The Learning Outcome that wasn’t on the Specification
My work has largely centred on helping adults develop the digital skills they need to move towards further learning and employment. Alongside my professional practice in further education and skills, I’m completing a Doctorate in Education exploring identity among young adults who have experienced being not in education, employment or training (NEET). This combination of practice and research has made me think more carefully about what learners gain from education beyond the outcomes we formally set out to achieve.
We don’t tend to include learning objectives like this in digital skills programmes. The formal outcomes, understandably, tend to focus on what learners should know and be able to do, for example, building webpages, writing code, and demonstrating their technical skills. But my research has made me increasingly interested in another kind of learning taking place alongside those things. Changes in how learners see themselves.
My doctorate explores identity among young adults who have experienced being not in education, employment or training (NEET), while participating in a digital skills programme. Many had prior negative educational experiences that shaped how they saw themselves as learners. My research asks what happens to those identities when they re-enter education in a different environment.
Learning, but also becoming
We often think of education as acquiring something. Learners gain knowledge, develop skills or achieve qualifications. In vocational education, we might also expect them to progress into further training or employment. While all of these things matter, research has long suggested that learning is not only about acquiring skills and knowledge, but also a process of “becoming” (Colley et al., 2003).
Research with vocational learners has shown how new educational environments can challenge earlier identities associated with failure and disengagement, particularly through experiences of belonging and participation (Hegna, 2019). There is a subtle but important difference between being able to say, “I have learned some code” and beginning to think “I am someone who can code”. For somebody who has previously believed that education, technology or a particular career is “not for people like me”, that shift can be significant.
Other research suggests that vocational learning environments can provide opportunities for learners to reconsider previous assumptions about their own ability and capability (Tarabini et al., 2022). For one participant, positive feedback became a turning point in their view of their own ability. They stated, “It started to click – like, I can actually do this.” The learning wasn’t only providing new evidence of technical ability. It was providing new evidence about who they might be capable of being.
Other accounts from my research point towards the importance of achievement, positive feedback, relationships and belonging. One participant described the significance of winning a hackathon as “the first prize I won”. These experiences might seem relatively small compared with the formal outcomes of a programme, but to the learner, they can carry a different kind of meaning.
What do we count as success?
This raises an uncomfortable question for those of us working in further education and skills. What counts as a successful outcome?
We are understandably interested in things we can evidence and measure. Did the learner complete? Did they achieve the qualification? Did they progress into further learning? Did they get a job? Those measures tell us important things. But they don’t necessarily tell us everything education has done. A learner might leave a programme having developed technical skills and seeing themselves as more capable than when they arrived. They might have experienced a sense of belonging in education, where previously they had felt excluded. They might begin to imagine a career that had previously seemed inaccessible. None of those things guarantees progression.
In fact, that tension has also been apparent in my research. Participants can describe significant positive changes during education yet still encounter barriers afterwards. One participant described completing the programme positively only to feel “back at square one” when faced with the job market. That doesn’t make the learning meaningless. But neither should positive personal change allow us to ignore the structural barriers learners continue to encounter.
Not everything valuable needs another KPI
I’m not suggesting that we add “develop a new learner identity” to every scheme of work or create another spreadsheet for tutors to complete. Trying to turn every meaningful educational experience into another measurable outcome may miss the point. But perhaps we could become better at noticing these changes and creating the conditions for them to happen.
That might mean thinking about how learners experience feedback and achievement. It might mean paying attention to whether they feel they belong in our classrooms. It might mean recognising the significance of a learner beginning to participate, take risks or talk differently about what they could do next.
And it might mean occasionally looking beyond whether a learner has met the outcomes we wrote for them and asking what learning has come to mean to them. When a learner says, “I can actually do this”, they may be telling us something important about what education has achieved.
Even if it wasn’t on the specification.
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