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Importance and impotence?Learning, outcomes andresearch in further educationDavid Jamesa University of the West of England , Bristolb Faculty of Education , University of the West ofEngland , Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Bristol, BS16 1QY,UK E-mail:Published online: 17 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: David James (2005) Importance and impotence? Learning,outcomes and research in further education, The Curriculum Journal, 16:1, 83-96, DOI:10.1080/0958517042000336827
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Importance and impotence? Learning,
outcomes and research in further education
David James*University of the West of England, Bristol
One of the defining features of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme is that it ‘aims to
improve outcomes for learners of all ages in teaching and learning contexts across the UK’. This
article argues that, although it is possible to use the terms outcomes for learners and learning outcomes
interchangeably, they have an important difference in connotation. Particular meanings of the latter
term are dominant within the Further Education sector. Some insight from analysis in the TLRP
project Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education is presented to illustrate this difference
and to underline the necessity for educational research to engage critically with both outcomes for
learners and learning outcomes if it is to provide knowledge with a practical application.
Keywords: learning outcomes; outcomes for learners; further education; educational research
Introduction and background
It is widely acknowledged that, until recently, and in comparison to schools and
higher education (HE), the further education (FE) sector received scant attention in
educational research (Elliot, 1996; Hughes et al., 1996; Hodkinson & James, 2003).
This point was important in the conception of one of the nine Teaching and Learning
Research Programme (TLRP) Phase II projects, entitled Transforming Learning
Cultures in Further Education (TLC). Subsequently, the commissioning of the third
phase of TLRP gave a programme-wide emphasis to post-school teaching and
learning, and it includes several projects that also have a further education focus or
include a consideration of FE in a series of educational processes. Together with
contemporary projects funded by other means,1 this constitutes a substantial increase
in research effort focused on the FE sector. It coincides with the sector’s rising profile
in government policy on lifelong learning and economic regeneration.
It has sometimes been hard to reconcile the relative ‘invisibility’ of English FE with
its scale. FE is in receipt of a substantial portion of the Learning and Skills Council’s
*Corresponding author: Faculty of Education, University of the West of England, Bristol, Frenchay
Campus, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK. Email: [email protected]
The Curriculum Journal
Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 83 – 96
ISSN 0958-5176 (print)/ISSN 1469-3704 (online)/05/010083–14
# 2005 British Curriculum Foundation
DOI: 10.1080/0958517042000336827
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annual budget of some £8 billion, serving well over two million students, of whom
roughly one-quarter are under nineteen. Three-quarters of its students are on full-
time programmes of at least a year in length. While no one qualification dominates
overall, programmes are mainly vocational in a general or specific sense, covering a
wide range of occupational areas and levels. There is also a substantial minority of
students following academic courses at all levels from pre-GCSE to degree (Learning
and Skills Council, 2002a, 2004; Hodkinson & James, 2003).
This scale and breadth of activity involves a large number of different purposes and
curriculum and assessment regimes and their associated conceptions of learning.
These learning cultures do not always sit comfortably together, though they often
have a long history of institutional juxtaposition. The TLC project, which was partially
designed in a process of consultation with practitioners in FE colleges, sought to
reflect this diversity, all the while knowing that it would be impossible to sample it in a
classical sense. With hindsight it is clear that across the learning sites that became the
core case-studies in the project, certain kinds of FE work are under-represented (e.g.
higher education in FE colleges) or over-represented (e.g. and crudely speaking,
provision for ‘vulnerable’ groups). Nevertheless, the project team has evidence that
the range and diversity of the case-studies are sufficient for the realization of the
project’s aims. We return to some of the detail of the TLC project later in this article.
Towards the end of their article in this issue, M. James & Brown helpfully identify
two facets that require further exploration. One of these is to do with the breadth of
the range of learning outcomes to be assessed, and they suggest that
If . . . the learning outcomes in which we are interested in are dynamic, shifting and
sometimes original or unique, we need a new methodology for assessment, perhaps
drawing more on ethnographic and peer review approaches in social science, appreciation
and connoisseurship in the arts, and advocacy, testimony and judgement in law. (p. 19)
The breadth of pedagogic and curricular activity in FE means that many such
‘methodologies’ are already located there. However, this is not to say that they always
enjoy recognition from a broad range of stakeholders, something that M. James &
Brown also rightly mention as being necessary. Indeed, some of the analysis in the
TLC project suggests there are sharp tensions between professional and bureaucratic
notions of outcomes for learners and how they might be measured and expressed.
Overall, the sheer range and diversity of conceptions of learning made it very difficult
to apply the mapping activities we devised within the Learning Outcomes Thematic
Group (also described in the M. James & Brown article). In the attempt, it quickly
became apparent that even if we confined our attention to student learning outcomes,
the TLC project’s sixteen initial learning sites could provide sixteen quite different
sets of responses across the matrix of metaphors and classifications. The picture
became unwieldy if we included learning outcomes for teachers, managers, colleges
and researchers, all of which feature in the project. The net result was that the matrix
helped us to see the variety of learning outcomes in FE, but did not give us ready
purchase on how the TLC project was engaging with the TLRP aim of ‘improving
outcomes for learners’. To gain an appreciation of this requires a little further
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conceptual discussion and then some illustration of the kind of analysis that is under
way within the project.
The importance of outcomes for learners
Learning outcomes are as important in FE as they are in other parts of the educational
world. Awarding bodies produce documents specifying in detail what it is intended
that learners will know, understand or do by the time they have completed a course or
part of a course. Assessment tasks and processes are, at least in theory, designed so
that they measure these learning outcomes; and arrangements for moderation,
verification and external examining, together with aspects of internal and external
quality assurance, attend directly to this relationship.
Learning outcomes also appear to have a pivotal position in regard to the legitimacy
of qualifications. The National Qualifications Framework (NQF) sets out the nine
levels2 at which qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland can be
recognized and it explains how they relate to one another. The Qualifications and
Curriculum Authority website says that
The positioning of qualifications at the same level only indicates that they are broadly
comparable in terms of general level of outcome; it does not indicate that they have the same
purpose, content or outcomes
and
The NQF is supported by level descriptors, which have been produced as a working draft.
These offer broad descriptions of learning outcomes at each level, which represents (sic) a
common standard met by all qualifications. (QCA, 2004, p. 3, emphasis added)
There would seem to be a problem with the expression of a standard in the form of a
‘working draft’ of indicators that are ‘not intended to be precise or comprehensive’
(ibid.). However, that aside, it is clear that conceptions of learning outcomes are
central to the NQF, the key mechanism for making sense of the multiplicity of
qualifications. In one sense they are a precursor to it, yet in another they are
dependent upon it.
Learning outcomes are also important at a more intimate level. It almost goes
without saying that it is generally desirable for learners, and those who work with
them, to be able to identify and communicate, in recognizable terms, what has been
learnt or done in the name of learning. The means for this are wide-ranging, from the
smallest summary by a tutor on a record of achievement or report, through to a
certificate marking the successful completion of a qualification. Some kinds of data
on the outcomes of learning are also of crucial importance for institutions and the
people in them, including learners, because they play a key role in systems for funding
and quality assurance, or are important to reputation (and therefore market position)
in a highly competitive context.
A diversity of purposes and ways of working in the FE sector gives rise to a
wide range of formally acknowledged outcomes that sit alongside one another.
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These do not just differ in terms of a construction of ‘level’, but also in the
nature of the content and process of learning that they articulate, and in terms of
what counts as recognized evidence of their attainment. Even within one course,
it is quite common to find ‘process’ learning outcomes (e.g. in the area of
developing effective teamworking) alongside others that express propositional
knowledge (e.g. a knowledge of some legislation and how it applies). Both these
could be assessed in a combination of examinations and coursework assignments,
with or without an element of peer assessment. However, in addition to
recognizing variety along these lines we must add that, generally speaking, any
formalized learning activity usually has a vast range of outcomes for learners.
What is learnt will vary in terms of how intended or unintended it is, how
explicitly acknowledged it is, by whom it is acknowledged, how readily it can be
measured and communicated, its perceived importance to the different parties
involved, how long it remains significant (or its ‘shelf life’), the language in which
it is expressed, its possible psychological categorizations and perhaps even how
welcome or otherwise it is in the eyes of learners. The outcomes of a learning
process will also vary in terms of what ‘slice’ of them come to be reified in the
form of qualifications. Furthermore, the very process of qualification-taking is
itself likely to generate significant learning, especially where it is clearly associated
with either ‘success’ or ‘failure’. Here there will be learning outcomes for learners,
but also for staff, institutions and others.
In a sense, the foregoing is not much more than a statement of the obvious, yet it is
a necessary reminder, for three reasons. First, the extent to which qualifications
provide adequate coverage of those outcomes deemed necessary, desirable or
significant is an issue of constant debate and change. Learning outcomes are part of
the politics of qualifications. The so-called Great Debate, initiated by Callaghan’s
Ruskin College speech in October 1976, is just one celebrated moment in an
otherwise ongoing struggle at the intersection of differing interests, in which
educational processes and products are seen as key factors in how well the economy
responds to new forms of competition and new, global configurations (see Brown &
Lauder, 1997). Second, there is a tendency for common-sense notions of teaching
and learning to simplify the outcomes of learning so that they conform to an
‘acquisition of knowledge’ model:
the basic structural formula of learning, ‘transmit – internalize – transfer – apply’ pre-
supposes the existence of special, secluded institutional arrangements. Nevertheless, this
theory of learning does not allow us a full grasp of the significance of these institutional
arrangements for learning nor of learning in these arrangements. (Dreier, 2001, p. 23)
This is a problem if we are genuinely interested in the nature of learning and its
outcomes for learners. Moreover, the basic formula Dreier has identified implies a
time-scale so that, at some point, certain outcomes take on the role of performance
indicators for the efficiency or otherwise of a ‘knowledge acquisition’ learning
process. Yet, as Strathern reminds us within her broader critique of contemporary
accountability:
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Learning may manifest itself weeks, years, generations, after teaching, and may manifest
itself in forms that do not look like the original at all. However ‘direct’ a teacher may be in
his or her presentation, the student’s experiences will introduce his or her own
‘indirection’. (Strathern, 2000, p. 318)
Third, we should note that on a day-to-day basis, we hear much more about some
outcomes than others. For secondary schools, there appears to be more political and
public (or at least media) interest in league table positions than in any of the many
other possible (and arguably, more interesting and informative) articulations of the
results of learning. In FE, which is now part of the Learning and Skills Sector,
outcomes in the form of qualifications have been tightly linked to funding in the systems
operated by the national Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and its predecessor
bodies, the Further Education Funding Council and the Training and Enterprise
Councils. In the 1990s, funding for FE and adult provision was almost entirely
dominated by an outcomes (qualifications) orientation, with courses only approved
for public funding where they led to recognized qualifications. Qualifications
outcomes remain dominant in funding mechanisms despite some loosening under
the current LSC regime, which once again allows non-certificated learning to qualify
for funding (LSC, 2002b).
The impotence of learning outcomes
So far we have been using the terms learning outcomes and outcomes for learners almost
interchangeably and without much attempt at precision, and a range of meanings is
already apparent. The following discussion demonstrates the need for more care if we
seek a subtle understanding of the issues. Two examples from the post-compulsory
sector are worth highlighting because they flesh out two prevalent directions of
development. The first is the case of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs),
where a core philosophy acknowledges the outcomes of learning only when they
coincide with statements of performance, or competence. The second is the case of
parts of UK HE, where a broader notion of learning outcomes has rapidly taken root.
Arguably, the most closely defined of all learning outcomes are vocational
competences as they were developed under the NVQ framework from the mid-1980s.
The process by which these were produced was highly systematized, incorporating
functional task analysis and a close proximity to relevant work environments and
employer interests in each vocational area. However, the process was at the same time
underpinned by a deep conviction that competences were a form of outcome that, by
measuring task performance, could subsume everything that mattered in vocational
learning. There was, accordingly, an insistence that assessment could be divorced
from learning and that the recognition of competence could break free of ‘time-
serving’ (James & Diment, 2003). This technicist solution was both confident and
powerful, though it is now widely recognized to have been too simplistic. Warnings
about behaviourist reductionism (e.g. Hyland, 1994, 1997), and about an over-
reliance on performance evidence at the expense of capability evidence (e.g. Eraut,
1994), were not heeded as early as they might have been, and both have subsequently
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turned out to have been fully warranted. It is significant that current policy in the area
of vocational programmes, with the idea of (modern) apprenticeship as a flagship, has
strong programme and curriculum process elements rather than relying on a pure
outcomes-based approach (Oates, 2004).3
It would be difficult to underestimate the impact of the rise of competence-based
assessment on the shape of post-compulsory education and training since the second
half of the 1980s. It is not only occupationally specific learning that has felt the effects
of the specification of outcomes as competences and the ‘comprehensive’ approach to
assessing them (Jessup, 1991). General National Vocational Qualifications, too, were
built upon a problematic importation of the model from NVQs (Oates, 1997) and
were characterized by a separation of the learning process or programme from the
assessment specification, leaving providers, for a time, a great deal of scope in how
they designed, arranged and ‘delivered’ their provision (Higham, 2002). Tarrant
(2000) has tried to take stock of the many criticisms of competence-based assessment,
classifying these as epistemological, ethical or political. He suggests that while
objections under the latter two are not ‘fatal’ and could be met through various
reforms, competence-based assessment suffers from a fundamental epistemological
flaw. It combines two incompatible views of knowledge and meaning that together
produce ‘incoherence’:
Underpinning knowledge, associated with knowing that something is the case, is a
function of mental terms as inner causal entities, whereas performance jargon equates
knowledge with the doing of a certain operation. . . .The scheme is defining knowing both
as an inner causal concept and then denying any inner causal role by stipulating knowing
as an overt performance. (Tarrant, 2000, pp. 79–80)
Statements of competence are one of the most widely used conceptions of learning
outcomes in FE, albeit by another name. They also appear in some parts of HE,
usually in combination with other types of outcome and assessment criteria.
However, a broader concept of learning outcomes has quickly become established
across the length and breadth of the HE landscape. Learning outcomes are now a
cornerstone in processes and systems that are designed to assure the quality of
teaching, learning, the curriculum and assessment, and upon which various crucial
funding and reputational consequences may follow (QAA, 2001). One prevalent
version of learning outcomes may be seen in the Quality Assurance Agency’s subject
benchmark statements, against which undergraduate honours degree courses are
referenced, with the purpose of guaranteeing a baseline or threshold specification of
standards. But beyond this, courses of study leading to a qualification are now
specified in publicly available documents called Programme Specifications, and these
list course content, via learning outcomes, with the intention of making funded
provision more visible and transparent. There is now considerable developmental
activity in the sector to support the writing of learning outcomes and to locate them
within an expanding curriculum methodology which also includes assessment criteria,
five level descriptors (first year undergraduate to doctoral, and which match the top five
levels of the NQF mentioned earlier) and four types of skill and knowledge (e.g.
subject-specific knowledge and understanding; cognitive/intellectual skills; key/
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transferable skills; practical skills). The notion of constructive alignment4 provides
one key theoretical underpinning (see Biggs, 2003; also Cuthbert, 2002). Never-
theless, the various terms overlap so much that even the most well-developed
description of their relationship can leave the reader bemused (see, for example,
Moon, 2002).5 Both the causes and consequences of the rise of learning outcomes in
HE have been the subject of some fierce debate and sharp disagreement (see, for
example, Avis, 2000; Barnett, 2000; Jackson, 2000).
One contemporary critique argues that learning outcomes are problematic because
far too much is expected of them. Hussey & Smith (2002) focus on the HE context to
argue that, although learning outcomes can be useful, their adoption for the purposes
of control has distorted them so that they become vacuous and at best useless, at
worst damaging. The key objections are (1) that learning outcomes have a largely
spurious clarity, explicitness and objectivity;6 (2) that they bring to bear an
unwarranted homogeneity across academic disciplines, which have within them
different ideas of level and necessarily different concepts of what skills are appropriate
at what stage;7 (3) that they can, and in all likelihood do, restrict learning, either by
helping students to aim only for threshold passes, or by undervaluing all-important
emergent, less predictable educational outcomes through an apparent commodifica-
tion of knowledge. Hussey & Smith also suggest that the requirement on academics to
write learning outcomes is often an instruction to do the impossible, to turn Ryle’s
‘knowing how’ into his ‘knowing that’ (i.e. turning process knowledge into a
propositional form). The resulting statements are often bland, so as to avoid storing
up trouble. In a subsequent paper the same authors go on to advocate a different
model which allows for unintended as well as intended learning outcomes (Hussey &
Smith, 2003). Recent research within TLRP has begun to illustrate the nature and
significance of disciplinary differences and identities in ‘ways of thinking and
practising’ in HE learning, and something of the distance between these and the
requirement to use precisely defined learning outcomes which have the potential to
limit student understanding (see Entwistle, in this issue, p. 76).
Given that some contemporary conceptions of learning outcomes are problematic,
there can be a further layer of difficulty if we burden learning outcomes with being a
primary indicator of ‘improvement’. This point holds even in the most favourable
circumstances. For example, if someone thinks that GCSE grades per se are the
learning outcomes that matter most for a particular phase of schooling, then they are
unlikely to take much note of genuine improvements in learning that, it so happens,
leave grades much the same as they were before. Let us imagine that the GCSE was in
mathematics, and that the improvement in question was a change in teaching
approach that involved students making more links with critical thinking skills, or
perhaps becoming more imaginative in how they could apply mathematical thinking
to other areas of their lives. Clearly, it would be foolish to discount these
improvements on the grounds that they were difficult or impossible to trace in rising
GCSE grades. This is a simple example but it illustrates a real difficulty. To define
learning outcomes is to define what does and does not count as evidence of worthwhile
learning, and it is a political as well as a technical act, revealing not only a set of values
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but also to whom and to what we are prepared to listen when we seek evidence of
learning. If learning outcomes are defined too broadly, they lose their capacity to
assist in comparison across cases and over time. Defined too narrowly, they become
impotent, in the sense that they refer to so little of a de facto learning process that they
are simply uninformative, powerless to generate or even signal improvement.
The discussion thus far suggests that, for educational researchers, the term ‘the
outcomes of learning’ (or alternatively ‘outcomes for learners’) is helpful. Some of the
outcomes of learning come to be defined—by agencies or individuals—as learning
outcomes, and these are also likely to be useful in understanding learning processes.
However, educational researchers are likely to gain from ‘unpacking’ the process of
reification that leads from ‘outcomes for learners’ to ‘learning outcomes’. There is no
shortage of research and writing that can help in this task and in the maintenance of
the necessary criticality, especially in the area of debates about curriculum models
and educational ideologies.
Learning outcomes and the outcomes of learning: examples from the TLC
project
The core aims of the TLC project are to (1) deepen understanding of the complexities
of learning, (2) identify, implement and evaluate strategies for the improvement of
learning opportunities, and (3) set in place an enhanced and lasting capacity among
practitioners for enquiry into FE practice. The project combines detailed qualitative
case-studies with extensive questionnaire surveys, and a resourced partnership
between HE-based researchers and FE-based practitioners as researchers. In taking a
cultural approach, the TLC project gives attention to the dispositions and practices of
students and tutors and more ‘structural’ features such as management, funding and
quality regimes. In short, a learning culture is not just a ‘context’ for learning, but the
set of social practices through which people learn (i.e. the ‘participation metaphor’
explored by M. James & Brown in this issue). This approach takes actual practices as
its starting point and seeks in the first instance to understand such matters as ‘what
practices go on in the name of learning in this situation?’ and ‘what tutor
interventions can be made in the name of improvement, and what are the
consequences?’ 8
From the earliest stages, the analysis in the TLC project confirmed that an
enormous range of outcomes are deemed important by teachers, learners and
managers. We anticipated something of this range because it was articulated in the
consultation and discussion processes leading up to the writing of the original
proposal.9 The range encompasses outcomes as diverse as: ‘attending regularly’ (a
major achievement in some ‘special needs’ provision); ‘shopping independently’ (a
milestone for some of the newer asylum seekers on an ESOL [English for Speakers of
Other Languages] course); and ‘understanding the concept of cognitive dissonance’
(part of an Advanced level psychology syllabus). In short, FE appears to embrace and
acknowledge many subtle shades and combinations of participation and acquisition
outcomes, even if we only focus upon those outcomes of learning that enjoy an
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‘official’ status. Adding to this the other outcomes of learning that tutors or learners
declare are important to them, we can safely say that all the conceptions of learning
discussed by McGuiness and by Edwards (in this issue) are represented in some
form.
As may be expected from a cultural approach, the outcomes that are of interest
in the project range from the smallest shift in a skill or in knowledge through to
quite major shifts in perspective or life-chances. Thus, in one of its core case-
studies, the project studies learning in a college-based vocational course for
nursery nurses, known as CACHE (Council for Awards in Childcare and
Education). It seeks to understand ‘vocational becoming’, or how this formal
provision works in the socialization and identity-formation of young people, in
relation to vocational culture. We use a concept of synergy as part of a cultural
analysis ‘across the project’. In the CACHE site, there was a high level of
congruence between the nature and context of the learning opportunities and the
subject-matter to be learnt. Yet while we can be fairly certain that this kind of
synergy does contribute to successful learning, the sorts of things that are being
learnt may be highly problematic:
In the CACHE course, linked in as it was to the vocational habitus of the childcare
profession, issues of female gender stereotyping, emotional labour, low status and poor
pay were enshrined and unchallenged, and learned by the students (Colley et al., 2003).
Only in the area of equality of opportunity related to ethnicity did a combination of tutor
commitment and government legislation facilitate any sort of critical challenge to the
status quo. In entry-level drama, the price (of high synergy) was the further isolation of
the students from the rest of the college and the local community, and the reinforcement
of their dependency. . . . Furthermore, in most synergistic sites, that very synergy was
constructed at a cost to some students, through subtle processes of exclusion, to remove
some sources of divergence and possible tension. (Hodkinson et al., 2004, p. 12)
The outcomes of learning can therefore be numerous, well evidenced and high
volume, but still give significant cause for concern. Given the earlier argument
about the dominance of qualifications as learning outcomes, however, what of
conventional outcome measures? These also figure prominently in the TLC
project, both as general context and for the part they play in systems of
management and quality. Often they are helpful in our attempts to understand
learning cultures and practices and the ways in which these are transforming or
may be transformed. However, they can also make it more difficult to see beyond
appearances, as the following example illustrates.
One of the TLC ‘learning sites’ is a college-organized but workplace-based
assessment process in the field of Business Administration at NVQ levels 2 and 3.
In terms of conventional measures (i.e. completion and pass rates), this process is
highly successful. It is also described in very positive terms by the students
themselves, who as well as picking up the qualification, generally gain in
confidence, self-awareness of capability, and have improved promotion prospects.
We have evidence that much of this success may be attributed to the practices of
the tutor, who works in well-established ways that are nevertheless well beyond her
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job specification. However, the tutor’s actions are progressively and increasingly
denied by regimes of funding, staffing and quality assurance, because the cost of
them cannot be realized in the highly competitive market of assessing workplace
competence. As a consequence, these successful pedagogic practices appear to
have been ‘taken underground’ by the tutor in order that they might survive.
Rather than resources, recognition or even institutional acknowledgement, what
supports and sustains the tutor’s practices is a set of professional values and habits
that are deeply rooted in the tutor’s own educational and professional history (part
of what we call tutor disposition).
In this case, conventional outcome measures are a relevant part of the context
but are themselves quite unhelpful in terms of understanding and perhaps
improving learning. There is a real sense in which these outcomes actually mask
the institutional and structural problems that are making certain successful
teaching and learning practices unsustainable. Our evidence also suggests that this
is not an isolated case—that various forms of ‘underground working’ are deeply
entrenched in parts of further education colleges, and that these sometimes involve
tutors acting in opposition to college systems so as to achieve positive outcomes
for learners that would not otherwise be possible. Indeed, the tension can become
too great between (on the one hand) professionally informed tutor ambitions for
learners, and (on the other hand) the resource-driven changes in the organization
of learning. This happened in the case of a modern languages Advanced level
programme in one college, where an increasingly frustrated tutor decided that her
attempts to improve outcomes for learners, specifically through the use of the
target language to promote inclusivity, were rendered impossible when the college
instituted major reductions in contact time. She attributed her eventual resignation
to this change. Examples like this remind us not to oversimplify the nature of, and
scope for, tutor interventions for improvement. They also question the
comfortable simplicity of the idea that pedagogic research, if sufficiently rigorous,
can and will give dependable, universal recipes for change at the level of the
teacher (otherwise known as the ‘what works’ model) (see James & Diment,
2003).
Finally, it is worth noting that, in this project, students on courses are not the only
‘learners’ for whom there are significant outcomes of learning. The design of the
project includes an element of action research in respect of the college-based
participating tutors, all of whom have been keeping diaries and observing other tutors,
and some of whom have shared extracts more widely or contributed to joint project
publications of various types (see, for example, James, 2004). The learning outcomes
for tutors have been many and varied, and in some cases quite personally and
professionally profound. In two cases there are also demonstrable outcomes at the
level of the college. Ultimately, if the project is a success in its own terms, there will be
learning outcomes for students, teachers, managers, colleges and the policy
community, to say nothing of researchers. In this respect the TLC project shares
some goals with the four other TLRP projects in the field of FE and post-16
education.
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Conclusion
One of the difficulties that a cross-sectoral programme of educational research must
contend with is the way that terms and phrases have different currency and meaning
in different sectors. While the term ‘learning outcomes’ appears on some curricular
and other documents in FE, and refers to what students learn during (or by the end
of) a course of study, this meaning of the term is not the dominant one.10 The
dominant meaning in FE is what I have termed outcomes in the form of qualifications. In
July 2003 the Learning and Skills Council announced ‘sharp rises in learning
outcomes’ following the publication of figures showing that ‘success rates for further
education’ had risen from 59 to 65 per cent between the years 2000–01 and 2001–02.
For the LSC chief executive this information was indicative of the health of LSC
policies and systems. For the minister it was ‘a clear indication’ of rising standards
(LSC, 2003).
As was noted in the introduction, the improvement of outcomes for learners is one
of the core goals of the TLRP. Together with what we may term its ‘proximity to
practice’ and its wish to extend the range of academic disciplines involved in
educational research, a concern with learning outcomes is part of a distinctive
programme identity that speaks of the age and context into which the programme was
born.11 Clearly, however, this continues to beg the question as to what we mean by
learning outcomes.
The foregoing discussion suggests there is an important difference in connotation
between the term ‘the outcomes of learning’ and the term learning outcomes. The latter
is highly problematic and needs to be handled with caution. It has a deceptive
simplicity and all the appearance of a concept that ‘cuts to the chase’, that is focused
on ‘the bottom line’, and which refers to matters about which there is high consensus,
but in reality it is none of these things. Reality is more complex. The educational
landscape is characterized by a range of interests and values, policies and practices,
and few simple or straightforward alignments between government, agencies, schools,
colleges, teachers, parents, learners and so on. This complexity also gives rise to
differences in what outcomes of learning are seen as desirable and which are
celebrated, and by whom. Furthermore, some learning outcomes are legitimated,
resourced and communicated more willingly or readily than others—in other words,
questions of social difference, culture and power enter into any thorough
consideration of learning outcomes.
In educational research looking at FE and post-compulsory education, just as
much as with other phases/sectors, it is crucial for researchers to understand (and
where possible articulate) the relationship their work has to this series of interests and
the various definitions of learning and learning outcomes that are located with those
interests. Researchers can and should be expected to do work that will contribute to
the improvement of outcomes for learners. Crucially, this is not the same thing as
automatically gearing educational research effort to contemporary, dominant
definitions of learning outcomes and attempting to cause an upward movement in
the indicators attached to them. Indeed, to operate as if this was fundamental or
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always necessary could be deemed an abuse of the resource and the trust that a
democratic society places in the hands of independent educational researchers—a
trust that is already dangerously eroded.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mary James, Tim Oates, Jonathan Simmons, Phil Hodkinson
and Denis Gleeson for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. I am also indebted
to the members of the Learning Outcomes Thematic Group within TLRP and all my
fellow team members in the TLC Project – Graham Anderson, Gert Biesta, Helen
Colley, Jennie Davies, Kim Diment, Denis Gleeson, Phil Hodkinson, Wendy Maull,
Keith Postlethwaite, Tony Scaife, Michael Tedder, Madeleine Wahlberg, and Eunice
Wheeler.
Notes
1. Such as projects funded by the Learning and Skills Council, the Learning and Skills
Development Agency, the Learning and Skills Research Centre and the Department for
Education and Skills.
2. The National Qualifications Framework was revised in the summer of 2004. The upper two of
the five levels in the framework were further subdivided, making a total of nine levels. The NQF
is expressed in a series of ‘level indicators’ which aim to give an indicative definition of the
general learning outcomes that may be expected at each level (see QCA, 2004).
3. Similar trends are visible in the National Curriculum, the National Numeracy and Literacy
Strategies and in other educational policy developments.
4. ‘Constructive alignment’ is Biggs’s term for a system for achieving an optimum alignment or
integration between the main components (the learning environment, activities, assessment and
learning outcomes) of a teaching and learning situation (Biggs, 2003). Its implications are both
radical and positive in situations where teachers have the opportunity to reshape the main
components. It is worth noting that this opportunity does not generally pertain in the FE sector.
Arguably, the scope for achieving constructive alignment in higher education diminishes as
there is growth in centralized specification of one sort or another.
5. Moon’s definition of learning outcomes is that they are statements about ‘what a learner is
expected to know, understand and be able to do at the end of a period of learning’ (2002, p.
12). Compare this to another source of guidance: Jenkins & Unwin (1996, p. 2) insist that ‘we
emphasize what students will be able to do. This distinguishes an approach based on learning
outcomes from one which uses more intangible ideas related to educational aims and
objectives. In the educational literature there are important debates about the differences
between objectives/outcomes and competences, but this introduction will not bother you with
these niceties. The key word is DO. . .’. This latter claim makes learning outcomes the
equivalent of competences, while implying it is safe to ignore such relationships between
different interpretations. Together, the two demonstrate the sheer breadth of meanings, even
from respected sources in just one sector of education.
6. Strathern (2000) makes a similar if more abstract point about ‘superclarity’ in respect of
systems of accountability.
7. See Entwistle, in this issue, for an explanation of how and why ‘it is becoming increasingly
difficult to make meaningful comparisons between learning outcomes even within the same
subject area and at the same level’ (Entwistle, p. 74).
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8. These two questions are indicative and illustrative, and represent a paraphrase of parts of
several of the project’s core research questions.
9. Prior to the submission of a proposal, the TLC project was discussed at some length with
established groups of FE practitioners who were already interested and/or engaged in some
form of research. This ‘proximity to practice’ is also reflected in the design and operation of the
project. FE tutors and seconded part-time FE-based research fellows work with HE-based
research fellows and project co-directors in four FE/HE partnerships.
10. A Google search in early November 2004 found 404 direct ‘hits’ for the phrase ‘Learning
Outcomes in Higher Education’. The equivalent phrase ‘Learning Outcomes in Further
Education’ scored only four ‘hits’ and three of these referred, directly or indirectly, to one
TLRP project (i.e. Ivanic, Barton & Edwards’s Phase III project Literacies for Learning in
Further Education: LFLFE).
11. See M. James & Brown in this issue; see also Hodkinson & James (2003) for a brief contextual
account; and Grenfell & James (2004) for an attempt to understand this context via Bourdieu’s
concept of field.
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