Flexible study opens doors

NEARLY four years ago, Alda McGregor, a secretary working for a community college in Cambridgeshire, started an open learning course in accountancy.

Mrs McGregor already had an aptitude for figures but wanted to get professional qualifications to expand her secretarial job into something with more responsibility. She enrolled on a distance learning course with the National Extension College leading to the AAT (Association of Accounting Technicians) Foundation Certificate and set aside six hours a week (one evening and Sunday morning) to master balance sheets and profit-and-loss accounts.

After a year off, she then took the intermediate course, which she has just completed, and hopes to move on to the more advanced course this year. All the hard slog ("It's been a tough and lonely road," she says) has reaped its rewards. She has been promoted and is now the finance administrator for the college. "I expanded the job and gradually took on more responsibility as I learned new skills. The carrot of promotion gave me the motivation to see it through - I never would have achieved all this without the qualifications."

She is one of 25,000 students taking courses through the National Extension College (NEC), one of the country's leading providers of distance learning materials and courses. Like many others, she needed a way of studying that was flexible enough to fit into her lifestyle as a mother-of-two with a full-time job. Open-learning students include people with irregular working patterns - nurses, lorry drivers, night security guards, actors and police officers - as well as people with nine-to-five jobs. Many find that studying at home offers both flexibility and a consistent standard of quality through the materials.

The Open University is the best known provider of open learning, largely thanks to the talents of Willie Russell, the writer, who gave it prime time exposure through the creation of a Liverpool hairdresser called Rita, who was transformed from ugly duckling to educated swan. The NEC is less well known, although equally well regarded. Like the Open University, it offers courses through distance learning, with self-study materials and a personal tutor who marks assignments and is at the end of a telephone. But unlike the Open University, students are in complete control of their own learning, can enrol at any time and pace their studies to fit in with other commitments. There are more than 150 courses, covering GCSEs and A-levels (by far the most popular courses), vocational and professional qualifications in areas such as accountancy, care, information technology and marketing, London University degrees, and a mixture of vocational and leisure-based courses in popular areas such as writing, publishing and counselling.

Mrs McGregor is, in many ways, a typical open-learning student - female, well educated (many are qualified to GCSE or A-level standard, or the equivalent), working in a white collar or professional job and living in southern England.

But the latest survey shows a subtle gender shift. In 1990, only 34 out of every 100 students were male; now males account for more than 40 per cent of all NEC students. There is also evidence that indicates that open learning is being used primarily for career advancement rather than to develop leisure interests. There is also, predictably, a correlation between people who use "open teaming" as it is known and people who shop by mail order.

Some further education colleges also report an increased interest in open learning and a change in the male-female gender balance. Last autumn Stockport College in Cheshire saw a 54 per cent increase in enrolments in "flexible teaming" programmes. "We have done little publicity, but the students have been flooding in. This year there are more than 3,000. It is a huge growth area," says Jackie Robinson, the manager of Flexible Learning Services. Forty per cent of open-learning students at the college are male, compared with 20 per cent three years ago. The reasons? Stockport is attracting more employer-sponsored students, and NEC is offering more courses leading to vocational and professional qualifications.

About 500 students at Stockport College are enrolled through a scheme called "flexiStudy", which was developed by NEC in 1978 and relaunched a year ago. More than 50 colleges are now involved in this form of study which is, essentially, a form of supported distance learning where students study at home but have the use of college facilities and tutors. Each student follows an NEC open-learning course in his or her own time and sees a tutor about once a month for a one-to-one tutorial. Students can also telephone tutors and receive marked assignments by post. Colleges pay NEC a fee of pounds 500 a year to join the scheme, which qualifies them for discounts and free preview packs.

Each college taking part in the scheme receives funding for each student from the Further Education Funding Council and is also able to charge appropriate fees.

Barnet College in north London, the college that originally developed the prototype of flexiStudy in the 1970s, has about 274 students on such courses (mostly (GCSEs and A-levels) using NEC materials. "A lot of students are people who want a fast-track route to a qualification in under nine months; others are people who cannot study on a regular basis at college because of family commitments or irregular work patterns. Then there are those we call "school refusers" who have had a bad experience at school, who dislike the idea of studying in groups," says Evelyn Thomas, the open- learning co-ordinator. "Many people lack confidence. A one-to-one relationship with the student helps build that confidence."