More humanity. More democracy.
I want to pass this on: A thoughtful, semi-fictional, epistolary film that discusses the practical meaning of André Gorz’s ideas, which were influenced by Marx, Sartre, Illich and others. More info here>
I find his distinction between heteronomous work and autonomous activity useful and first came across it when thinking through social solidarity co-operatives for higher education.
In September 2025, Gracie left home for university in London. Each month, I send her a ‘postcard from home’ about the places and words that have mattered to me. Sue contributes a small drawing, too. The gallery below will continue to expand through to 2028, when Gracie graduates. Click on an image to move back and forwards through the postcards.
I received this newsletter update yesterday from the Co-operative College:
“As you may be aware, the College has operated for several years without core or government funding. Despite everyone’s best efforts over the last 10 years to implement cost saving measures and diversify income generating work streams, the College has been unable to reach financial sustainability. Therefore, the Board have taken the decision to cease all learning delivery as of 1 August 2026, and transition to an unstaffed operating model which will allow us to optimise our remaining funds to continue to meet our charitable objects.”
More information can be found in the attached information pack.
Although I was aware there were financial problems at the College, the announcement that all staff will be made redundant by 31st July and that the continuation of the ‘Co-operative College’ name is uncertain, came as a surprise to me. I’ve not been involved in the College’s work since the centenary book chapter was published. It was a way of consolidating my involvement and moving on, while Mike Neary continued to work with them until he became ill. That was shortly after the College submitted an application to the OFS for degree-awarding powers in 2019.
The detail in the OFS application demonstrates that it was a sincere and serious attempt to re-orient and restructure the College towards a federated model of co-operative higher education. At that moment at least, the College was willing and felt able to put everything it had into the plan, but I understand that the pandemic created too much uncertainty for the College and the application was withdrawn. It would be a useful set of documents to make available for archival research and to enable open discussion about why the plans failed. What can we learn from this? In fact, the rise and fall of the Co-operative College is a PhD waiting to happen.
The new model for the Co-operative College is not the model those of us envisaged a decade ago, but the decent, charitable intentions are still there to create some kind of legacy and I hope the remaining staff at the College are able to move on to less precarious and more hopeful work. The last few years can’t have been easy for anyone.
Fundamentally, the reasons why we felt the need for co-operative higher education and the critique that a co-operative university was meant to institutionalise, have only become more evident and necessary in light of the predictable structural problems in UK higher education. The crises of capitalism continue to intensify and the scenario of ‘dissolution’ that we proposed seems to be happening without any effort, but not towards a more co-operative model of higher education or society as a whole.
On 9th November 2024, I began to clear the site for a timber-framed ‘annex’ that would replace an existing garden shed and provide an office for Sue. The project has carried me through the winter and was finished on Mother’s Day, 30th March. I spent every weekend, many early mornings and evenings and a couple of weeks’ annual leave to build it. Despite the lack of light through the winter months, which added to the urgency of each shortened day, there were also some of the most beautifully clear, crisp days that made the work effortless.
I had significant help from an old friend, Billy, without whom I may still be drawing up plans. Billy called in one day, after many years without seeing him, just as I was thinking about how to design the building and he offered to lend a hand. He put me in touch with his school friend Mark, who took my sketches and notes and created a set of technical drawings as well as a ‘cut list’ for the builder’s merchant. All of a sudden, I had a plan and the materials for the main structure, which we completed just before Christmas. Another of Billy’s friends, Jody, fibreglassed the roof in January, and Billy returned in February to help with the heavy lifting of the steel and larch cladding. My old school friend, Whitey, who I hadn’t seen for over a decade, completed the electrics in March. My friend from work, Rob, came for a day to help finish the office interior, which ended up taking us three days. It has therefore been a collaborative project but when people ask, ‘Did you build that?’ I can say I did. I have been consumed by every detail.
The annex is a 15m square, 2.5m high building, partitioned two thirds to the rear to provide a garden tool shed at the back and a comfortable office at the front. It is constructed using modern methods of timber-framing. The walls, for example, are built up of nine layers of materials: External cladding, horizontal and then vertical battens, breather membrane, ply sheathing, a timber frame filled with PIR insulation, a reflective air and vapour barrier and plywood internal walls finished with Danish oil. I enjoyed every stage of the construction except cutting the insulation and am pleased with the finished result, which should outlive me. Now, there’s a thought.
This mixed-methods research aimed to understand the extent to which staff of six schools in rural England, share, recognise and draw upon, their pupils’ experience within the household and community. Starting from the critical concepts of ‘funds of knowledge’ and ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’, the research focused on the life experiences of school staff (including school leaders, teachers and teaching assistants), asking whether those who: i) share a similar socio-economic background with their pupils, or ii) participate in those communities by living in it and using its services, are better equipped to identify and draw on the historically accumulated knowledge of their pupils and community in the classroom. The survey (n=126) found that senior leadership staff, being working class and working at a primary school were each associated with a greater overall ability to know about their pupils’ funds of knowledge. Subsequent interviews revealed how the increasing amount of ‘social work’ that teachers perform, supporting pupils and their parents, results in the classroom being treated as a space where the underlying causes of social problems, such as deprivation and declining mental health, are left at the door.
With Lucy Mallinson and Rebecca Sanderson.
Funded by the Society for Educational Studies.
The article is Open Access and available from the British Journal of Educational Studies.
Gill and Faire (2025) Forced to Reimagine: Reflections on the Experience of Leicester Vaughan College Community Benefit Society
This is such an important account of the sincere, persistent but frustrated efforts to establish a co-operative form of higher education. I have added it to the bibliography, but wanted to highlight this article in particular because it captures so well, the lived experience of creating alternative institutions that, by their nature, cannot exist apart from the social context to which they are opposed.
Mike Neary was a renowned critical educator, Professor of Sociology at the University of Lincoln, and a founding member of the Social Science Centre, Lincoln. He died in January 2023, and in the months prior to his death, the editors of this book met with Mike and, with his guidance, worked with him on a collection of his writings. Mike was once asked why he wrote and he responded, “I write for the future.” This book gathers some of his key writings to keep alive the critical legacy which Mike’s life and work embodied. It contains a body of work written by Mike on his own, with his close collaborators, as well as contributions written about him. The work gathered here in this book attests to Mike’s lifelong critical engagement with the work of Karl Marx, and as his work shows, this is an engagement on terms which are uniquely his own, reflecting Mike’s unique vision, his deep egalitarianism, his personal warmth, and his critical intellect.
Buy the book from Peter Lang publishers.
