Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
<j.s.daniel@open.ac.uk>
All are united by the conviction that learning is at the heart of economic and social progress and is the key to economic and social regeneration. We are particularly pleased that our Secretary of State, David Blunkett, who has put lifelong learning at the centre of his agenda for education and training in Britain, will be along to talk to us this afternoon.
What is a learning city? You can interpret the term in several ways. Some cities require you to learn just to find you way around and many would say that Milton Keynes is top of that list. Those of us who live here are proud to be citizens of the roundabout capital of the world and its most successful planned new city. After eight years here I can consider myself an old Milton Keynesian, one of the advantages living in a new city, and I enjoy, without questioning them, the many stories about its development.
The planners had twenty square miles of Buckinghamshire countryside to play with and they set out to integrate the new and the old.
Where did the name come from? One Indian educational journal, waxing lyrical about the home of the Open University, claimed it was made by combining the name of a great English literary figure, John Milton, with the name of one of our greatest economists, John Maynard Keynes.
Those in favour of a close integration between monetary and fiscal policy think it is a blend of Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. Of course they are all wrong. In fact the village of Milton Keynes, from which the new city took its name, goes back to the 12th century.
Where did the roundabouts come from? That's easy. As the planners contemplated their task they would sometimes put their plastic coffee cups down on the huge map of their virgin territory. Sometimes this left a coffee ring, which the next planner took for a roundabout.
What about H and V. The planners designed Milton Keynes on a grid system. However, unlike the grid systems of cities in North America, where straight streets follow lines of latitude and longitude, Milton Keynes wanted to preserve the tradition of the rolling English drunkard making the rolling English road. So the roads of our grid system wind around.
In order to keep track of their work the planners used the notation H for Horizontal and V for Vertical on their own maps. I believe it was never intended that these annotations would be for public consumption but they proved essential for finding your way around.
At school you learned that parallel lines meet at infinity. In Milton Keynes infinity is Junction 14 on the M1, because that's where two Horizontal roads, H5 and H6 actually meet.
The distinction between horizontal and vertical roads was helpful to some people, but not to all. I learned in this learning city that when it comes to finding their way around, human beings split into two groups. Half of us navigate on the basis of mental map, so the idea of a grid system of H and V roads suited us fine.
But the other half of humanity finds its way around on the basis of landmarks, and they had a problem in Milton Keynes. We've done such a beautiful job of landscaping the city - with millions of trees planted over thirty years - that you can easily become confused. So in recent years we've given names to the roundabouts.
There must have been some good arguments over that. If you came here from the west via Buckingham the first roundabout you met has an identity crisis. It was first named Bottledump roundabout. I presume that some people must have complained that Bottledump was an inappropriately frivolous introduction to the Florence of the South Midlands because it was quickly changed to the Buckingham Roundabout. But then, after a few months, it went back to Bottledump again, which is what it is today.
I've no idea of the story behind the change, but I imagine that the local historians applied their learning to the issue and argued that the roundabout was the site of a very special and historic bottledump. So there we are. After all that I'd better urge you to drive carefully on the way out because I don't want you to get so involved in spotting roundabouts and H and V roads that you have an accident.
So there are cities that you have to learn to find your way around in.
Then there are cities of learning, also called seats of learning. I note that all the founding members of the Learning Cities Network have universities. Indeed, most of them have two universities, including, most surprisingly perhaps, Milton Keynes. I often think that of all the surprising developments in this remarkable city, none would have startled its founders more, coming back today, than the signs you see in the south east of the city to 'Universities' - plural. They take you to - you've guessed it - University Roundabout, where you find the Open University on one side and the local campus of De Montfort University on the other.
The story of the OU's location in Milton Keynes is interesting. The OU was being planned in the late seventies just as Milton Keynes was being created. The OU's founders had ambitions that required a bigger site than was available in London and Milton Keynes was keen to attract a potentially large employer in a brand new industry.
However, as the time came to consummate the deal that would locate the OU on the land around the old manor house of Walton Hall in 1969 an election loomed. Some Tories had made it clear that they would like to strangle Harold Wilson's infant Open University at birth, and at the key meeting of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation the more cautious members urged their chairman, the late Jock Campbell, to check out Conservative intentions.
The story is that he left the meeting and called the Tory spokesman on education, who confirmed that if the Tories formed the government they would indeed terminate the OU project. When Jock Campbell returned to the meeting his colleagues looked at him inquiringly. "What did he say?" "Oh, I couldn't reach him", said Campbell. The rest is history.
Milton Keynes became the proud home of one of Britain's most successful initiatives of the twentieth century. The Open University has been proud to become the largest employer in Britain's most successful new city. It has been a wonderfully symbiotic and synergistic relationship as city and university, town and gown, have grown to maturity together, learning from each other on the way.
When you visit The Point, our splendid multiplex cinema, today it is hard to imagine that twenty-five years ago the weekly showings of the Open University Film Club were the cinematic highlight of life in Milton Keynes. Equally those who set up the OU in those days could hardly have imagine that the postcode MK7 would be the world's most intensively used academic address.
Cities that require you to learn, cities of learning, but, finally, what about learning cities? This is something different again. How to create a city where learning, by all citizens, promotes the cultural, social and economic development of the city community, is what we have come to this conference to talk about.
We come together as a very different group of cities. The meaning of cultural, social and economic development is somewhat different as you move between them. Here in Milton Keynes we have an enviable rate of economic growth. That's good, but we also have the challenge of being the youngest city in Britain. I don't just mean a city recently created, but a community that leads the country in the proportion of the population under the age of 20.
That age profile means that Milton Keynes has to generate a large number of new jobs every year in order to give fulfilling work to all the young people coming into the workforce. Then because we are a new city, we have special social needs. Most people over 30 in Milton Keynes were born somewhere else. We are a national melting pot of immigrants and we want that melt to set into a vibrant, viable and interesting community with a good sense of itself.
Finally, we are still building our cultural and spiritual infrastructure, which gives us the chance to innovate. Our central church of Christ the Cornerstone was ecumenical from the start. Our new theatre is under construction and will be wonderful. We have set new standards in the use of parkland and the provision of pathways and cycleways.
All this requires us to work together and to learn together. I have been in Milton Keynes for eight years and I have been enormously impressed by its educational, economic and social networks and how easy it is to join them and get involved.
Each of your cities has its own context and its own needs and we look forward to hearing about the manifestations that the concept of a learning city takes in your community.
One thing I can say with pride and certainty. It is that in all you cities the Open University is playing a very important role in contributing to the web of learning. This year around a quarter of a million people have some learning link with the OU, and we have reached over two million people in the last quarter century. That means that about one adult in twenty, in each of your cities, has some link with the OU, and one in four knows someone who is or has been an OU student. Our television programmes reach millions every week and help, as our Royal Charter tells us, 'to promote the educational well-being of the community generally.
Today, of course, there are new technologies and the 40,000 Open University students who are now networked from home probably represent the world's largest academic community in cyberspace. Maybe we can help you to bring the benefits, the challenges, and the opportunities of learning in the online world to your community.
A final comment. This is the time of year when the Open University holds its degree ceremonies for graduating students. There are twenty-four ceremonies this year and a number of them are held in the cities represented here such as Birmingham, Derby and Edinburgh. I count it a great privilege to talk to thousands of our new graduate individually at these ceremonies. OU graduates represent a huge diversity of people. At all the ceremonies I attended recently, in Edinburgh, in Preston, in Harrogate and in Portsmouth, there was a spread of half a century in the age of the graduates. The youngest were in their mid-twenties; the oldest were in their mid-seventies.
One theme recurs again and again in what they say to me. It is that study and learning changed their lives. At first that seems odd, because these are, after all, mature people whose lives have achieved some stability. But that is really the point. Human life is a dynamic experience and, in this changing world, stability easily becomes stagnation. So learning is a life changing experience.
For some it has changed their prospects at work, led to a job, or to a new job. For others it is a gain in confidence that has led them so become more engaged in their communities. But even those who don't claim that OU study has helped their career, like our 7000 students over sixty, all express great satisfaction. They have gained new perspectives. They have proved to themselves that they can do something which a teacher told them fifty years ago they couldn't cope with. They have discovered a new interest. They have made new friends.
This is what we are all engaged in at this conference - changing lives for the better. I wish you all well with that noble endeavour in each of your learning cities and I thank you for coming to Milton Keynes to pool and build on your experience.
Thank you.