008; Pollard and Filer, 1999). Indeed Wortham talks about how there is an approach to learning which is essentially ontological, in that it shows how learning is inseparable from what it mean ‘to be’ as a person and the identity-making process (Wortham, 2005, Chapter 3).

This more whole-person approach to learning raises hard questions about the role of context. Is this a new way of revisiting traditional concerns about who has access or how ‘environment’ affects learning? Or more conceptually, how does learning transfer occur if context is so influential? Does the contemporary approach to the situated nature of learning offer portability or fixedness? Much contemporary educational discourse focuses on notions of competence and skill rather learning as a way of drawing attention to performative, non-contextually bound capabilities but again this avoids ideas of abstract potentials that can be realised in different situations. In general, learning theory needs to remain unfettered as it skates between these two poles.

A final introductory observation needs to be made. All the discussion about context, place and site is premised on the use of spatial metaphors. This vocabulary derives from a recent tendency to add the spatial dimension to the historical and the social in what Soja calls a ‘trialectic’ understanding of social phenomena (Soja, 1996). The effect of this new kind of social geography has been influential in connecting educational analysis with socio-economic structures. This helps us understand learning at the micro level (individuals in their social contexts) with macro questions about broader and deeper context (national and global economy) in ways that aren’t just about differences in scale, but suggest deep patterns of interconnectedness (Leander and Sheehy, 2004). I shall return to this issue in the final section.

In summary, I have used snapshots of educational moments/writing as a way of trying to disentangle the different ways in which context has been used as a way of offering insight into learning. I have suggested that:

• We need to reconcile approaches to learning which focus on its social function in concert with how it works at the level of individual process
• That there are contradictory notions of the ‘material’ and ‘transparent’ nature of context within common understandings of what learning is
• That context is social in the sense of the interpersonal and the affective as well as the semiotic and networked
• That learning cannot be divorced from identity (or identities) as an ‘ultimate’ context even though this raises questions about transfer of learning across contexts.

2. Formal/informal/non-formal: epistemologies and knowledge-economies

This section describes some of the current thinking underpinning the idea that learning takes place in and across sites. In particular, I suggest that the notion of informal learning has gained greater currency in recent years as a way of describing some of the perceived changes in where and how people learn (Sefton-Green, 2008). It thus offers a way of conceptualising learning within and across different and/or new sites and learning contexts. This frame is, I would argue, an epistemological one in that it suggests different ways of knowing as much as it suggests that learning may be taking place in alternative and complementary time-spaces. However, this approach also raises questions of political economy inasmuch as ideas of informal knowledge and other ways of knowing are bound up with the changing economic role of knowledge(s) in different domains.

Although there are no hard and fast definitions of what formal, informal and non-formal education might mean, and the terms are often used interchangeably, it is useful to distinguish between school systems (formal structures supported and developed by the State), learning taking place as determined by the learner (informally), and the organised but non-formal sites of education. See also discussion in Sefton-Green, 2004; Bekerman et al, 2005.

Although these terms are not new they have been used with increasing frequency to describe the changing locations for learning and as such are central to the hypothesis behind this challenge. Yet, the interest in informal learning predates the kinds of structural re-organisation of education we are concerned with. Scribner and Cole started from the assumption that most research on learning derived from non-socio-cultural approaches looking at school-based systems of learning and argued that if we just accept the fact that the social organisation of learning differs from site to site, then learning occurring in the non-formal domain is crucially important (Scribner and Cole, 1973, p553).

This approach opened the door to a huge range of research of which language learning and literacy acquisition are the most prominent examples (Baynham, 2004). Implicitly, this work explored the complexity, the structured nature and the embedded social nature of informal learning, although learning language or literacy was the object of this study rather than the notion of informal learning in its own right. The more ethnographic and anthropological accounts of literacy and language acquisition also inscribed the study of informal learning as, in some ways, an adventure into the unknown.

Once it had become accepted that informal learning could be theorised in this way, that it offered a legitimate object for study, the key (and oft repeated question) becomes how we distinguish between formal and informal learning. Scribner and Cole focused on the social organisation of knowledge. In doing so, they also touch on the idea (followed up by later scholars) that debates about the nature of learning via this informal route is indistinguishable from the politics of education.

Because schools occupy such a central role in the organisation, transmission, and regulation of knowledge and accepted forms of pedagogy it is obvious that a discussion about informal learning becomes more than simply a disinterested account of socio-cultural (or even cognitive) processes. The critique of schooling as social reproduction, the analysis of the status of knowledge developed by Bernstein (1990) and the power of pedagogy developed by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) are all examples of how discussion about the nature of formal learning becomes a discussion about power in society. In other words, socio-cultural discussion cannot separate claims for the impact and significance of school (and out-of-school) learning from notions of how what gets legitimated in, for example, classroom settings, and individuals are subjected to, identify with, and ‘behave’ according to its process: this affects the nature of the claims that can be, or are made for informal learning.

Using informal and non-formal education as a way of exploring the politics of education partly helps us deconstruct the relationship between schooling and learning, showing, as we shall see below, how assumptions about the organisation of the project of mass education underpin versions of how learning works. However, it also helps us rethink the different roles and power of knowledge(s). In the NSF future vision for learning quoted above, the new technologies are primarily imagined as a way of accessing the same kind of knowledge provided by traditional academic disciplines but at different times or places. There is now an established body of study which is interested in how new kinds of learning (experienced informally and non-formally) is in itself developing new kinds of knowledge-communities. Here, studies of blogging are allegedly changing the nature of participation in the body politic (Shirky, 2008; Palfrey and Gasser, 2008) or scholars of computer games show how swathes of games literacy and in-game knowledge are learnt online (Gee, 2004: Shaffer, 2005). Although there is debate about how far, how deep and how meaningful these new kinds of knowledge are, it remains a key tenet of the shift towards valuing informal and non-formal education that other kinds of authority, other types of knowledge and other kinds of scholarly apparatus have currency and value.

There is now substantial literature about informal learning (eg Bekerman et al, 2005) and much of it does try to distinguish the unique and distinguishing characteristics of informal learning as a distinct mode; although it is also true that many writers do not, at the end of the day, generally hold onto extremely hard and fast distinctions between informal and formal learning, or between modes of informal learning and learning in general. In general, much of the recent study of informal learning derives from workplace studies and/or cultural anthropology and does not focus on young people. Taking these caveats into consideration, the literature on informal learning can be broken down along the following key axes (see Colley et al, (2003) for an extended and more detailed taxonomy):

1. Location. Where the learning takes place – how and if context is a determinant of processes

2. Processes. How the learning is organised, whether there are forms of accreditation and assessment: what kind of style or pedagogic relationship is used. How the learning is supported and whether it is collective, collaborative or individual

3. Purposes. Why the learning occurs, in whose interests?

4. Content. Whether the knowledge has disciplinary provenance, how it is applied theoretically and in practice.

In very general terms these elements underpin all attempts to characterise and describe formal and informal learning. The central role of location within this paradigm underpins the discussion in the following section which explores different spaces and the different dimensions of location.

3. Unbundling learning: homes, schools, communities, nation states and the global.

This section draws on the notion of unbundling as described by urban geographers. Graham and Marvin explain the processes by which discrete services within the urban environment (eg sewage, roads, gas, electricity, etc) all of which used to be delivered by a central urban authority have become increasingly unbundled as part of the process of privatisation and marketisation (Graham and Marvin, 2001). In some respects I suggest here that the idea of learning (as imagined by Jude, for example), which used to be understood as a unified and unitary process through the idea of schooling, is now fragmented and subject to a range of market pressures. This is not just the same thing as analysing the marketisation of schooling (see, for example, Kenway and Bullen (2001) and Ball (2008)) because we are interested in how the concept of learning (as opposed to just its practices) may have become unbundled as much through the idea of informal learning as through changing modes or locations of delivery. At the same time the idea of unbundling draws attention to geo-social contexts. Accordingly, the structure of this section begins locally (in the home) and then moves progressively outwards through schools, communities, regions, nation states and ultimately, via virtual technologies, to considering learning on a global scale.

In essence this section of the essay suggests that recent thinking about learning has investigated, and at times even constituted, this process of unbundling: and indeed argued that different delivery mechanisms now available in the home or virtually have contributed to an assault on schooling as the previous monopoly supplier of education. If this hypothesis is correct, whether and how the processes of unbundling can be further developed, and if so, whether this implies a further scaling across different levels (away from the narrow concerns with the individual in the home to wider ideas of the breakdown of schooling as a national project), will be key questions for the future of education. Here older humanist visions of de-schooling society (Illich, 1995) connect with neo-liberal visions of an expanding and fragmenting market as well as with cutting edge theorists of cognition and understanding.

Each part of this section contains a paragraph explicitly teasing out implications for future scenarios. The key principle I have applied is not how change will influence future models of education but more what will need to have changed in socio-economic terms to facilitate structural changes in education organisation and practice.

3.1 The role of the Home in Learning

On one level the home has always been a key site for education research and it is not appropriate to reprise all of these interests here in great detail. Whether it is exploring the impact of social class and background on educational achievement through the provision of social or cultural capital, or studies of language acquisition, or indeed the roles that parents play in developing and supporting learning with their child, it is clear that the home is always going to be a differentiated key determinant on people’s learning.

However in recent years these traditional concerns have taken on a new slant in two interrelated ways. First, the home is key site for the consumption and use of digital technologies, and from a range of perspectives, it thus enters into an educational field. Secondly, and of course in conjunction with this approach, the home has now become a key site for the marketisation of education and this too positions it within a larger socio-economic geography of learning.

Given that underpinning both of these concerns are long-standing issues relating to the role of social and/or cultural capital it is inconceivable that these issues of differential access, connectivity (social and technological) and participation will not play a key role in future models of education and learning.

The emerging and changing space of the ‘digital bedroom’ (Livingstone, 2002) is both a site for the consumption of edutainment media (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2002) and a new space for media culture. Here computer games and participation in online virtual communities seem to be creating a host of new ways of learning, being and knowing that challenge the epistemological conventions of mass schooling (Gee, 2004; Shaffer, 2005). These challenges are further developed by scholars analysing how the different ways of being young (as both child and youth) are changed by these new modes of behaviour (Buckingham, 2000): and especially analysing when these too come into conflict with what it means to be a traditional school student. Others suggest that this is re-negotiated in re-configured school/student relationships: see the collection by Knobel, Lankshear and Bigum, 2007.

At the same time as these cultural analyses of learning in the home have suggested important ruptures in educational relationships, there has been a flood of initiatives to turn the home into a new site for conventional education. Building on models of social capital, studies have shown how spending on educational opportunities via hardware and software is now an important part of how education has leaked beyond school boundaries and made the home a key site for complementary, and remedial intervention (Nixon, 1998). Of course this shift has obvious policy implications in terms of the equitable distribution of resources and challenging traditional ways in which education is imagined as a way of equalising opportunity.

Both the culturalist-ontological approach and the social/cultural capital analysis build on deeper concerns about how learning works and what difference education makes. These questions will remain irrespective of how deep critics of these developing trends maintain the level of change actually is.

3.3.1 Future Scenarios

The home is going to continue to occupy a key place in the unequal distribution of social capital which determines educational success. Families will continue to seek educational advantage for their children. If the State finds it acceptable to change the idea of mass schooling as an equalisation/baseline experience then the home will become even more important as a site for complementary, supplementary and remedial education. Such opportunities will continue to be exploited by the private sector. Homes may even become a site for obtaining credentials but income disparities will set significant political challenges for cohesion and fairness.

At the same time attention to quality of learning in the home will continue to act as an educational alternative leading to a constant struggle with formal knowledge practices. These tensions will never become resolved with the formal curriculum because they remain necessarily positional markers of class differentiation: and until differentiation stops being a primary goal of the education system, the politics of maintaining unequal differences will continue to seek forms of legitimation.

3.2 Re-distributing the School

The NSF vision described in Section 1 of learning science in a number of off-site locations and yet in a more ‘authentic’ set of learning relationships than those traditionally available in conventional schooling exemplifies our second key unbundled location. Whereas the home offers itself as an alternative (complement or remediation), ideas of opened-up schools working in a networked or distributed fashion is also a serious way of imagining different ideas of learning contexts and locations.

The central vision of networked schooling essentially unpicks a series of key ideas about the project of mass schooling. It is founded on the principle that the kinds of place-based resources (especially based on books) which defined the economics of schooling can now be more effectively and efficiently met by re-distributing the functions of schooling across other kinds of places and in other time frames as a way of ‘networking’ learning itself.

Intellectually, many of these ideas derive from attention to the metaphor of the network underpinning economic analyses in the 1990s (see Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and studies of workplace based learning which showed how attention to learning within organisations could work as effectively as any notion of command and control or hierarchy (Brown and Duguid, 2000). In one sense throwing the onus back onto the learner makes them the fixed constant moving through differing experiences and opportunities. This then creates challenges for communication, transparency, regulation, accountability and power (amongst others) according to one attempt to theorise these new forms of social organisation emerging out of these concerns (McCarthy, Miller, and Skidmore, 2004). In Education in the UK, these concerns have influenced two recent policy initiatives: Personalisation (Leadbeater, 2004), and Building Schools for the Future (BSF).

With respect to ‘Personalisation’, Hargreaves has argued that a range of innovations can stem from framing education in a more personalised way, exploring both its effect on teachers creating learning communities, stakeholder interest in participation as well as increased opportunities for challenging, varied and appropriate learning customised for individuals. (Hargreaves, 2003) Much of this thinking has additionally informed work around BSF as very particular way of concretising theory. In their visions for future versions of schooling – built around new types of school – publications like What If? (Rudd et al, 2006) – draw on wider understanding of extended and community schools (see, for example, Craig, Huber and Lownsborough, 2004) within a policy framework inspired by the joined-up-ness’ of Every Child Matters, to produce aspirational models of distributed learning.

Here an attention to principles behind educational experiments leads to more differentiated models of schools, with distinct social functions, as workplaces, community hubs and even as local markets. The institutional compromise which characterises how schools work in practice subject to the necessary normative power of standardisation cannot be found in such exercises. It is thus noticeable that the research literature describing ‘re-distributed’ schools ‘ is not as empirical or as theoretically sophisticated as that referred to in the section above, as to an extent, the literature performs an advocacy rather than a descriptive function. Accounts of innovative practice are, to an extent un-tempered with even medium term evaluations of impact, and certainly there are no large scale, widely accepted evaluations of any such changes around for use as change-models.

Studies of innovative school re-organisation are more cautious about examples in practice of the kind of visions outlined in the literature discussed here. This is not to say that re-distributed schools are not possible but that they require a significant change of emphasis across many dimensions, much more than just buildings or curriculum (as suggested by BSF) and that the English record of structural innovation is perhaps more patchy than some would wish. However, the principle of changing where, how and when students learn beyond conventional schooling is a fixed trope in futures thinking around the role of context in the educational imagination.

3.2.1 Future Scenarios

In the immediate future (up to 10 years) it is plausible to imagine schools partially redistributing learning, unbundling curriculum and diversifying pedagogic strategies but this may remain the preserve of innovative practice unless resources are made available to make such an offer open to all. Such changes will place immense stress on developing an appropriate workforce, and there is no evidence that the UK is capable of investing in this at present. If the delivery of education becomes increasingly stratified, it is entirely conceivable that forms of accreditation and assessment will move into a highly controlled, regulated but not centrally delivered model of education.

3.3 The Learning Community and (City) Region

Recent innovation studies have paid much attention to the role of the city region as a driver of economic growth (Athey et al, 2007) and have both implicitly and explicitly explored how such city regions work in relationship with and as part of local education providers (Gustavsen, Nyhan and Ennls, 2007). Traditionally Higher Education has been researched as playing a lead role in driving productivity at regional level and supplying labour for local markets. The European Union is especially focused on policy interventions at this scale. At the same time, learning has been explored at a community level, in ‘units’ larger than a school, but nevertheless explored as constitutive of, and in response to, the social construct of a local community. Studies like Local Literacies (Barton and Hamilton, 1998) or Making Modern Lives (McLeod and Yates, 2006), as well as the youth-centred work of Glynda Hull in San Francisco, have looked at learning and education as framed by routes and trajectories within the community. In the US the work of Luis Moll and colleagues on ‘funds of knowledge’, as a way of characterising ways of thinking, literacy events, language use and social practices in Mexican Latino communities (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti, 2005) has been influential. Such theories and professional development programmes explore the cultural knowledges and practices of minority communities in collision with the ‘mainstream’. They look to legitimate other ways of knowing and being for teachers and schools. Taken together this economic focus on the city region, and a social-anthropological attention to learning as a feature of community, suggests a meso level type of context.

Studies of learning at this level like Schooling the Rustbelt Kids (Thomson, 2003) offering a socio-economic history of the region in South Australia or even those studies drawing on a sociology of youth like the study of education-to-training routes in parts of London (Ball, Maguire and Macrae, 2000) often focus on the effects of schooling on life-chances: and so more properly use the second face of how learning is used in the this essay – looking at its role in society more generally, than as an ‘intra-personal’ process.

I suggest that this vast literature field belongs in this essay because these studies and this approach draw attention to the immediate social context in which learning takes place. They explore what difference learning makes to the life-chances of learners and shows how aspirations, opportunities as well as academic processes are constructed by these local political and economic determinants.

The important issue of what Phil Cohen called ‘really useful knowledge’ (Cohen, 1990), that is the kind of tactical-learning that might make a difference to what you do or become, is best articulated in studies at this level. The literature points to real limits, constraints and serendipities in people’s life courses. It also underscores the economic purpose of learning and how such determinants affect how learners understand the value of knowledge and learning-to-learn and add thus a depth to the kinds of approaches we have encountered so far. The more ethnographic research projects explore the formation of social identities at this level and this too offers an important corrective to any perspective that can’t see beyond the close-up. Any consideration of a generalised unbundled educational future has to acknowledge the reality of local labour markets and community knowledge as very real constraints on the impact of learning at this level. In particular simply paying attention to changes in technology or delivery process ignores this crucial determinant.

3.3.1 Future Scenarios

The key issues here are in what ways education focuses explicitly on its economic purpose in preparing for labour markets. The more this function predominates, the more local/regional needs will determine outcomes. Changing macro-political arrangements within England and the EU may assist in this process of regionalising the purpose of schooling: although this raises the prospect of an internationalised elite. At the same time increasing movement of peoples and the development of forms of cosmopolitan citizenship (Beck, 2006) may both homogenise and balkanize diversity of communities. These trajectories are opaque. The increase of large global corporations as dominant employers in certain regions will focus attention on the need for schools to meet local supply needs.

3.4 Nation States, the Global, and the role of ICT in unbundling

At present, education is conceived of as a national project. Most systematic investment in education is at the level of the Nation State. However, a key dimension of neo-liberal globalisation is that previous boundaries belonging to the nation are now opened to multi-nationals and different kinds of international flexibility. At present the curriculum and accreditation/qualifications are the remit of the Nation State and the governance of education is considered a question of national policy. In an unbundled globalised world, these assumptions may not hold true.

Not only might issues of curriculum context be supra-national but qualifications and even the market value of accreditation may look very different as individuals feel free to purchase their education beyond their immediate locale. The emerging trends of Cisco and Microsoft industry standard qualifications point to a level of a marketised supra-national curriculum authority. This perspective is at the heart of popular studies of globalisation like The World is Flat (Friedman, 2006). Although more geared towards higher education than schools, studies exploring learning at supra-national levels are frequently motivated by questions of economic competitiveness, with the world economy and employment in transnational companies the object of interventions. However, with the exception of studies of the English language, and possibly ongoing research into the use and take up of the International Baccalaureate, we tend to think of education being a national concern when clearly this isn’t an entirely tenable proposition.

There would be thus appear to be three dimensions to this analytic frame. The first, as outlined above, considers questions about governance, authority, and structural organisation; the second explores the ways in which learners can position themselves within the global flow as consumer-citizens beyond national boundaries; and the third investigates the growth of transnational forms of co-operation of which the open education (and open source movements) are the most evident. It is clear here that in analytic terms we are dealing with both questions of political authority and also the social effect of ICT, as clearly it is only through the use of such technologies that we might achieve the sort of unbundling that might enable this scenario.

There are now many formal and informal mechanisms by which learners position themselves in relation to the wider community beyond the immediate locale. In general this gives rise to two kinds of literature. The first explores curriculum projects that develop international links where learners’ sense of self and their focus is taken beyond usual boundaries: see, for example, www.chicam.org. The second explores learning in online and virtual communities, especially those constructed though game play, to examine how identity, co-operation, and simulation develop knowledge and capabilities: see for example the scoping of participatory culture in Henry Jenkins ‘White Paper’ (Jenkins et al, 2007) and the TLRP commentary on Education 2.0. In some respects the ideas behind these kinds of research link with some of the aspirations of the culturalist approaches I outlined in Section 3.1 above, as together they all suggest ways in which the learner is positioned differently, in terms of their identity and their putative agency, than within more conventional learning frameworks. Of course, whether this trend continues and how it relates to the formal curriculum remain areas for debate and policy intervention.

Finally, we need to mention initiatives that are beginning to unbundle the conventional apparatus of national regulated education systems, including publishing and content-driven issues. John Willinsky has argued persuasively (and developed practical online tools) to develop structural interventions that reposition the peer-review journal industry (Willinsky, 2006), and the contributors to a volume on ‘Open Education’ (Iiyoshi and Kumar, 2008) suggest a host of ways where international collaboration is genuinely offering both free (or more accessible) cross-border opportunities for study, research and curriculum development – all suggesting changing forms of pedagogy. Indeed the thrust of much writing in this area is that the un-doing of time and place (part of the unbundling, as I have termed it) requires the recognition of different kinds of learners than is currently produced though national education systems, eg Green et al (2006).

3.4.1 Future Scenarios

Unbundling the Nation State will lead to the growth of cosmopolitan elites who may well learn within a globalised assessment and accreditation framework. Some of the technologies underpinning these possibilities may well develop as a mixture of public good (open source/open content) and private initiatives. This trend will lead to an explicit two-tier education system. Jonathan Zittrain has shown how technological openness is engaged in a constant struggle with legal regulatory frameworks and the growth of ‘walled’ and ‘tethered’ appliances (Zittrain, 2008). ICT in Education is in the same place. The democratic, open and generative technologies which speak to individuals, support individualised learning trajectories and create communities of interest which offer an imperfect fit with State systems of control of assessment and stratification.

3.5 Summary

The structure of this essay has perhaps rather artificially followed physical scale, moving from the home, through schools to communities, regions and then to the Nation State and ultimately the global. At each of these levels there is considerable interest in opening up, or unbundling as I have characterized it, the socio-economic limits of each context to offer learners different authority and agency over their learning. At the same time, I have suggested that this isn’t a process of unfettered expansion because I have tried to weave questions of governance and marketisation into a study of pedagogy and learning, showing how regulatory issues constitute, shape and form the identities of learners and their learning.

Given the likely continuation of this unbundling process and the policies which will address the questions of equality bound up in such trajectories, my challenge is to ask what the political response to such possibilities will be. As always, the issue is to focus on what the purpose of schooling is and let the systems follow from such principles. Whilst the role of schools may change if political settlements alter the traditional role of the Nation State, opening up schools to a range of learning processes available also opens up education to the market. If that is acceptable to a new political dispensation then unbundling will continue apace: if not, then measures will need to be taken to regulate and equalise such processes.

4. Imagining Learning as a Spatial Project: the Socio-Cultural lens

This fourth and final section of the essay tries to reflect theoretically on how our dominant paradigm of learning-socio-cultural frames – both constitutes and is constituted by the idea of space, contexts, and sites. I am suggesting that if we are trying to imagine Education and Learning in 2050, inevitably we are going to use the way we conceptualise learning processes now and there is a strong tradition in educational thinking which suggests that dominant ways of thinking about learning are themselves the product of a contemporary set of social and political arrangements rather than deriving from any deep ahistorical abstract processes. In other words, how we imagine learning is as much the result of the relationship of learning theory to practices as it could be about anything else.

If this is true then it does two things. First it asks us to reconsider the implicit values in how we think about contexts, location places and sites, in any review of their place in learning. Secondly, it raises questions about we can think about the nexus of theory, practice and political arrangements that will define education in 2050.

Kieran Egan suggests that there are, in effect, a few ‘old’ models of education which get recycled and are anyway bound up with changing historical circumstances (Egan, 1997). Robin Alexander makes a similar point about fashionable cycles of educational theory (Alexander, 2001). The key point here is that the theories which each generation uses to explain its theory of mind, as Bruner would put it (Bruner, 1996), is not absolute. When applied to the range of discussion I have tried to cover here, we might argue that notions of informal and distributed learning are discursively produced by marketisation processes rather than just offering direct ‘justifications’ of changes in sites of learning. We should also consider that descriptions of practices become unproblematically translated into prescriptions for change.

One interesting speculation for future-gazing might be to reflect on the ways in which older theories of learning are still present in current educational discourse. Egan talks about the core principles of socialisation and of ‘entry into a conversation that began long time ago’ (Egan, 1997, p14). More intriguingly might be a way of considering the kinds of ‘neo-behaviourism’, usually a relatively discredited explanation of learning, which offer a different way of understanding some of the learning identities observable across new and changing sites of education. Rather than analysing new kinds of learning behaviour (in, say, computer games, or across network play) in socio-cultural terms, where the role of context is so important, might such kinds of attitude, or approach, be as explicable due to forms of behaviourist theory? Might such learning simply be an adaptation to changing circumstances.

It is not that I would necessarily advocate this interpretation, or even support it, but I do want to suggest that our current interest in questions of context, site, location may be as much a question of theoretical fashionableness as it is a way of shedding light on any truth about learning. If this is this case we have to be careful as we approach any idea of inferring a future for education because all we are really capable of doing is extrapolating contemporary theorisations of learning. And this, I am arguing, is simply a response to our contemporary politico-social settlement.

My final observation relates to space’s corollary: time. Whilst I have focused above on the unbundling of place in response to shifts in the nature of capital resources required to support the project of mass education, it is equally true that shifts in place are also about shifts in time. Just as a central theme in Section 3 has been the unbundling of a national model of schooling by a series of more distributed and dispersed providers, so it now seems clear that when you learn is as much up for grabs as where. It is true that many scholars exploring the role of context have focused on time in their analysis, so questions of a/synchronicity in chat , ‘just-in-time’ knowledge, and so forth are equally conceptually important terms in contemporary educational discourse, as much as metaphors of location and place.

One obvious implication here is that just as the theorisation of learning has become detached from simply the study of schooling towards more lifelong and life-wide processes, so the unbundling of learning from the resource-intensive capitalisation of mass schooling will mean that future education models will continue to spin out along the axes of time and place towards greater individualisation and niche experiences. Whether the structure of the State or even new and other structures of locale, region or community will begin to impose structure and homogeneity on this process of disintegration is a political challenge for the future. It may be as Sections 3.3 and 3.4 argued, that this idea of greater and greater individualisation will not work in an era of greater competition and standardisation, or it may be that diversification is key. As always, then, the key question is: for whom? Which sections of society gain and which lose? But, as I argue in the Futures scenarios in Section 3 above, that is what policy is for.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_spaces_places_andrew_harrison.pdf

The challenge of analysing and acknowledging the multiple timescales of human activity in respect of learning has also been recognised by, for example, Lemke (2000). This essay is itself spatially limited and does not allow me to discuss fully the role of time which, at one level, is part of any discussion of space. Certainly in Section 3 discussion of changing spaces is sometimes a question of time-shifting locations for learning and re-ordering places in learning narratives (where and when we study, take exams, and so on).

http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-nonfor.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/06/youtube.youngpeople

Gee’s (2004) ideas in respect of the significance of ‘affinity spaces’ in terms of participation are a particularly good example of this.

see especially the work undertaken by Thomson, Hall and Jones: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/education/projects/plt-creative-partnerships/index.php

See the ongoing research project: http://www2.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=18911and18911_0=19964

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, studies of mobile technologies often offer insight at this level because, although mobile technologies appear to position individuals in global maps, studies actually show how immediate social context is a key part of mobile ICT use (Ito, Okabe and Matsuda, 2006).

There is not space to discuss the role of English in this globalisation process (see Pennycook, 2006) and scholarship around Second Language teaching may be an important contribution to this level of debate, an issue we in the UK tend to be un-self-aware about.

http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/TELcomm.pdf

[12] The term justification is taken from Boltanski and Chiapello (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and is used deliberately to explain how capitalism recuperates artistic and social critique.

An idea for further study here would be to connect the scholarship of ‘precarious labour’ (eg Lloyd, 2005; Ross, 2003) which emphasises ways of behaving and being as the modality of working in the creative economy with the production of a certain kind of subjectivity produced by learning in digital-networked times.

See for example http://www.vanderbilt.edu/litspace/Synchrony/index.html

The history of work-life balance begins in the latter half of the 19^th century when reformers successfully campaigned against long factory hours and were able to demonstrate that reductions in working hours had no impact upon levels of output. During the early part of the 20th century the campaign to reduce working hours continued through a series of pioneering studies that demonstrated the relationship between time spent at work and the level of output was a complex one. These studies also took account of the importance of motivation and morale, fatigue, concentration, and attention to reveal that there were conditions under which a reduction in working time led to increased production, and there were optimum arrangements for the length of working time and intervals for rest pauses, in particular circumstances.

During the 1960s and 1970s, though the term work-life balance had yet to be coined, a number of factors can be identified that eventually gave rise to the current policy mix. These included:

• health and safety at work;
• international competitiveness;
• equality; and
• the flexible labour market.

During the 1960s the debate was very much about the extent to which paid overtime was “manufactured”, as explained below. The analysis focussed upon informal work group organisation and the joint regulation of working practices, within a framework of collective bargaining. The approach was at the heart of the report of the Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations in the late 1960s. The analysis built on the productivity bargaining experiences of the previous decade. Productivity bargaining recognised that groups of manual workers often exercised unilateral informal control over many aspects of their working practices. Case after case revealed that the control included the regulation of working hours where overtime was paid at premium rates. Long overtime hours were often not necessary but “manufactured” to boost earnings. The consequence was a low productivity culture, associated with low hourly rates of pay and long hours of work. The answer was to negotiate new productivity packages, which included major changes in work organisation and working practices – including flexible patterns of work organisation – increasing basic rates of pay and curtailing overtime working.

The 1970s proved to be a turning point brought about by a wide range of factors, such as increased international competition, changes in technology, new forms of organisation, increased female participation, as well as changing and more diverse working-time needs of individuals. It was during the 1970s that regulation also began to recognise the importance of equality with the introduction of the Equal Pay Act in 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975. Since then issues relating to social equity and justice have multiplied and become more prominent and explicit. It is argued that long working hours among men in the child rearing years have disadvantaged women in two ways: they have made it less possible for men to share in childcare and home building, leaving the onus upon women to carry those responsibilities; they have made it less possible for women to compete for more senior jobs if a major criterion for promotion is commitment to the job, as demonstrated by long hours at work.

During the 1980s the political focus was very much upon liberalising the economy, including the labour market. At the heart of labour market reform was the introduction of more flexible patterns of work – frequently referred to as “atypical forms of employment” (increased temporary/fixed-term employment, etc.). This took place at a time of a major structural shift in the labour market with employment moving from the production to the service sector, which tended to favour female employment at the time. The introduction of more flexible forms of work was an important strand in improving labour supply because it potentially allowed groups of individuals otherwise unable to enter the labour market the opportunity to do so. It was only during the 1990s, especially the latter half of the decade, that Government began to play a more interventionist role to give employees (and potential employees) certain rights with respect to establishing a work-life balance that suited them.

The Current Work-Life Balance

Since 1997, there have been a number of regulatory changes that have been driven by a desire to make the labour market more equitable, efficient and safer given that the work-life balance agenda has some of its origins in a desire to improve health and safety. The Working Time Regulations have their origin in the European Union, where successive UK Governments have been amongst their less enthusiastic supporters, reflected in the UK’s desire to retain the opt-out.

From a regulatory perspective work-life balance encompasses:

• Maternity rights – all pregnant employees are entitled to 52 weeks of maternity leave regardless of their length of service. Mothers are also eligible for Contractual (Company) Maternity Pay, as agreed with their employers, or Statutory Maternity Pay for 39 weeks, plus other potential welfare benefits.
• Paternity leave – an entitlement to a father to take a short period of paid leave to look after his baby or support the mother following birth.
• Adoptive leave – an eligible employee adopting a child can take time off when the child is placed for adoption for 52 weeks and may be eligible for Statutory Adoption Pay for 39 weeks.
• Parents’ and carer’s right to request flexible working – an employee with a child aged under six, or a disabled child aged under 18, and carers of adults, can request to work flexibly. The employer has a statutory duty to consider the application and refuse it only on the basis of clear business case for doing so.
• Time off for dependants in an emergency – this right enables an employee to take the necessary action to deal with an unexpected or sudden problem concerning a dependant and to make any necessary longer term arrangements. Whether the time off is paid or not is at the discretion of the employer.

These all relate to the Government’s campaign to promote work-life balance and are all concerned with the care of young children or other family commitments in one way or another.

Work-life balance, however, is about balancing time between work and activities outside of work which will include time spent looking after young dependants but many other activities, both frivolous and important, too. In this respect, perhaps the most important statutes are the Working Time Regulations because they establish the maximum number of hours that an individual may work (provided the individual has decided not to opt-out from the regulations).

• Working Time Regulations - a central provision of the regulations is to set a maximum 48-hour working week, averaged over a 17-week period, though other basic rights and protections provided for in the Regulations include a:
  • limit of an average of eight hours work in 24 which night workers can be required to work
  • right for night workers to receive free health assessments
  • right to 11 hours rest a day
  • a right to a day off each week
  • right to an in-work rest break if the working day is longer than six hours at one stretch
  • right to four weeks paid leave a year.

Additionally, from a regulatory perspective if improving work-life balance is seen as reducing the constraints upon individuals’ work-leisure choices, then there are other regulations (including proposed regulations) to consider.

“Flexible working” describes the various work patterns adapted to suit the needs of employees, but which may also have important benefits for the employer. Common types of flexible working are:

• part-time – working less than the normal hours of full time workers and, while there is no absolute value of hours, a full time worker usually works 35 hours or more a week
• flexi-time – where the employee chooses when to work, bearing in mind there is normally a core period during which the individual must be present
• annualised hours – set the hours that an employee is expected to work over a year – if the employee works more than average hours over some period, this is compensated by lower than average hours at some other time of the year
• compressed hours – involve working the agreed weekly hours normally worked over, say, five days a week, over fewer days (e.g. 36 hours over four days)
• staggered hours – allow different start, break and finish times for different employees in the same workplace
• job sharing – occurs where a job designed for one person is shared between two or more people
• home working – involves carrying out part or all of the work from the employee’s place of residence.

Currently there are plans to extend provisions already in place following the Walsh Review, principally the right to request flexible working for parents of children aged under 16 (currently the age cut off is six, and 18 if the child is disabled).

In addition, the Government is currently considering providing employees with the right to request time off to train:

“The right to request time to train would work by giving an established employee a legal right to ask their employer to give them time away from their mainstream duties to undertake relevant training, which their employer would be required to consider seriously.” (DIUS, Time to Train, p5)

As with the Right to Request Flexible Working regulation employers will be obliged to give serious consideration to any such request.

The regulations listed above in many respects represent the core of work-life balance once a person is in employment. There are, of course, many other factors which relate to finding work in the first place, lest individuals end up viewing work-life balance from the abject position of being involuntarily out of work. Levels of employment demand, the welfare system, skill levels, and anti-discrimination laws are all related to work-life balance insofar as they affect the individual’s ability to find (any) work, and find work in those sectors of the economy where they are likely to be afforded some form of work-life balance that suits their needs.

The Incidence of Work-life Balance

Historically, in comparison with the European Union, the UK has been a country with relatively long working hours. Figure 1 shows the trend in total working hours over the last decade, based on Labour Force Survey data, which shows that there has been a gradual reduction in working hours for both men and women, but, for some groups in the labour market, long hours of work remain the norm. It has been estimated that one million people work sustained long hours; that is, over 48 hours a week on average for a 17-week period (the limit specified in the Working Time Regulations). This figure is not limited to senior managers – where the divide between work and non-work activities is somewhat blurred when, for example, social functions are factored in as time at work – but also includes manual workers. The data go on to reveal that the business need for long hours working was manifest in some cases, but there was also evidence that, it in some cases, it arose from custom and practice unrelated to the production process.

Figure 1: Trends in Average Total Hours of Work, 2001 – 2008

Source: Labour Force Survey / Eurostat

There are often cultural factors that lead to either long hours of work – which by definition is neither a flexible form of working nor one consistent with work-life balance unless the individual freely chooses to work in that manner – which are unrelated to business need. “Presenteeism” is one such factor by which employees demonstrate their value to the business by their almost constant presence which, in turn, has a contagion effect such that other people feel the need to mimic the practice. Employers, however, can and do find innovative alternatives to a dependence upon long hours, although it needs to be borne in mind that changing working time arrangements, particularly where they are linked directly to payment systems, can prove both difficult and protracted. The Work-Life Balance (WLB) Surveys, conducted in 2000, 2003, and 2007, provide information about the extent to which employers provide flexible forms of working. Figure 2 shows the results from the second and third WLB surveys.

Figure 2: Provision of Flexible Working Time Arrangements by Employers, 2003 and 2007

Source: Work Life Balance Employer Surveys; Hayward et al., 2007

The data show an increase in the provision of flexible working time arrangements by employers, with 84% of employers providing at least two or more flexible working time arrangements in 2007. The incidence of provision increases with the percentage of women in the workplace, and it is larger establishments and those in the public sector that are most likely to report provision. Provision is not the same as take-up, and the evidence points to take-up not increasing at the same pace as provision. Where employers do not provide any flexible working time arrangements – 4% in 2006 – it tends to be because it is not compatible with the business. The WLB3 Employer Survey also reveals that 40% of employers had received a request from an employee to work flexibly and 90% had agreed to that request.

A representative sample of employees can provide a more detailed picture of take-up. Figure 3 shows results from the WLB3 Employee Survey and compares employer provision with actual take-up by employees. Take-up refers to the percentage of staff taking up a flexible working time arrangement where it is provided by an employer. It can be seen that relatively few employers allow working from home on a regular basis, but, where it is provided, a substantial percentage of employees take it up. The data show that some flexible working time practices, such as reduced hours for a short-period or a compressed working week, are taken up by relatively few employees. Overall, 90% of employees said flexible working time arrangements were available to them and 62% reported that they were working flexibly. The percentage of employees that had approached their employer about working flexibly was 17% in 2007, the same as in 2003, and 60% said their request had been fully met and a further 18% said it had been partially met.

Figure 3: Take-up of Flexible Working Time Arrangements by Employees, 2007

Source: Third Work Life Balance Employee Survey; Hooker et al., 2007

In relation to policies aimed more directly at parents, evidence reveals that 34% of workplaces reported a female employee being pregnant over the past twelve months, with 94% going on to take maternity leave. There are differences between the proportions of workplaces reporting a female employee being pregnant in the public and private sectors, with 56% of the former reporting a pregnancy and 30% in the latter. Why this should be the case is unknown, but there are a number of possibilities: women thinking of becoming pregnant may choose to select the public sector, the public sector may have more job opportunities for women of child bearing age, or pregnant women in the private sector may be more likely to leave employment before becoming pregnant. The EOC investigation into discrimination during pregnancy revealed few differences in incidence between private and public sectors. Employers overall appear to be increasing the provision of childcare support, with 14% providing some form of support or guidance about support in 2007, compared to 4% in 2003.

Developing an Effective Work-life Balance for the Future

There is a wide body of evidence which suggests that work-life balance favours both employers and employees. These relate to overall effects on business performance or assisting particular groups of workers. For instance, an early study demonstrated how the provision of flexible working time arrangements allowed older people, many of whom were of post-retirement age, to re-enter the labour market because they were able to choose when they worked in the light of their other commitments and their ability to work. Ultimately the success of work-life balance is dependent upon employers being able to implement the practices so that, at worst, they do not impose an unsustainable cost on their businesses. If it were to impose an unsustainable cost, then the likely outcome is some form of regulatory avoidance, such as not recruiting people who may demand some of work-life balance assistance. To date, the evidence about the introduction of flexible working time arrangements and leave entitlements appear to have been largely beneficial to employers, even if the percentage of employers reporting a positive impact appears to be declining over time (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Perceived Effects of Flexible Working and Leave Arrangements

Source: Work Life Balance Employer Surveys; Hayward et al., 2007 Figure 9.2, p.65

There remains evidence that the take-up of work-life balance is uneven across the economy and that some demand from employees has not been met. Women, for example, are much more likely to take up flexible working time arrangements than men, even though an increasing number of men find themselves in the role of secondary earner in their household. Also, take up is much greater in large establishments and the public sector. In looking to the future the key question is how work-life balance can be extended to a wider group of people and employers.

The Government has responded over time, by increasing the range of people who fall within the scope of existing regulations, such as extending the right to flexible working to carers in 2006, and proposing to further increase the scope of this regulation by making it available to all employees with children aged under 16 years. Regulation is very much family focussed, but there is an intention to broaden the scope to include time off for training such that individuals can pursue, within limitations, their intellectual interests. In other countries, study leave is also available (eg Denmark) and the UK Government is currently considering making this provision available. Improving the take up of education and training seems an essential step towards lifelong learning, reducing inactivity rates and improving productivity amongst older individuals. At the present time, male employees aged 16-17 are nearly three times more likely to receive training than those aged 50-64.

As noted in the introduction, in order for Government to justify intervention, the net social benefits of doing so need to be demonstrated. In the case of family focussed interventions, the argument is made with reference to the burden of family care being disproportionately borne by women. There are two principal social benefits from assisting women – and men – to meet the costs of family care: (i) increasing the current supply of labour; and (ii) ensuring a future supply of labour by reducing any employment barriers to childbearing. There are also issues of equity that form a further aspect of social benefits: (i) equality of opportunity – everyone has the same opportunity to use their talents, and society should mitigate the effects of race, gender, inheritance, etc. (ii) equality of process – people in the same situation should be treated in the same way (iii) equality of outcome – everyone should have an equal share of resources produced by an economy.

It is likely that, for the foreseeable future, the work-life balance from a public policy perspective, will be focussed mainly on the family rather than a wider set of issues relating to how individuals want to balance their time between work and the rest of their lives. Aside from a right to time off to train, it is unlikely that work-life balance from a regulatory standpoint in the UK will be expanded much beyond the area Government has mapped out for it since the late 1990s. That said, progress since the late 1990s has been substantial, with a range of issues previously regarded as matters to be decided between employees and their employers now falling within the remit of public policy. The evaluative evidence, insofar as it exists, suggests that the benefits to employers, employees and the State derived from the current set of regulations are sufficiently large that they are unlikely to be repealed or made more limited in scope.

Where there is room for further extension of work-life balance is in relation to the take-up of existing policies. There are several issues of interest here:

• whether there is ignorance amongst employers and employees about the scope for introducing work-life balance – as the Walsh Review suggests – such that it will be possible to further roll-out practices across the economy with the assistance of some form of advice, guidance and information; or
• whether there is a selection issue, where those employers that have taken up work-life balance are those that are capable of doing so (or find it in their own interests to do so) and those that remain face difficulties doing so.

There is an analogy with the high performance work practices literature. Such practices are self-evidently beneficial to the employer and employee that it is puzzling why so many employers have failed to do so. The answer is likely to a mix between ignorance and lack of applicability (the selection issue) but it is not clear about the extent to which either is the case.

Myers, C.S. (1924) Industrial Psychology in Great Britain. London, Cape

Whybrew, E. (1968) Overtime Working in Great Britain. Research Paper No. 9, Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations. London, HMSO.

Donovan, (1968) Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations. London, HMSO.

European Foundation, 2003

Hogarth, T. et al, 2000.

BERR (2008) Right to Request Flexible Working: A review of how to extent the right to flexible working to the parents of older children. London, DTI, May 2008

Hogarth, T., Daniel, W.W., Dickerson, A. and Campbell, D. The Business Context to Long Hours Working Department of Trade and Industry, Employment Research Series Report No.23, DTI, London

Purcell, K., Hogarth, T. and Simm C. (1999) Whose Flexibility? The Costs and Benefits of Non-Standard Employment Contracts. York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Hogarth et al. ibid

Hayward, B., Fong, B. and Thornton, A. (2007) The Third Work-Life Balance Employer Survey: Main Findings, Employment Relations Research Series No. 86, BERR, London, December

Hooker, H., Neathey, F., Cassebourne, J. and Munro, M. (2007) The Third Work-Life Balance Employee Survey: Main Findings, Employment Relations Research Series No. 58, BERR, London, March

Hayward et al., 2007

Although the data are not directly comparable over time, there is tentative evidence that the percentage of employers reporting a pregnancy has increased in the public sector and decreased in the private sector.

Adams.L., McAndrew, F. and Winterbotham, M. (2005) Pregnancy Discrimination at Work: A Survey of Women. Manchester, Equal Opportunities Commission

Eaton, S.C. If you can use them: flexibility policies organisational commitment and perceived performance. Industrial Relations, 42 (2), pp.145-167; Dex, S. and F. Schiebl, Flexible and family friendly policies, Journal of General Management, 24 (4), pp 22-37

Hogarth, T. and Barth, M. (1992) The Costs and Benefits of Hiring Older Workers: The B&Q Case Study. International Journal of Manpower, 9 (2)

Bosworth, D.L. (2008) An Ageing Population: the Challenges Facing the UK. Contribution to Skills in England, Learning and Skills Council.

In Rawls’ Theory of Justice he suggested that decisions should be made according to the veil of ignorance test. If we did not know, in this case, whether we were a man or woman then would we choose policies that discriminated against women?

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Moneyandworkentitlements/WorkAndFamilies/Pregnancyandmaternityrights/DG_10029290.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Moneyandworkentitlements/Parentalleaveandpay/DG_10029398.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Moneyandworkentitlements/WorkAndFamilies/Adoptionrightsintheworkplace/DG_10029406.

http://www.berr.gov.uk/whatwedo/employment/employment-legislation/employment-guidance/page35663.html.

DTI [now BERR], Time Off for Dependants: A guide for employers and employees. URN 99/1186. London: Department of Trade and Industry. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file11419.pdf.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029491.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

There are two types of trend to examine (a) the numbers of employees and (b) the percentage of the eligible workforce employed.

Total numbers of employees in GB and the UK have continued to increase steadily in the past 25 years since 1983. But within this overall total there are a number of different trends. Men’s numbers in full-time employment dipped from 1990 and stayed lower until the end of the century, but have since picked up to early 1980s level and are now stable again. The number of men in part-time employment has been on a very gradual but steady increase.

The percentage of working age men in employment fell between 1975 (87.8%) and 1993 (74.8%) but has since risen and remains fairly stable around (80%). The employment rate for older men fell substantially between 1950 and 1995. Men’s employment rates have remained above women’s employment rates, but women have been progressively closing the gap.

The picture of men’s employment has been one of relatively little change, some fluctuations with the business cycle, and some decline through a restructuring of the economy in which men’s jobs felt the brunt of the change. The restructuring of the economy away from manufacturing to predominantly services hit men the most and produced the decline in their employment after 1980 and the concomitant growth in men being economically inactive, long term-sick and increasingly in receipt of incapacity benefit. This trend also had strong regional differences.

More recent trends among men have been an increase in men working part time, especially at the youngest and oldest (50+) ends of the lifecourse, and a slight increase in both men’s employment rates beyond 65, and women’s beyond 60 since 1993.

The number of women employed has been on a steady upward trend for the past 25 years and longer. Numbers of women in full-time employment mirror the total in that the trend is consistently upwards. Numbers of women in part-time employment only increased very slightly in the 1980s and 1990s, after much faster increases in the earlier decades, and since the turn of the century appears to have levelled off.

The percentage of women in employment has also been on an upward trend for four decades, and has shown no fluctuations with the business cycle as was evident in men’s trend employment figures. Over the post-war period the proportion of jobs held by women has shifted from one third to nearly one half. A strong driver of the increase in women’s employment has been the growth in women obtaining degrees, and women in partnerships with young children spending less time out of work to have children. The gap to have children has declined over each successive generation of women reaching working age and then giving birth. In 1979, 25% of female employees having a baby resumed paid work within a year of the baby’s birth. By the Millennium the proportion of mothers returning by 9-10 months was approximately 50%.

The increase in women going into higher education has meant that they have not accumulated as much work experience as those from earlier generations, or those who left school at an earlier age. They have also delayed starting their child bearing into their thirties. Spending longer in full-time education, as well as having made larger investments in their qualifications, and being more ambitious than earlier generations, have all contributed to pushing back the age at which women have their first child.

So the big labour market story has been the women’s story. Women now make up half, if not more, of the workforce, but they do not work half of the total working hours since around 44% of women work part-time hours. Women are still over represented in lower level, low paid occupations, compared with men. Although they have increased their presence in the top occupations, they are still under-represented at the top end of the occupational hierarchy.

Underneath these aggregate level and macro trends are a number of other trends of note:

The sectoral restructuring of the UK economy has increased the demand for labour intensive activities but has also pushed many jobs up the ‘value chain’.

A growth in the intensity of work has been occurring, especially in some sectors.

The content of jobs has changed more than their duration over time, suggesting that the claim about ‘no more jobs for life’ is vastly overstated. One job per person has stayed the norm and permanent full-time work remains the dominant pattern for men. Workers are not moving more often from one employer to another.

The type of skill distribution across the economy has changed with a large growth to 40% in the proportion of managerial and professional jobs. Despite this rise in skills, there has also been a decline in task discretion in some jobs, especially among women and those working part time.

The level of qualifications that jobs require has been on an upward trend, as has the extent of qualifications in the workforce. While half the workforce had no qualifications in 1970 now there is a target for half to have a degree. The rapid growth in qualified workers has not been matched by the same rate of growth in jobs requiring the qualifications they hold. There has also been an increase in numbers of people, particularly graduates, holding qualifications at a higher level than those required for getting their job (eg 40% in 2006 had qualifications higher than required compared with 35% in 2001).

There has been a growth in the percentage of jobs where employees say they keep having to learn new things.

There has been a growth in jobs which use automated or computerised equipment, in those who think it is an essential part of their jobs, and in use of the internet at work. However, this growth slowed in the 21st century, and the wage premium attached to such jobs has shrunk over time.

Skill surveys have pointed to there being an increasing deficiency in demand for intermediate skills. This leaves few opportunities for employees who start out in the lowest job rungs to move upwards over their working career, and leads to increasing division in career prospects. Greater polarisation is already being reflected in the widening distribution of earnings that has been seen since the 1980s. It may not be entirely accurate to call this a ‘demand deficiency’. Such results come from surveys of employers, dominated by larger employers. Many of the so-called intermediate skills have traditionally been filled by male, self employed, skilled, manual workers, providing necessary services (plumbing, carpenters, etc.). These are the sort of very small employers or sole traders who do not appear in skills surveys of employers. There is other evidence that such skills are in great demand from the general public, but unfulfilled supply. The problem may be more about the lack of successful training routes to provide both the skills and the capability to run one’s own business in order to supply these skills (and hence the growth in immigrant labour filling this employment gap).

In 1980, 7 in 10 employees (including managers) had their pay set by collective bargaining between employers and trades unions. By 1998 the proportion was only 4 in 10, the majority of whom were in the public sector.

What does the future hold?

Men’s participation rates are likely to stay fairly stable with a slight upward trend. While there is a current push to get more men into paid work, by tightening up on conditions for receiving incapacity benefit, the effects of these measures are likely to be relatively small. Any upward trend in the number of employed men is likely to come from older men working longer but also more flexibility over retirement ages, and immigrant men; the latter, are predominantly all of working age. This employment growth is likely to occur at much slower rates than in the past through the new and more selective conditions for entry for immigrants.

The supply of younger workers, based on current demographics will fall (and in addition current policy is to get more of them to remain in full-time education). However, immigrant workers who brought their families to the UK could boost the balance of young people in the workforce.

Women in employment are likely to continue to increase in numbers and percentages. This is because more women graduates are going to be coming through into the labour market and these are the women with the highest participation rates. There are some groups where gaining degrees is only just starting to increase, meaning that they have some way to go before reaching their natural peak of participation; for example the much improved success rates in schools of Bangladeshi girls will start to increase their presence in higher education and eventually in employment. The gradual spread of family-friendly policies in workplaces is also likely to add to women’s lifetime participation by making the combining of work and caring easier. The incentives for lone mothers to enter employment will also add to the size of the women’s workforce but such inducements are unlikely to get lone mother’s employment rates as high as those of mothers in couples, partly because lone mothers tend to be substantially lower qualified on average than women living in couples. The growth in the rate of childless women may now have peaked since birth rates have been starting to rise again. These increases in women’s employment will all level off before 2025 and probably remain fairly stable for years from then on.

There have been enormous changes in workplaces in the UK with women moving into male dominated positions to make them ‘integrated occupations’. The number of male dominated industries and workplaces has fallen. This has all happened gradually. Occupational segregation is likely to decline further, although I suspect it will not disappear entirely since many men and women prefer doing different jobs. One might say that legislation for equality has opened up these pathways, but all the signs point to legislation and statutory provision following changes in behaviour rather than leading it. However, once enacted, legislation does help to drag along reluctant employers, and it also makes behaviour more uniform (eg peaks in return to work dates after childbirth around the statutory entitlement limits).

Other projections include:

Human interactions will continue to be a growing component of many jobs (containing an increase in time spent interacting with people); this is sometimes called the ‘emotional literacy’, and represents an increase in jobs where interpersonal skills are valued and important. The care economy is one place where these skills are used, but other customer-facing jobs also contain this skill. Life skills are also a growing part of the paid work market

A widening gap between good and bad jobs is likely, with fewer in the middle. Those in low paid jobs will have fewer rungs of the ladder ahead to provide them with upward career prospects, or to motivate their ambitions.

Immigrant numbers are not likely to reduce, and there is likely to be an increasing supply of immigrant labour, and increasing employer demand for more to be admitted. Immigrants will undoubtedly continue to increase the diversity of British society. Migration is also likely to strengthen the informal economy.

Given some evidence points to a growth in the intensity of work, issues of stress at work and occupational health will grow in strength and employers will have to pay more attention to these issues. It is likely that they may even face legal challenges based on health and safety regulations and duties of care.

Job segregation is likely to break down further, especially among the highly qualified, but some job segregation is likely to remain, especially in lower paid jobs. It will be based on differences in preferences of men and women over the characteristics they seek in a job, and their preferences about the culture of workplaces, and employers’ preferences.

It is likely that women will reach men’s employment rates, although this equality will not be in hours of work; women, mothers in particular, are still likely to work part time to a far greater extent than men.

The earnings gap between men and women will shrink further, probably to the point where there is no unexplained gap.

There is likely to be growth in couples where the woman earns more than the man, resulting from girls doing better than boys at school, although this trend may also lead to more single women, and fewer partnerships being formed.

Change is likely to continue to occur more in job content than in frequency of moves between jobs. Workers will continue to want stable employment for financial reasons, and employers will want the same, since high turnover and recruitment is very expensive for employers, especially for highly skilled employees.

Issues for men’s employment

There are a number of issues raised by future trends in men’s employment.

2.1 One issue relates to sub-groups of men who are out of employment and pose threats to society in a number of ways. Lack of employment is very high among some ethnic minority groups of men (Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Black Caribbean and Black African) and high among younger men in these groups, as well as being concentrated in certain local labour markets in larger cities in London, the North and the Midlands. Among prime age men in partnerships, many Pakistani and Bangladeshi men are working only part-time hours with their wives not being employed. The concentration in certain areas make these breeding grounds of discontent and disaffection with mainstream society.

2.2 The second issue about men’s employment is the feeding through to the labour market of underachieving white working class boys from the education system. The structure of employment has changed towards services, and the need for unskilled work has shrunk. Boys who leave school without any qualifications do not find many opportunities to build a career that would support a family even if they wanted to. However, there is a clear need for skilled manual work and with training, such work would not be outside the competence of these boys who are only without qualifications because of lack of motivation rather than ability.

2.3 Barriers to work beyond retirement are likely to remain in many workplaces and dampen the growth in working for those beyond retirement age. Older workers are usually more expensive workers.

2.4 What can be done to provide career prospects out of low quality jobs?

The opportunities to train in intermediate jobs like skilled manual professions have not been available to young men since the apprenticeship system collapsed by 1980. Nothing has successfully taken its place. There is an excess demand for manual skills in the UK; yet it is very recent EU immigrants who are largely meeting this need and not white working class boys, or young men from minority ethnic groups mentioned above. This problem clearly starts in schools with disengagement from formal education which is disruptive to others.  Britain desperately needs a good quality vocational education option to run along side the academic stream in the schooling system. It also needs a successor to the apprenticeship system to train young working class men (white and minorities) in skilled professions. Such a system needs to start before the end of compulsory schooling to avoid disaffection and low motivation setting in amongst such boys. Solving this problem would also help address some of the other societal challenges in the UK. It would increase the number of marriageable young men who could offer economic support to a family, and reduce the threat of social unrest in certain localities.

Issues for women

2.5. Will women ever reach equality with men in the labour market – and do they mind anyway?

Although there have been enormous changes in women’s position in the labour market, the pace of change of women getting into the Board Rooms, being top executives and top managers is slow. There are now plenty of individual women running their own successful companies who are millionaires. However, most commentators and forecasters about whether and when employed women will match men in their proportions in the top occupations and with equal pay suggest they are still a long way off, even another 20 years. It is clear that such jobs require women to face the cut and thrust of competition, accept the long hours culture in workplaces, and possibly a jet-setting lifestyle, rarely at home. The majority of women do not have ambitions for these types of jobs. Probably there are a few who will want them and probably they will get them. But the ratio of men to women in such jobs is always likely to look bad. But I suspect it is not going to be a problem and will mostly reflect the lack of desire by the majority of women to hold such positions. Women are doing well along side men in the next layer down, and making gradual inroads into the statistics ratios. Even at these lower levels, women and men prefer different types of jobs. This maintains a high degree of occupational and workplace gender segregation, much of it by choice, although less so than used to be the case. Occupational segregation is likely to reduce gradually over time, but not go away completely. However, on pay women are still behind men in the upper part of the wage distribution, but more equal and even better than men at the lower parts of the wage distribution. Again their position at the higher wage levels is likely to be because women are less likely to demand pay rises in an individualised performance reward system, and less likely to use threats to quit in order to get a pay rise. Women will have to learn to be more aggressive about pay rises if they want to match men’s pay. The new pay audits which will be taking place in the public sector will help to equalise women’s and men’s pay in the public sector, but gaps are likely to continue in the private sector.

2.6. Do women have to become like men if they are going to have a chance of full equality? Will they have to accept working long hours, being prepared to travel further to work, and be mobile between workplaces in different geographical locations in order to climb the career ladders? Or is there a chance of changes occurring in the way work is organised such that men and women work fewer hours, with employers stopping the practice of forcing employees to move locality to get wider experience.

I don’t see changes in the way work is organised occurring in the UK economy on the scale required. The Netherlands has moved considerably in this direction, but even there, it is only a minority of men who work part time. Those who feel they have responsibilities for caring will always be less likely to gain promotions, and these are likely to remain disproportionately women and mothers. However, movements toward gender equality in the labour market is still likely to take place, partly due to the current relatively high proportion of childless women who will give men a good run for their money. Also the introduction of pay audits and pay reviews will give women more information on which to make a case for equal pay. However, gender pay ratios at the very top of the occupational and wage distributions will plateau out before reaching full equality since there are fewer employed women than men who want the top jobs and top wages.

2.7. Can there be equality between part timers and full timers in pay and conditions, and can women who work part time reach the top jobs? I think this is something women are likely to push harder for and achieve.

2.8. What can be done to provide career prospects out of low quality jobs? This is an issue for women as it was for men.

2.9. Parents at the low paid end of the wage spectrum will face problems of coping financially and child poverty will remain an issue. In the low paid sectors, employment is more insecure and has higher turnover – and this is likely to continue. This will make coping financially at the low income end even more challenging. Lone parents are likely to remain employed at lower rates than mothers in couples, and in worse jobs as they are less qualified – with a consequently greater risk of their children living in poverty.

2.10 Problems of work life balance among couples who both work full time are likely to increase. There is a tension with women having equality in circumstances where both partners work full time – accepting the male model of labour market participation. Children will not have either quality time or quantity time with over tired (or stressed) parents and may suffer and have poorer relationships.

Education implications

• Solving the need for effective training in skilled manual skills vocational training and in due course starting and managing one’s own business which includes coping with uncertainty and managing fluctuating income.
• Consider welfare system’s response to handling uncertain income flows.
• Considering the proposed expansion of graduate qualifications when the economy is not keeping pace with the need for such qualifications, and the risks of discontent this will create in the workforce as well as potential moves further away from gender equality.
• Preparing the workforce for jobs that require continual learning, and preparing the appropriate training courses.
• Continuing to supply learning on IT skills and internet use.
• Incorporating learning on emotional literacy, interpersonal skills, and negotiating skills into learning curricula or at further and higher education levels.
• Education to tackle bullying cultures
• Particular initiatives in local labour markets with high unemployment among ethnic minorities.
• Education aimed at breaking the cycle of disadvantage – discussed further under section 5 below.
• Majority of children coming into compulsory school (5+) in future are likely to have had childcare from age under one year old. Children entering school may be more socialised in future. It is likely to be still a minority who have had full-time child care from less than one year old. If this turns out to be damaging to children (as debated) there may be more problems for teachers from this trend.
• High divorce rates and high lone parent rates imply (if studies are correct which suggest there is damage to children from marital breakdown) suggest that a high proportion of children, possibly increasing, will have emotional problems during their school life. For same reason, statistical correlations showing intergenerational transfers of marital breakdown also likely to keep the flow high.

3. Trends in homeworking

Going under the heading of ‘mobile forms of work’, there are at least 3 main types of homeworking and the trends of each differ. Employees and some self employed can work from home (eg mobile engineers, sales representatives) using their home as the base. Alternatively employees and some self employed can work at home, carrying out all of their work in their own home. This type of work has a long history of people doing textile work or sewing and garment making in their own home. But modern day working at home can also involve IT use, called teleworking or manual electronics work (eg assembling PCBs). Thirdly, employees who work primarily at their employer’s workplace can have occasional (even weekly) days at home to do their work. Unfortunately, the statistics do not always differentiate between all of these types of homeworking. Nor are they published as a matter of course. They rely on bespoke analyses being carried out by researchers. (There is also the gradual spread of employees continuing to work at home after they have left the office, by checking emails and taking mobile phone calls. In this way the boundary between work and home, and work and leisure are being eroded for some employees. But this type of working at home is not routinely recorded, and is not discussed any further here.)

The trends are as follows:

There has been a steady increase in more mobile forms of work since 1980, both among employees and in terms of the percentage of employers who use these types of working arrangements.

Working mainly at home increased in numbers and as a percentage of the labour force between 1981 and 1992. Since 1992, it has stayed a stable percentage of the workforce (around 2.2%-2.4%), but the numbers employed working mainly at home have grown considerably.

Working mainly elsewhere but also working at least one full day ‘in own home’ has stayed at around 4% of the workforce, although increasing numerically from 1997 to 2002.

Working mainly ‘in different places using home as base’ increase from around 3% in 1981 to nearly 8% in 2002, the numbers of employees growing very substantially over this twenty year period.

One third of establishments had employees who work from home for some part of the week and 8% of establishments had employees who worked all or almost all of normal working hours at home (WERS 98). In 2004 WERS04 found that 6% of workplaces engaged people who worked for the establishment at or from their own homes but who were not employees (Kelsey et al, 2006).

WERS04 found that 26% of employers made homeworking available to some employees in 2004. This was an increase from 12% on the same question in 1998. Homeworking was slightly more common in workplaces where women were not the majority of employees. In 2004, 14% of employees thought that homeworking was available to them, varying by employee characteristics; women with children aged 18 and under were more likely to report having access to homeworking than women without dependent children (Kersley et al, 2006). Men (16%) were more likely than women (12%) to consider they would be able to work at home if they needed to.

The open plan office has clearly replaced the private small office in a large number of workplaces, with hot-desks growing to replace dedicated spaces with shared spaces.

What will the future hold?

Improvements in IT are likely to continue and would make working from or at home as teleworkers increasingly viable. Staying at home can be less stressful, cheaper and reduce transport congestion compared with going to the employer’s offices, if this involves commuting or a long journey. But the isolation this creates for employees also means that most employees will not wish to do this for long periods, or more than occasionally over the week or month. There are also the limitations to the number of people whose homes can be easily converted to be suitable to be office spaces. Working wholly at home is not likely to expand to any great extent.

The indicators suggest that there are limits to open plan and certainly to hot-desking which suggest it will not continue to grow and may even fall back. Employers’ stories about hot-desking describe employees arriving earlier and earlier on their days in the office to claim their favourite spot, and place potted plants and other possessions around to stake out their territory.

On teleworking, the few existing studies suggest there are limits to the use of this form of working by employers. It poses management problems for employers whose managers cannot be sure employees are working. It does not save as much space as employers initially expected and many employees do not like it  (Felstead et al, 2005; Dex et al, 2000).

There are tensions here between employers’ and employees’ interests, but more in periods of growth than during recessions. The extended growth period of the UK economy has pushed up property prices and rents, making employers want to encourage employees to stay at home. But this only saves them money if employees do not need dedicated office space at the employer’s offices. Employees prefer to have their own space at work. Work is part of the identity of most employees and their working location matters to them. The conventional office is unlikely to disappear.

Spheres of work and leisure will become less distinct for those who spend more of their time working at home. New forms of employer management will need to evolve to cope with employees doing more work from home or in mobile locations. This is likely to be part of a more general issue of employers coping with the tension of giving employees more autonomy and retaining control and supervision.  Employees will need more time management skills and be able to manage the boundaries of their work and life as well as work-related health issues.

Issues

3.1 Rises in the price of office space will undoubtedly create pressures to reduce costs by greater sharing of space, especially in large conurbations. This may lead employers to pressurise more employees to use their own homes as offices in a way that may be inappropriate either to their home circumstances or their psychological make up.

3.2 The growth in flexible jobs on the margins of the labour market has not been associated with an overall downward movement in their quality. The growth of the flexible sector has suited the needs of the workforce that has filled these positions (eg students; people coming up to retirement; lone parents with major caring responsibilities). While there are differences in conditions of work between regular and non-standard or flexible working these have not got worse over time, and there are signs that the gap may reduce through legislation. But further large increases from this position are not likely to be filled by voluntary labour supply, except immigrants. This will produce further tensions and ethnic conflicts with existing UK unskilled workers who will see this as a threat, even though they want better jobs for themselves.

3.3 Similarly, the growth of women’s work in the low paid ‘flexible’ periphery segment is nearing its end, due to the large highly qualified workforce of women that is going to increasingly dominate this source of labour supply.

3.4 The class divisions that are already embedded in the labour market division between core and periphery workers is likely to strengthen and become more polarised, with conflicts growing between the white working class, minority ethnic and immigrant workforces.

Educational implications

• Working at or from home relies heavily on time management skills, but also on being able to draw boundaries between work and non-work time to have work-life balance.
• People who do this kind of work need to be psychologically profiled and trained to check they can cope with the isolation and boundary issues and recognise emerging health problems.
• Educating to occupy space rather than possess it.

4. Trends in unpaid work

Unpaid work covers domestic work in the home, and caring work for those inside and outside the home. Domestic work could be broken down further, as can caring work. These forms of work are often aggregated together in discussions and thought to have a gender bias with women doing most of this form of work. But not only is caring work distinct from other domestic chores, there is a range of types of work within domestic work. Information on unpaid work comes from two main sources. Time budget studies provide the most detailed breakdowns, but survey questions are common in which female and male partners are asked about who does the most, or whether there are equal shares of the main housekeeping and caring tasks. The survey question findings are easiest to summarise. The majority of both women and men say that women do more than men in areas of caring for children, cleaning, washing and shopping tasks. However, the proportions of men who give this response is less than the proportion of women who give it. So, women as a whole tend to claim they do more of unpaid work in the home, than men agree they do. It is agreed that men do most of the DIY, gardening and car maintenance work in households. A few small-scale studies have found that women can act as gatekeepers and they can determine which jobs and how much men do. Women also act as the managers of household work, and also do most of the so-called emotion work in households.

Evidence on the trends in unpaid work from time budget studies suggests that:

• Adding up women’s and men’s paid and unpaid work leads to near equality in the amount of total work done by men and women, or men doing slightly more total work than women (Jacobs and Gerson, 2001; Harkness, 2008). Such figures show that claims of the ‘double burden’ carried by women who are employed and do the larger share of unpaid work are not often supported. In fact Sullivan and Gershuny (2000) have shown that there is little evidence that the double burden exists for the vast majority of women. If anything, it is a temporary phenomenon or one based in perceptions rather than in amounts of time spent in total on both paid and unpaid work.
• The average amounts of domestic work and paid work vary by country as by well as by gender (Geist, 2008: Gershuny, 2000).
• Although women appear to do more of the unpaid work hours, and have a larger share, than men, the calculations of the amount of hours spent on unpaid domestic work have also been found to depend on which tasks and work items are included in the calculations. When gardening and maintenance or odd jobs are included, the gap between men and women in number of weekly hours spent on unpaid domestic work narrows substantially (Gershuny, 2000).
• There are no notable gender divisions in time spent in personal care or in shopping (Gershuny, 2000).
• There have been changes over time and by country in the amounts and the shares of unpaid work (Gershuny, 2000; Robinson and Godbey,1997; Jacobs and Gershon, 2001). The time spent on domestic household work by women has been declining over time in many countries (Gershuny, 2000; Harkness, 2008; Bianchi et al, 2000). The time spent on domestic work by men has increased, but not as fast as the increase in women’s paid work.
• Early in the 20^th century, increases in women’s paid work were matched by a decrease in time spent on domestic work. However, for every two hours increase in paid work, domestic work declined by one hour. Later in the century this process continued with every two hours increase in paid work being associated with 1.5 hours decline in unpaid work. More recent 21^st century British data suggest that declines in women’s domestic work are continuing but now the decline in domestic work time exceeds the increase in paid work time (Harkness, 2008).
• Gershuny describes this combination of changes in women’s and men’s paid work and domestic work times as movements towards a convergence in time spent on the different types of work by men and women. He also presents evidence that this move towards convergence is apparent in a large number of countries.

One conclusion we could draw from these detailed analyses of time-use diaries is that over time, and without any particular state policy intervention, women’s unpaid domestic work has been declining while men’s contributions have been growing. The changes in men’s unpaid contributions have admittedly been smaller than changes in women’s paid work, but they have changed nonetheless.

The forces that appear to have brought about these changes, as far as commentators can tell, are as follows. It has been suggested that technological change in household appliances have offered labour-saving efficiency in carrying out some of the core domestic tasks. However, detailed attempts to measure the time gains from labour-saving appliances have not identified definitive gains (Bittman et al, 2004). Another suggestion is that declining fertility has led to smaller families across the industrialised world and this has reduced the amount of unpaid domestic work.  Numbers of children as well as their ages have been found to be positively correlated with amounts of time spent on unpaid work (Gershuny, 2000). It is also possible that women have reduced their unpaid work because of doing paid work, either because they are more tired, have lowered their domestic standards, or can afford to outsource more jobs. However, declines in domestic work are also visible among women who do part-time paid work and among those who are not employed (Gershuny, 2000). Lastly, economic mechanisms have also been offered as part of the explanation of the changes. Here the mechanism is that as women’s wage rates have increased in response to their greater education and human capital, the opportunity cost of doing unpaid work instead of paid work increases and women are likely to switch from one to the other. However, there have, over time, been relative price changes, particularly price increases, in purchased goods and services (paid cleaners or housekeepers). This price rise would lead us to expect that women would substitute their own cheaper housework production for the more expensive purchases of goods and services. But the increasing incomes that have also occurred over time mean that people will prefer leisure to unpaid work and will switch to purchasing goods and services to reduce their own housework. It is the greater effect of increasing incomes that has been winning over substitution effects. This argument, essentially, is that the progress of modern economies has built into it, given technological progress but subject to business cycle fluctuations, forces that are leading to declining work (paid and unpaid) and increasing leisure. These forces are not policy driven and are likely to continue into the future without policy assistance. However, there are groups who do not fit this pattern, especially in the USA and the UK. Increasing weekly hours of paid work are evident among some groups of managers and professionals (Jacobs and Gershon, 2001; Kodz et al, 2003) even if the majority are having greater leisure.

Caring for children is a task that falls predominantly to women. Even when they are working, they are more likely to be the ones to take time off to look after sick children (Dex, 2003). However, caring for older adults is a task that is likely to involve as many men as it does women, although women are likely to do more hours of such caring than men.

Although there is unpaid caring work, substantial amounts of care work has moved into the paid economy, and sometimes into the informal economy where people are paid in cash or kind, but not in such a way that it is recorded in national statistics. The informal economy has been estimated to be 6.8% of the UK economy in 2004. The growth of paid caring has been substantial as families out-source their child care and in some cases their care for older adults. Some of these developments, particularly the growth in care work for older adults is linked to growth in immigration.

What does the future hold?

A further shift in the division and share of domestic work, and caring between male and female partners within households, is likely to grow as more women gain degree qualifications and are in employment and gain higher earnings and more equality with men. Men are likely to continue to do more domestic work with women doing less, and so this will move in the direction of equality.  Gershuny’s idea of lagged adaptation may be used to describe this movement towards equality. This is the idea that it takes time, after women starting doing more paid work, for men to get the idea that they need to share more of the unpaid work in the home. However, equally, the reduction in women’s domestic work could be understood in economic terms as the increase in opportunity cost of domestic work for women as they gain more qualifications, work experience and career prospects which will reduce the quantity of such work they do.

It is unlikely that men’s and women’s amounts of domestic work will always be equal since women are still likely to tend to work fewer paid hours of work than men. Also, there is still likely to be a division between the types of domestic jobs men prefer doing and those women will accept to do – even if they do not prefer them, and women showing they prefer to do caring (Houston and Marks, 2005). Men’s and women’s involvement in caring for children is likely, therefore, to continue to be biased towards women doing more of this.

Men and women are likely to continue to care equally for older adults, although with women likely to continue to care for more hours than men.

There is the general expectation of demographic change with people continuing to live longer due to continuing improvements in the technology of health care, and in nutrition at early ages. This would suggest that caring responsibilities of adults for their elderly parents and relatives will increase. However, this increase is likely to take place after the retirement ages of adults, and in this way, it is not likely to increase the care burdens of the workforce substantially.

Increases in migration are likely to continue as a way of doing some of the less desirable care work in the UK, for example, caring for the elderly, as the volume of such work grows through the ageing of the population. Migration is also likely to strengthen and increase the informal economy

Issues

4.1. The provision of a paid workforce to do the increasing care work for older adults is a major challenge. Imported labour is currently being used to fill this growing labour force gap. The issues relate to providing both the quantity and quality care workers. Immigrants whose English language skills are poor do not make ideal carers for elderly, vulnerable and confused people. It is arguable whether it is genuine care that is provided in such instances.

4.2 Issues relating to the quantity and quality of the child care workforce are also not fully resolved, but these are much further advanced than is the case for care for older adults.

Educational implications

• Training up a care workforce for older adults, which might be heavily dominated by immigrant labour, for quality care provision.
• Educating the younger generation about the costs of care for older adults, what care is, and society should solve this growing problem of care in an ageing society.
• Educating for a more equal gender balance in the amounts of informal care hours for older adults provided by households.
• Formal flexible working arrangements for employees to cope with care needs of older adults.
• Some attention to child care provision to make sure quality grows and becomes more uniform and accessible in all areas, through systems of quality control, or licensing or inspections.
• Attention to the uniformity across local areas in quality and quantity of after-school and holiday care for school aged children, 

5. Living off state benefits

The extent of living off state benefits, either because of being unemployed, sick or inactive tends to be cyclical with the business cycle. However, there are some notable trends which have not followed a cyclical pattern as set out in the volume by Dickens et al (2003) and they include:

• A substantial rise in men’s inactivity rates since the 1970s, alongside a notable fall in women’s inactivity rates which previously were much higher through women looking after their families.
• The rise in men’s inactivity rates has been seen in many age groups although higher rises were visible in 25-54 year old men than in under 25 year olds and there were also higher rates in the bottom of the skill distribution.
• The majority of inactive men (70%) reported themselves as having a limiting health problem.
• Analyses have linked this rise in inactivity rates to the substantial decline in male manufacturing industries in some areas, with a lack of replacement jobs, and where the former industries left a health scar on the working population, for example in mining areas. However, the operation of the invalidity benefit system is also cited as a reason for the growth in men’s inactivity rates. Since the government changed the benefit rules, inactivity rates among men have started to fall.
• Unemployment rates have risen among older workers since 1998, despite unemployment among other groups being low in a buoyant period of the UK economy. The higher unemployment rates occurred disproportionately among those in their 50s, women and the more highly qualified.
• New Deal for Young People policies also appear to have had some success getting unemployed young people out of unemployment – although they have been operating over a period of economic growth which has undoubtedly helped their progress. While some of the young people targeted have gone into work, the largest decline in unemployed young people has been as a result of getting them into education and training.
• Unemployment among ethnic minority men is still persistently high, and higher than unemployment rates among equivalent white men. During the recent period of economic growth, while the unemployment rates of some minority ethnic men fell, the gap between white and both Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean men did not reduce.

Another group who have had high rates of living off state benefits are lone parents, the vast majority of whom are lone mothers. Their rates of employment have been much lower than those of women living in couples. The Working Families Tax Credit from 1999 followed by the Working Tax Credit in 2003 were attempts to remove any disincentives lone parents had to stay out of the labour market. These schemes were presented as aiming to tackle child poverty, by getting parents into paid work. These were financial attempts to make work pay for the low paid and they have gone alongside tax credits for child care and other personal assistance from DWP’s Job Centre staff. This battery of measures does appear to have had some success in getting lone mothers into work, and their employment rates have doubled since the benefits and other schemes were initiated.

Up to 1996, the number and percentage of workless households grew at the same time that there was a growth in two-earner households. Workless households reached approximately one fifth of working age households by 1996. This represents a growing polarisation in the distribution of work across UK households. However, government measures to intervene and get people back into employment reduced the workless household figure after 1996. This fall is mainly due to single parent (workless households) moving into employment.

What does the future hold?

It is unlikely that employment rates of the over 50s will fall voluntarily in the future as discussed under paid work above, given changes in demographics and pensions. (However, they are likely to be affected by cyclical changes in the business cycle, and fall in the short and possibly medium term for reasons of recession.)

Higher male unemployment rates among minority ethnic groups, especially Black Caribbean and Bangladeshi men, are unlikely to be resolved and may grow even worse in future recessions, assisted by their concentration in local labour markets with typically high unemployment rates.

The battery of policies to reduce workless households is likely to hold any increase at bay, but is not likely to be able to reduce the size of this group substantially.

Issues.

5.1 High unemployment rates among some minority ethnic groups of men is a worrying element since it is located in certain geographic areas and it can lead to social unrest or fuel discontent and even terrorism.

5.2 The UK is likely to experience growing unemployment rates for a period following the credit crunch and associated global recession. The severity and length of this downturn may be more difficult to cope with than earlier downturns, partly because many of the current generation have hardly experienced recessions and have expectations linked to continual growth.

5.3 At the same time that the government is successfully trying to get more of those on benefits into work, they are not stemming the inflow into these categories (eg. divorce rates being high thereby fuelling a flow into lone parenthood).

5.4 One of the biggest remaining issues acting as a barrier to getting more people off benefits into work is Housing Benefit. Qualitative studies have shown for some time that Housing Benefit offers valued security to people and families who are out of work in the long term, and who have low levels of skills such that they would only be likely to gain low paid, insecure work were they to enter the labour market. Although the tax system has been changed to make work pay for such groups, giving up the security of Housing Benefit for a low-paid insecure job is not seen as rational by those being encouraged to make this transition. This is especially the case where they have larger families and benefit more from the Income Support system’s child multiplier.

Educational implications

• Education aimed at breaking the cycle of disadvantage
• Some suggest parenting classes are key to tackle low achievement and the effects of disadvantage in the young. This might have implications for all age schools. (Some churches practice this where all age groups attend a Sunday School class.) This could also foster a culture of lifelong learning among the young as well as among adults.
• Parenting classes made mandatory for prospective parents when pregnant, as part of their antenatal ‘clinic’.
• Proportion of children from disadvantaged background coming through school likely to be increasing since the poor are having more children and the rich are having fewer, if any. Similarly, for the same reason, children from teenage pregnancies may increase in percentage share, even though past trends show there is not much change in their numbers over time.
• Current policy case for early intervention into the cycle of disadvantage at pre-school ages 3-4 is not likely to go away, and it may be necessary to spend more on this if the percentage of such children from disadvantaged families goes up, as is quite possible.

6. Work attitudes and motivation

There have been a number of trends in attitudes towards work and motivation of workers. Young people display the largest amounts of change in attitudes at any one time and older people display the least. There is a general recognition that the many changes in workplace practices and policies, as well as changes in employment contracts outlined above, have had their impact on employees’ subjective experiences of work, although not always as much as might have been clarified.

Trends in the quality of work experience

The quality of work experience can be measured by job involvement, work strain, and psychological distress. Some studies also use job satisfaction as a measure and this gives a different picture than job involvement measures of the trends occurring.

In the 1960s it was forecast that there would be a decline in the traditional work ethic, and this would be replaced by an instrumental approach to work (jobs then would be seen primarily as a way of generating income to have better family income or higher cost leisure activities). There is no evidence that this change occurred. There has been no change since the 1980s in the extent to which people were committed to paid work, irrespective of the financial benefits, sometimes called work as a central life interest. Choosing jobs has continued to place high importance on intrinsic aspects of work and having interesting work. Having a job with high income was ranked much lower down the scale. This continuing relationship is thought to have been upheld by increases in the qualifications held by the workforce, since higher qualifications are associated with higher job involvement. Also higher levels of task discretion are also associated with higher levels of job involvement. These changes are thought to be responsible for the stable or upward trend in quality of work experience for many employees.

Rates of job satisfaction appear to have been on a downward trend over time.

Alongside the trend increases in job involvement and job discretion has gone a trend increase in work strain (mental tension, physical fatigue or worry), due to work intensity and the pressure for higher levels of work effort. This has been more marked among women employees.

One consequence of unemployment rates widening to include professional workers in the early 1990s was that there has been a growth in worries about job insecurity even among those in work, and a growth in the importance school leavers attached to having a secure job. This is manifested in increased physical distress among people in work, not just people out of work.

Studies suggest that rates of organisational commitment, or commitment to the organisation’s values, are very low among employees in Britain around the turn of the Millennium, despite, or possibly because of, increased efforts by management to generate such feelings. This low commitment was evident in organisations were there was little employee participation in decision making, or lip service was paid to participatory employee involvement. Contrary to this general state of affairs affecting both public and private sectors, employees were more committed and loyal where they felt employers cared about the welfare of their employees, or where they saw their activities as having use and value for society.

Trends in attitudes to work and skills development

By 2006, the vast majority of employees ranked intrinsic elements of their jobs essential or very important, much higher than the rank given to having good pay. Felstead et al (2007) found no evidence of a decline over time in the importance attached to intrinsic features of jobs by employees and rather found the reverse, that expectations and importance attached to these elements of jobs had grown from 1992 to 2006.

There is evidence of growing convergence in men’s and women’s preferences about jobs, from 1992 to 2006, on the importance attached to being able to use initiative in your job, and have good training provision. Nonetheless, initiatives for training came mainly from employers.

In 2006, three quarters of employees wanted training in the future but only one quarter expressed a strong desire for it. The type of training most commonly wanted was acquiring new vocational or professional qualifications – primarily in order to offer job mobility, a sense of achievement and improved performance in their job.

There has been a general societal decline over time in deferential attitudes towards authority figures. This has its counterpart within workplaces in attitudes towards managers. The top down model of command and control now feels uncomfortable, and has been replaced by flatter organisational structures, greater autonomy and discretion for many employees. This change has also gone alongside changes in human resources policies and practices which encourage and reward employees who have internal and individual motivation to work hard and show commitment to the organisation.

The overall decline in union membership, despite an increase in women members, is evidence of a decline in the value attached to collective representation. The decline in male manufacturing industry employment, which were trade unions’ traditional strongholds, was a major contributory factor to membership decline. Commentators suggest this is part of a more general rise in individualism in society.

Evidence has started to emerge more recently that suggest cultures of bullying are growing in workplaces. This may not be a change in the extent of bullying. It is likely that this new trend is, in part, a feature of employee aspirations and expectations having changed such that they are less prepared to accept workplace bullying than in the past, they place a greater emphasis on having good interpersonal relations at work, and they are more prepared to voice their concerns in a climate that proclaims commitment to equal opportunities.

Trends in women’s attitudes towards women working

In the early 1980s the British were fairly conservative in their views about women working. While attitudes have changed among both men and women, the change is modest on many measures. One of the larger changes has been in attitudes towards women engaging in paid work. It is now accepted and even advocated that women with children should be allowed, even expected, to do paid jobs. Men are slightly less likely to hold such views than women, but this view is held by the majority of both women and men.

There was a shift between 1980 to 2002 towards greater egalitarianism in both nurturant and instrumental roles of women at work. Nurturant roles are those indicated by questions about whether women’s employment is harmful to children, whether family life will suffer if women work, or whether women will be happier if they go out to work. Instrumental attitudes indicate the level of agreement with whether work is really what women want (or mainly a home), whether a husband’s job is to earn money and a wife is to look after the family, or whether both husband and wife should contribute to family income, and whether a job is the best way for women to be independent.

There was evidence of a slowing down of the move towards egalitarian attitudes in nurturant roles in the 1990s, reaching a peak in 2002, from where it has now fallen back a little, especially with the movement away from egalitarian views on whether pre-school children suffer from mothers going out to work. There is also increasing doubt about whether jobs allow women to be independent.

By 2002 there is still considerable support for a gender-role divide and concern that maternal employment may compromise family and child well being. There has also been mounting concern about work-family balance.

Trends in men’s attitudes towards women working

Women have tended to be more egalitarian than men, with one exception. Support for dual earner households started out with women more in favour than men, but since the mid 1990s, men are as likely as women or even more likely to support two earner households.

What does the future hold?

It is unlikely that commitment to the intrinsic value of work will decline in future, but more likely it will be upheld by the majority of the workforce. (Workless households are a group where such values may be absent.)

Movement towards egalitarian attitudes in the labour market seems to have stalled and may reverse further among both women and men. This may be due to the growth in work strain among employees, particularly women.

Further decline in trade union membership is forecast. This may also symbolise a further increase and acceptance of individualised values and concerns with an equivalent fall in support for collectivism at work and in society.

The growth in jobs needing to have constant learning is likely to increase, so workers who are eager to embrace learning at work will also need to grow.

The trend towards so-called humanization of work is likely to continue with more jobs having increased autonomy and opportunities for self development, alongside greater employee involvement.

The seeming shift from control to commitment is already showing signs of strain, and it is likely that, in future, these new management methods will become more obviously new forms of control and work intensification. At that point there will be a downward turn in motivation and commitment and even more decline in employee participation in workplace decision making. Growing affluence among the top half of the workforce will also increase the desire for time for leisure and fewer working hours.

Feelings of job insecurity are likely to increase among the workforce with the financial uncertainty, redundancies and global recession following after the stock market crashes and financial crises.

Issues

6.1 Conflict between creating jobs with higher employee involvement and the increased work strain that goes with such jobs, or between better quality jobs but with higher work intensity. This creates the challenge of generating jobs with higher demands on skills and performance but which have tolerable levels of work strain.

Educational implications

• The loss of deference in society is already showing itself in schools, but this is likely to continue and has implications for how schools are organised, how they are run, the aims and manner of conducting school inspections. Evidence from the workplace suggests that participatory models produce better results.
• Balancing control and autonomy in the classroom will equip children better for the world of work.
• Educating for identifying and handling stress.
• The premium on learning and self direction will be high in the workplace
• Education to promote personal development and lifelong learning 
  

ANNEX

Evidence and references

1. General

Moynagh, M. and Worsley,R. (2005) Working in the twenty-first century. Swindon: ESRC and The Tomorrow Project.

2. Trends in paid work

2.1 Women’s and men’s paid work

2.1.1 References

Aston, J., Clegg, M., Diplock, E., Ritchie, H. and Willison, R. (2005) Interim update of key indicators of women’s position in Britain. London, Women and Equality Unit, Department of Trade and Industry.

Dex. S. (ed) (1999) Families and the Labour Market: Trends Pressures and Policies. York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York Publishing Services, p.88.

Dex, S. (2003) Families and work in the twenty-first century. Bristol, The Policy Press and York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, p.84.

Dex,S. and Joshi, H. (2005) Children of the 21^st century: From birth to nine months. Bristol, The Policy Press, p.281.

Dex,S. and Smith, C. (2002) The Nature and Patterns of Family-Friendly Employment Policies in Britain. Bristol, Policy Press and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, p.49.

Dex, S. and Forth, J. (2009) Equality and Diversity. In Brown, W., Whitfield, K., Forth, J. (eds.) (2009) A quarter century of industrial relations in Britain. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Felstead, A., Gallie, D., Green, F. and Zhou, Y. (2007) Skills at work 1986-2006. Oxford and Cardiff, ESRC Centre of Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance.

Moynagh, M. and Worsley, R. (2005) Working in the twenty-first century. Swindon, ESRC and The Tomorrow Project

Scott, J., Dex, S. and Joshi, H. (eds) (2008) Changing patterns of women’s employment over 25 years. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.

2.1.2 Datasets

Quarterly Labour Force Surveys

Workplace Employee Relations Survey WERS, 1998

Workplace Employment Relations Survey, 2004

2.2 Ethnic differences in paid work

2.2.1 References

Dale, A., Lindley, J. and Dex, S. (2006) A life-course perspective on ethnic minority differences in women’s economic activity in Britain. in European Sociological Review, 22 (4), pp.459-476

Dale, A., Lindley, J. and Dex, S. (2008) Ethnic differences in women’s employment. In: Scott, J. Dex, S. and Joshi, H. (eds) Changing patterns of women’s employment over 25 years. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.

Lindley, J. Dale, A. and Dex, S.(2004) Ethnic differences in women’s demographic, family characteristics and economic activity profiles, 1992-2002. Labour Market Trends, 112 (4), pp.153-65.

Lindley, J. Dex, S. and Dale, A. (2006) Ethnic differences in women’s labour force participation: The role of qualifications. Oxford Economic Papers, 58-2, pp.351-78.

2.2.1 Datasets

Quarterly Labour Force Surveys

2.3 Employers

2.3.1 References

Gallie, D. White, M. Cheng, Y. and Tomlinson, M. (1998) Restructuring the employment relationship. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

White, M. Hill, S. Mills, C. and Smeaton, D. (2004) Managing to change? British Workplaces and the Future of Work. Basingstoke, Palgrave.

2.3.1 Datasets

Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys

Workplace Employee Relations Survey WERS, 1998

Workplace Employment Relations Survey, 2004

Employment in Britain Survey, 1992, 1998

Working in Britain, (WIB) 2000

Change in Employer Practices Survey, (CEPS), 2002.

2.4 Skills

2.4.1 References

2.4.2 Datasets

Social Change and Economic Life Initiative, SCELI ,1986

Employment in Britain Survey, 1992

1997 Skills Survey, 1997

2001 Skills Survey

2006 Skills Survey

3. Homeworking

3.1 References

Allen, S. and Wolkowitz, C. (1987) Homeworking: Myths and Realities. London, Macmillan.

Bisset, L. and Huws, U. (1984) Sweated Labour: Homeworking in Britain Today. London, Low Pay Unit.

Cully, M. Woodland, S. Reilly, A. and Dix, G. (1999) Britain at work as depicted by the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. London, Routledge.

Dex, S. Scheibl, F. Smith, C. and Coussey, M. (2000) New working patterns. London, Centre for Tomorrow’s Company and Pertemps.

Felstead, A. and Jewson, N. (1999) Global Trends in flexible labour. Basingstoke, Macmillan.

Felstead, A. and Jewson, N. (2000) In work at home. London, Routledge.

Felstead, A. Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2005) Changing places of work. Basingstoke, Palgrave.

Haddon, L. and Lewis, A. (1994) The experience of teleworking: an annotated review. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 5 (1).

Huws, U. (1994) Teleworking in Britain. Employment Gazette, 102 (2), pp.51-60.

Huws, U. (1994) Home truths: Key findings from the national survey of homeworkers. National Group on Homeworking, Report No.2.

Huws, U., Denbigh, A. and MITEL (1999) Virtually There: The Evolution of Call Centres. Monmouthshire, Mitel Telecom Ltd.

Incomes Data Services (1994) Teleworking. IDS Study 551.

Industrial Relations Services (1994a) Diversity and Change – Survey of Non-standard working. IRS Employment Trends No.570, October.

Industrial Relations Services (1994b) Non-standard working under review. IRS Employment Trends No.565, August.

Kelsey, B. Alpin, C. Forth, J. Bryson, A. Bewley, H. Dix, G. and Oxenbridge, S. (2006) Inside the workplace: Findings from the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey. London, Routledge.

Moynagh, M. and Worsley, R. (2005) Working in the twenty-first century. Swindon, ESRC and The Tomorrow Project

Reed (1995) The Shape of Work to Come. Tolworth, Reed Personnel Services.

3.2 Employers and teleworking

A survey of a random sample of employers found that one in twenty had at least one staff member dependent on working at home and dependent on IT. A survey of a random sample of 1000 employers in 1994 found that 1 in 10 had at least one home-based worker (Huws, 1994). The Reed (1995) survey found that 14% of firms were using teleworkers in 1995. IDS (1994) suggested that between 5% and 15% of firms were using teleworkers and the size depends upon the definition used. There are often relatively few teleworkers in any one firm. Telecottages, largely in rural areas are increasing but they are in their early stages of development (IDS, 1994). In 1994 there were 90 but it is not clear how many have a long-term future.

Some studies have found telework to be concentrated in financial and business services (IRS, 1994b), and in the public sector (IRS, 1994b) whereas others have found most use of teleworking in manufacturing (Reed, 1995) and least in health. Teleworkers are also concentrated in the South East. Studies agree that the larger the organisation, the more likely it is to use this as well as other forms of non-standard forms of employment. The differences between the results on the size of teleworking show up the problems of generalising from what, in some cases, are very small sample sizes and the extremely low response rates which characterise these surveys.

Self employed home workers were used by relatively few employers in each industry. The highest proportions using self employed home workers were found in manufacturing (16%) and construction (17%). The proportions of employees working mainly from home were similarly small and the largest proportions of establishments were found in transport and communications (11%) and again in manufacturing (7%).  Much larger proportions of establishments were found who used employees working from home some of the time in 1998; between 24% of establishments in the distribution industry and 25% in construction up to 74% in energy and water and 47% in banking and finance.

Telework

The advantages to employers of teleworking are reviewed by IDS (1994) and Haddon and Lewis (1994). They pointed to the reduction in overheads, productivity improvements, and help in recruiting and retaining staff as the main benefits. Huws’s (1994a, 1994b) survey of employers’ use of teleworking found its main advantage to be its flexibility and convenience and its ability to reduce costs and solve travel problems. Managers expressed high levels of satisfaction with teleworkers whom they thought were more productive, more reliable, more loyal, produced better work and had lower rates of turnover and absenteeism than on-site workers (Huws, 1994a, 1994b).

There have been some notable attempts to try out teleworking and it is from these studies we have the most information about this form of work. The EU has also been promoting teleworking (IDS, 1994). The IDS (1994) study and Haddon and Lewis (1994) review the trials instigated by British Telecom, a leading insurance group, Digital Equipment and others. Whilst many were satisfied with the outcomes and thought the advantages to employees were significant other lessons were learnt from these exercises. Teleworkers need to be restricted to those who can work alone in a motivated way and to those who do not miss the social relationships at work too much. There is often less saving on office space and overheads than might at first appear since employees still need to come into the workplace regularly. Also, some managers obviously find the management issues more difficult to handle. ployers’ reasons for Teleworking

The main advantages of telework for employees have been argued to be savings on commuting time and increased flexibility or autonomy at work. However studies have shown that the disadvantages are also significant, namely those of feeling isolated at home and missing the social contact of office life (IDS, 1994; Haddon and Lewis, 1994).

3.3 Employees

3.3.1 Statistics from the 1998 Labour Force Survey:

4.7% of employed women and 2.9% of men worked at home in 1998; 3.3% of employed women and 9.5% of men  worked from home, in 1998; 6.5% of employed men and 3.8% of women were teleworkers for some of their work time in 1998.

* Teleworking as a share of total employment is greatest amongst men working in banking finance and insurance (13.4%) followed by men working in other services (11.7%). Teleworking is relatively uncommon amongst men working in manufacturing (3.8%), and in transport and communication (3.8%). The share of teleworking in total employment is greatest amongst women working in agriculture (11.1%), construction (10.9%) and banking, finance and insurance (7.5%). Teleworking is relatively uncommon amongst women working in distribution (1.8%) and transport and communication (2.7%).

* Teleworking as a share of total employment was highest for men and women working in professional occupations; 14.1% of men’s and 9.1% of women’s professional employment. Teleworking was also well represented amongst men’s associate professional and technical jobs (11.5%) and amongst managers and administrators (8.8%). Women in associate professional occupations (7.2%) and  managers and administrator occupations  (6.6%) also had amongst the highest shares of teleworking jobs amongst women. Teleworking is relatively uncommon in men’s clerical and secretarial (2.2%) and plant and machine operative (1.2%) jobs and amongst women’s employment in personal and protective services (1.1%) and sales (2.1%).

3.3.2 Employees’ reasons for homeworking

The reasons that women, the main homeworking group, are homeworkers include:

it is work they can perform whilst they have dependent children at home or whilst they are in ill-health (Huws, 1994)

it is suitable employment when language or cultural reasons make it difficult to go to a workplace

it can be part of the traditions of communities (Allen and Wolkowitz ,1987).

The disadvantages of working at home to these women were the very low pay, the isolation, the environmental hazards, and the mess it creates. One in ten of these homeworkers also suffered health problems from homework; neck or back ache and eye strain were commonly cited. Bisset and Huws (1984) found that some new homeworkers attached importance to the less tangible benefits of homeworking than those in more traditional homeworking jobs. For example, they appreciated the flexibility to schedule their work and the reduction in the stress of commuting to work.

3.4 Employers’ data

Table 1.  Prevalence of flexible working patterns among British and UK employers by source and date.

Per cents of employers in sample

** Sample: Establishments with 5+ employees.

* Sample: Establishments with 10+ employees

+ In the case of WERS data, on the question indicated, the availability is for non-managerial employees only.  

Table      Percentage of Employers using Non-Standard Employment (weighted data)

n/a: not available

Table      Non-standard employment by industry (WERS’ 98, weighted data)

Table      Percentage of Employers of a Certain Size who use the Stated Pattern of Employment

(WERS ‘98, weighted data)

3.5 Employees’ data

Table 1.  Prevalence of flexible working patterns among British and UK employees by source and date.

Per cents of employees in sample

LFS – Quarterly Labour Force Survey

* LFS has three questions covering the amounts of work at or from home. If aggregated they give the closest comparable definition to the less well defined questions in the other surveys.

** Employees in workplaces with 5+ employees.

++ Employees in workplaces with 10+ employees.

Table        Prevalence of flexible working patterns among British employees by source and date.

++     Employees in workplaces with 10+ employees in Workplace employee Relations Survey.

**      Employees in workplaces with 5+ employees. (Results quoted for first and second survey are those published in the second 2004 publication (Stevens et al, 2004) adjusted to be as comparable as possible for definition and sample population changes based on populations of all employees and including those who said they worked using this arrangement as well as those who did not use the arrangement but said it was available

Table Estimates of working at home and working on the move 1981-2002.

Source: Felstead et al (2005) Table 3.3 p.55. Labour Force Survey data

Table.  Percentages of employed mothers/fathers with access to flexible working arrangements, by country.

Sample: All Millennium Cohort Study main respondent mothers and partner respondent fathers (natural, foster, adoptive, step) who are in paid work. A oneway anova for each flexible working arrangement offered by country, the majority of values are less than or equal to p=0.01 suggesting systematic differences in the extent of working arrangements offered to both employee mums and dads by country.  # These values are not significant at p=0.05 suggesting that there are no significant differences in the extent of working arrangements offered to employee mothers and fathers by country.

Table      Men’s and women’s homeworking employment as per cent of all employed, 1998

Source: Labour Force Survey, Spring 1998

Table      Men’s and women’s homeworking employment by industry, 1998

Source: Labour Force Survey, Spring 1998

Table      Men’s and women’s homeworking employment by occupation,

Per cent of gendered employees in occupation , 1998

Source: Labour Force Survey, Spring 1998

Table . Access to flexible and family-friendly working arrangements, by sector and gender.

Base: All employees in workplaces with 25 or more employees. Figures are weighted and based on responses from 25,491 employees. Source. Cully et al (1999)

4. Informal and Unpaid work

4.1 References

Bittman, M., Rice, J.M. and Wajcman, J. (2004) Appliances and Their Impact: The Ownership of Domestic Technology and Time Spent on Household Work. British Journal of Sociology, 55, pp.401-442.

Corti, L. and Dex, S. (1995) Informal caring. Employment Gazette, 103 (3).

Dex, S. (forthcoming) Policy interventions to equalise men’s and women’s time spent in unpaid work: Are they possible and realistic? In: Treas, J. and Drobnic, S. (eds). Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Geist, C. (2008) Gendered views of Domestic Labour: Cross-national variation in men’s and women’s reports of housework. In: Treas, J.K. and Drobnic, S. Men, women and household work in cross-national perspective.

Gershuny, J. (2000) Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Post Industrial Society. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Gershuny, J. and Jones, S. (1987) The changing work-leisure balance in Britain, 1961-1984. Sociological Review Monograph, 33, pp.9-50.

Gershuny, J and Sullivan, O. (2008) Time use, gender and public policy regimes. In: Gender Work and Organization.

Gerson, K. (1985) Hard choices: how women decide about work, career, and motherhood. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Gerson, K. (1993) No man’s land: men’s changing commitments to family and work. New York, Basic Books.

Harkness, S. (2008) The Household Division of Labour: Changes in Families Allocation of Paid and Unpaid Work. In: Scott, J. Dex, S. and Joshi, H. (eds.) (2008, forthcoming) Changing patterns of women’s employment over 25 years. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.

Houston, D.M. and Marks, G. (2005) Working, caring and sharing: Work-life dilemmas in early motherhood. In: Houston, D.M. (ed) Work Life Balance in the Twenty-First Century. London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Jacobs, J.A. and Gerson, K. (2001) Overworked Individuals or Overworked Families: Explaining Trends in Work, Leisure, and Family Time. Work and Occupations, 28, pp.40-63.

Kodz, J. (2003) Working long hours: A review of the evidence. Employment Relations Research Series No.16. London, Department of Trade and Industry.

Robinson, J.P and Godbey, G. (1997) Time for Life: The surprising ways Americans Use their time. In: Campbell, A. and Converse, P. (eds.) The Human Meaning of Social Change. New York, Russell Sage Foundation, pp.17-86.

Sullivan, O. (1997) Time waits for no (wo)man: An investigation of the gendered experience of domestic time. Sociology, 31 (2), pp.221-40

Sullivan, O. and Gershuny, J. (2001) Cross-national changes in time-use: some sociological (hi)stories re-examined. ISER Working Paper WP 2001-1. Colchester, University of Essex.

Yeandle, S. and Buckner, L. (2008) Carers, Employment and Services: time for a new social contract. Leeds, Carers UK and University of Leeds.

5. Living off state benefits

5.1 References

Dickens, R., Gregg, P. and Wadsworth, J. (eds) (2003) The Labour Market under New Labour. Basingstoke, Palgrave.

6. Work attitudes and motivation

6.1 References

Felstead, A., Gallie, D., Green, F. and Zhou, Y. (2007) Skills at work 1986-2006. Oxford and Cardiff, ESRC Centre of Skills , Knowledge and Organisational Performance.

Gallie, D., White, M., Cheng, Y. and Tomlinson, M. (1998) Restructuring the employment relationship. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

White, M., Hill, S., Mills, C. and Smeaton, D. (2004) Managing to change? British Workplaces and the Future of Work. Basingstoke, Palgrave.

Scott, J. ,Dex, S. and Joshi, H. (eds) (2008) Changing patterns of women’s employment over 25 years. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.