Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
j.s.daniel@open.ac.uk
Let me begin by welcoming you to the Open University. This is a very appropriate venue for a meeting of the Milton Keynes Economic Partnership because the Open University has had a very successful economic partnership with Milton Keynes for thirty years.
This year on April 23, which is also St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s birthday, we shall celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the awarding of our Royal Charter. 1969 was an important year in other respects. It was the year in which Milton Keynes was opening for business. Although the infant Open University was housed in London, in Belgrave Square, it was clear to the founding Vice-Chancellor, Walter Perry, that the new institution had to move out of London to site that would allow expansion.
Various sites were considered and Jock Campbell, the chair of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, started to court the OU and encourage it to come here. But there was a problem. The Open University had been formally created by Harold Wilson’s Labour government and a Royal Charter had been granted. However, the first intake of students would not occur until 1971 and before that a general election loomed. There were mutterings in the Tory party that if they won the election they would commit infanticide on the baby Open University because it represented a silly idea by a Labour government. Anyway, the press and the educational establishment were almost unanimously hostile to the idea of the Open University and said it would never work.
So when Jock Campbell proposed to the MKDC that it make available a choice site at Walton Hall for the Open University some of his more timid colleagues demurred. What would happen if the Tories did come to power and did abolish the OU just as Milton Keynes had given it a key place in the new city? After some discussion it was agreed that Jock Campbell should go and call the shadow minister of education, Edward Boyle, on the phone and ask him to clarify Tory intentions. Campbell did so and in their one-to-one conversation Boyle apparently left him in no doubt that if the Tories won the OU would be for the chop.
Campbell came back into the board meeting. His colleagues looked at him expectantly. “What did he say?” “He said there is no problem”, replied Campbell. The rest is history. Margaret Thatcher saw off those who wanted to close the OU. Since 1970 the Open University and Milton Keynes have grown up together and today the OU is one of MK’s largest employers and still very much a growing employer. When I arrived as Vice-Chancellor in 1990 the OU employed 2911 full-time staff, of which 2254 are here in Milton Keynes. Today those figures are 3726 and 2585. In other words, we have added 815 full time posts so far this decade, a nice contribution to the growth of MK.
Jock Campbell gained considerable benefits for Milton Keynes by discounting the pessimists about the OU. Some who took the pessimists seriously lost nice opportunities to make money. Let me give one illustration. Universities hold degree ceremonies at which students put on their academic gowns and come to receive their awards. Most universities sub-contract to a robe-making firm the task of providing the gowns and renting them to students. The OU decided to follow this practice. However, the main robe-making firm declined the business, saying that the OU seemed to them an iffy proposition. They were not prepared to invest in making hundreds of academic gowns for a university that might not be around too long.
So my founding predecessor, Walter Perry, said he would buy the gowns and the University would rent them to the students itself. That’s what happened. Although we don’t overcharge the students it has become a nice little earner over the years. The robe-making company has tried several times to get the business back but we are happy with things as they are. It’s a considerable operation. This year the Open University will award around 17,000 degrees and diplomas and we do that at twenty-five ceremonies all over the UK as well as in Dublin, Brussels and Singapore.
Those ceremonies are very relevant to the subject of today’s symposium Maximising Participation. I officiate at many of our degree ceremonies, which means that each year I have the opportunity to talk individually to at least 5,000 new graduates.
I greatly enjoy those individual chats. People who have successfully completed a course of learning all seem to find that it was worthwhile, some find, perhaps to their surprise, that it was also enjoyable. And a considerable number find that it was a life-changing experience.
Two years ago I spoke at the award ceremony at Milton Keynes College. It was just the same feeling and the context was even more relevant to our meeting today because these were the ordinary people of Milton Keynes, some of whom had achieved extraordinary things against all the odds.
Some came to the College soon after school. They had lived and learned in school and their work at the College was a continuation of the habits of study they had acquired. But most of the award winners had lived for some years outside the school classroom before coming to study at the College.
They lived - and they learned. One of the things they learned was that we live in an age where knowledge and skills are more important to life than ever. They decided to enhance their knowledge and skills by coming to the College and they found, maybe to their surprise, that they were very good at learning, quick at acquiring new knowledge, and proficient in the practice of new skills.
For some of those award winners life had not been easy. Life as a single parent can be difficult; life in prison can be distressing; life with a disability can be daunting. Yet from the challenges of life the Milton Keynes College award winners had gained a determination to succeed and improve themselves. That determination carried them through. They succeeded; they improved themselves, first of all as people and secondly for their work.
They had also learned that there was still a lot more to learn. They had learned that live and learn is not just a cliché. We all have so much more to learn but we often need help to define those needs and to satisfy them. Schools, colleges and universities are there to provide that help and they deserve the support of employers.
That leads me to another observation. As the head of the Open University I get invited to other kinds of award ceremonies in Milton Keynes as well. The purpose of some of those ceremonies is to give prizes to companies and organisations for their exceptional success in business.
What I notice is that the same names recur time and again. The firms who sponsor awards at Milton Keynes College or at the OU also win prizes in their own right for their own performance as companies. That is no coincidence. They invest in their own people and they invest in the wider community.
We live and learn is a very old proverb, expressing the reality that we never stop learning. We are all curious and we all react to the world around us. Living and learning is natural.
What is unnatural is that for the last hundred years we've gradually developed a system that seemed to concentrate all the learning into the early years of life. To introduce universal systems of schooling, first at primary and then at secondary level, was undoubtedly a great advance for civilisation in this country. But it had a downside.
It tended to give the idea that learning is what you do before you reach 16; and living is what you do afterwards. The assessment systems in schools seemed to reinforce this. How well you learned in school, and how well you did in the various tests and exams, seemed to determine how richly you could live for the rest of your life.
It also determined how easily you could learn later in life, because when you applied to a college or university in order to learn something new, people would ask to see your record from school. The result was to create in Britain a society where most people were not able to achieve their full potential as learners.
Furthermore, and this is a key issue for us today, too many people not only failed to achieve their potential but hated the schooling process, escaped from it as quickly as they could, and vowed to avoid anything called education and training for the rest of their lives. Instead of creating lifelong learners we created lifelong hostility to learning.
In this respect, as you heard from Michael Geddes, Milton Keynes has nothing to be proud of. In terms of school results and other indicators our youngsters are consistently below the national average. They don’t do as well at GCSE; fewer of them continue in training or full-time education after they leave school; and they are off school more. When they go to college they drop out more often.
To some extent, of course, this is simply the flip-side of the strong Milton Keynes economy and the rapid growth of the city. I saw the same phenomenon earlier in my career when, in 1977, I moved in Canada from Quebec to the western province of Alberta. The oil boom was in full-swing and people were moving into Alberta at the rate of hundreds a week. Some were drawn towards the vigorous economy, others were fleeing disagreeable personal circumstances for a new life. For many it was both.
So the social system was under strain. It takes time to integrate into a new community. It takes time for a new community to build up relationships with and between its members. But at least there was work and the money that went with it. Milton Keynes is a bit like that.
Those who have jobs, even if their education and training is poor, usually have the chance to realise their missed potential and to do something about it. And, of course, Milton Keynes most famous industry, the Open University, was created to provide an answer for people all over the UK when the penny dropped and they realised that for them a university education would be both possible and useful if they could do it without quitting work.
The revolution that the Open University began thirty years ago is now being carried forward on a much broader front. Thirty years ago Lord Crowther, the OU’s first chancellor, announced that the OU’s mission was to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, and open as to ideas.
The OU swept away the idea of pre-requisites for university study. If you want to learn the OU simply says 'first come, first served'. It takes learning right into people's home. It harnessed the new technology of television to university teaching - and today it leads the world in the application of the new knowledge media to lifelong learning. There are 50,000 OU students on-line right now and they exchange 200,000 electronic messages every day.
It has been a revolution on a massive scale. In 1963, when Harold Wilson first launched the idea of the Open University in a speech in Glasgow, there were 130,000 students in all British universities put together. This year there are over 150,000 in the Open University alone.
Even more importantly, there has been a huge expansion of other institutions, like Milton Keynes College, that also cater to people after they have finished their formal schooling. We are still behind most other advanced nations, but I think we are finally starting to catch up. The penny has finally dropped that what counts for success for a modern democracy is not the qualifications of the few, but the education and training of the many.
All of you here are believers in education and training. Here are two interesting statistics. I give them not to convince you, but to help you convince others. The first relates to individuals. There's a study which shows that for every year of additional education or training you acquire beyond school, you increase your earning power by 16%. Over a lifetime 16% for each added year of education amounts to a lot of money and a better life. What other investment today yields 16% and is safer than Internet shares?
The second figure relates to the community. Research has shown that if the workforce in one community has, on average, one year more of education than the workforce in another, the first community will be 2.3% more productive. Now 2.3% may not sound like much, but these are figures that make companies decide to invest in one region rather than another.
A University has to have a motto. My founding predecessor, Walter Perry, liked things simple. When the OU needed a logo he just put an 'O' inside a 'U' and gave us one of Britain's most recognised visual symbols. When the OU needed a motto he just turned around the proverb Live and Learn and came up with Learn and Live.
There's a deep truth in that, by learning we live richer lives. Often that means richer in money terms, but almost always it means richer in our enjoyment and appreciation of life. I know that because I've been told it by literally thousands of OU graduates in the last few years. Indeed, I think I have the best job in higher education in the world, simply because so many people tell me that study with the OU has changed their lives for the better.
My key message is that learning for living is more important than ever. You've heard people say that we live in an information age, that we are citizens of a knowledge society. What is certainly clear is that intellectual capital is now more important than other kinds of capital for many organisations. We’ve launched a new speciality of knowledge management within the OU Business School because for many companies managing their knowledge base well is crucial to success.
I believe that is particularly true for the companies in Milton Keynes. Whether they are in services or production they tend, almost by definition since MK is a new city, to be in the newer end of their business. They are advanced organisations. For most of them I suspect that the sum of everything that everybody in the firm knows is far more valuable than its fixed assets or the money it has in the bank. That is certainly true of the Open University, even though, I’m glad to say, we also have a respectable amount of money in the bank.
The true wealth of our age is knowledge and communication. That is the wealth that education and training is helping to create. But education and training is also the key by which people access this wealth for themselves.
The newspapers refer to our community as 'booming Milton Keynes'. It may not always feel like that but there is no doubt that for the quality and quantity of available work, and for the quality of life, Milton Keynes is in an enviable situation.
It’s easy for youngsters to get employment in Milton Keynes. But as they take each new job they should also think of themselves as self-employed participants in a market for work.
That means they are responsible for their own careers. That means they and we must keep our knowledge and skills fresh and new. I'm part of an older generation but that motto, Learn and Live, has been true for me too. I've had three careers, based on three very different sets of knowledge and skills. Counting only my full-time jobs I've worked for seven organisations in five political jurisdictions and in two languages.
I didn't plan it that way, but it was often the part-time courses I took, while I was working in one job, that took me to the next. Indeed, twenty-five years ago I came to Milton Keynes for the first time because I was required to do an internship for the part-time programme in educational technology that I was studying. I was working in Montreal, Canada at the time and after my summer at the Open University in MK I went back to Canada for another 18 years.
But the part-time study - and the opportunity to see the infant Open University at work - changed my life and set me off on a new career. I've continued to be a student for most of my life ever since and I'm sure that will be useful to me again when I finally decide what I want to do when I grow up. Right now, I’m just starting as a student on a new OU course delivered on the Web called You, your computer and the Net.
I’m afraid I’m not making a very good start because my laptop computer, on which I had loaded all the software for the course, died on me last weekend. I should say that it also died with my half-written address for this symposium inside it with no hard copies – so you’re getting a completely new speech!
Some people are surprised that the Vice-Chancellor of the Open University is himself a student, but they shouldn’t be. When we last surveyed OU graduates we found that 44% of them wanted to come back and take more courses. The more education and training you have, the more you want. That is the spirit of the age.
Which brings us to the focus of this symposium. What about those who haven’t entered into the spirit of the age? What about those who don’t have much education and training and certainly don’t think they want more?
In most parts of the country and the world that is a problem for them, because they are often unemployed, and a problem for the rest of the community, expressed through the state, which supports them through the welfare system.
In Milton Keynes it’s a bit different. Unemployment here is so low that we need these people in the labour force. Our motivation for bringing these people into the mainstream of life, what we have called maximising participation, may be pragmatic and economic, but it has profoundly moral consequences.
If we can pull off the challenge of getting the least educated members of our community onto to ladder of work, learning, and achievement the world will beat a path to our door. Employers need the labour but people need the work. In a welfare state they don’t need it primarily to earn a living but more profoundly because for most people it is through work that we find a role in the community, achieve fulfilment and gain self-respect.
I was struck, in the slides that Michael showed, by the data on changes in perception. The biggest improvement was in the image of Milton Keynes and North Bucks. The biggest decline was in the control of vandalism. What an interesting contrast! On the one hand our collective pride in MK is being projected successfully to the world outside. On the other hand the lack of pride that too many individuals have in themselves leads them to destroy or deface the community itself. I’m not a sociologist but vandalism must be a pretty good indicator of alienation.
It seems to me that what we have to tackle is that alienation. If we can crack that, and give people pride in themselves and in their community, I suspect that participation in the world of work will follow almost automatically. We shall soon have the carrots of individual learning accounts, the University for Industry, and a huge array of convenient training opportunities. There will also be some new sticks in the shape of changes to the welfare system that will make it harder to hide away on benefit.
But you’ve still got to get the horse to the water in which all these carrots and sticks are floating, if I may thoroughly mix up my metaphors. It seems to me that what employers do to strengthen the sense of community in Milton Keynes is just as important in reducing alienation as the initiatives that we take that are related directly to employment.
Let me conclude with a story. I am constantly struck by the great similarities and also the huge differences between Milton Keynes and the city I lived in before I came here in 1990, which was Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
The first similarity is that they are both the butt of media jokes, but for very different reasons. I still don’t quite understand why the media pick on MK, because it seems to me to be the most civilised place in Britain. I guess it’s jealousy, plus the fact that the British pretend only to like old things and have great difficulty coming to terms with success.
It was clear why the media picked on Sudbury. It was a metal mining town and seventy years of smelting nickel and copper had made the region a moonscape for miles around.
Like MK, Sudbury was very concerned with economic regeneration. The difference is that Sudbury has to diversify out of an old primary industry while MK is simply diversifying a very modern business base.
Another similarity is that both Sudbury and MK seem to have created very good networks among the movers and shakers. When I moved from Montreal to Sudbury in 1984 to head the local university I immediately found myself involved in their equivalent of the economic partnership. When I arrived here in 1990 I immediately found myself on the TEC board. There is a great dynamism, a spirit of get up and go in both places.
What Sudbury was also able to do, it seemed to me, was to harness the population at large to the challenge of development and image in ways that reduced alienation and heightened the sense of common purpose. A key vehicle for this was the regeneration of the environment, the idea being that making the area once again the pretty region of lakes and forests that it had been before the sulphur dioxide killed the vegetation was crucial to changing its image.
Inco, the nickel-mining company, changed it processes completely and built the world’s highest structure, Superstack, better to disperse a vastly reduced output of emissions. It immediately became Sudbury’s equivalent of our concrete cows, but that was fine, because it symbolised change. Then my University developed cheap and effective techniques to give mother nature a hand in revegetating the region. We found that scattering a mixture of lime and grass seeds on the rocky outcrops led very quickly to the greening of the landscape as growth started in the cracks and hollows.
So we divided up the region and each school took responsibility for an area. The kids would fan out over the moonscape with bags of lime and seed and scatter it around. The effect was dramatic. Each year the whole area was noticeably greener than the year before as trees and shrubs took hold. The lakes became less acid and fish counts rose steadily.
All this had a powerful effect in making Sudbury proud of itself and of making ordinary citizens feel that they were part of the process of change.
I realise that environmentally Milton Keynes is the exact opposite of Sudbury. We already have the most attractive urban environment in the country and kids would probably be arrested if they went around scattering grass seed among the concrete cows.
But there must be other ways of engaging people. And there are. I think it’s wonderful that the MK Council is holding a ballot on the level of the Council tax. Britain suffers from a serious democratic deficit at local level and this is just the kind of initiative to remind people that it is their community.
So what is my conclusion? Simply that bringing our less fortunate citizens into the mainstream of community and economic life is a hugely important goal. We are just lucky that we have bottom-line reasons for tackling it. If we can make headway, most especially if we can do something to socialise disaffected young males, we shall be national pacesetters. To succeed I suspect that we have to look beyond the purely economic factors by building up the cohesion and sense of identity of the community that is Milton Keynes. And, of course, if we succeed in that we shall further enhance the image of MK as the best place in Britain to live and work.
Thank you.