To think night classes don't seem to exist anymore?

[Mongrelsrbeautiful]

Will soon have more time on my hands and have been looking at local colleges. What's happened to night classes? In the past you could do anything from cake decorating to Italian, to car maintenance. There seems to be nothing going on for adults in my area. Are night classes a thing of the past?

Classic result of Tory ideology. Cut all the publicly funded courses/venues, and let the private sector rake it in. Only the private sector doesn't want to teach you Italian for £100 a term on a Tuesday evening, as there's not enough profit in it. They'll happily teach you Italian online for £20 an hour though.

It was Blair/Brown who stopped the funding so colleges concentrated on 16-18 year olds instead!

For once, it wasn't the Tories!

Loads of Adult Ed classes near me!

Some were cut a few years ago, because many were not good value for money. They started the year well but then by the course end many dropped out.
Overheads were expensive heating and security of premises.

There have been consistent cuts since 2010. Look at local authority budgets - the Tories have systematically cut these.

And this is the Tory approach to things summed up - if you're already well off enough to pay for things you can have them, if you have a low paid job and want to retrain you can fuck right off.

This is one of the reasons we have an underskilled workforce which affects national productivity - plenty of fun classes, limited work-related classes.

Lack of funding, lack of staff willing to work evenings (janitors, teachers, building security),

We also have 'WhatAboutery' in our borough - nothing our local authority does ever seems good enough and I'm sure some of the staff just can't be arsed to go above and beyond now. As an example, we recently had a basic first aid overview course in one town and everyone was up in arms that their town was missing out. I think in the end it was causing too much bad press and they stopped it altogether. It was being run by volunteers so really up to them where they wanted to host it.....

A local council run care home used to have joint craft days with a small groups of nursery kids. Think gluing, sticking glitter etc, was lovely company for the elderly residents and kids loved the attention. If you've ever taken a toddler into a care home you'll know what I mean! A few care home staff would come in on their days off and be there help out with the older people and parents would watch the toddlers. They abandoned it in the end as one child had to be banned as they kept having meltdowns, throwing stuff around etc. Child was 5 so a lot bigger and stronger than the other kids, obviously not child's fault they had additional needs but it wasn't safe for the older people. To cut a long story short, parent then took legal action for disability discrimination and council ended up stopping the whole thing. (Slightly digressing but I fear people just can't be arsed with all the trial by FB and hassle whenever they try to do something nice nowadays).

The only courses they run around here are for school leavers.

Shame - I used to enjoy nightschool.

There are courses, but not necessarily through colleges. Look for village hall notice boards for exercise or language classes, craft/wool shops for knitting/sewing courses. Post something in your local Facebook mum's group asking about courses and you will be flooded with options.

If you are old enough (I think 55+), look at the local U3A.

Have you looked at online courses. Lots of MOOCs available (Massive Open Online Courses).

Yes - this happened a very long time ago, I will add. In fact, I recall being told this back at the start of the millennium - which was under Labour (I wouldn't vote Tory with a gun to my head but Labour started this!). If a course didn't lead to some sort of qualification, it didn't get funded.

I do feel that a lot of this has moved online. I sometimes feel inundated by adverts for all-in-one course places like Craftsy, Skillshare, Domestika, Coursera, etc. Some of them you pay by the class. Some are a monthly fee model. Some are really free, like Coursera, and you only have to pay if you want a “certificate” for having done the course. (Honestly, just pay someone a fiver to knock one out for your LinkedIn instead of “£69 for an official certification”).

Unfortunately, it takes away almost all of the human interaction element - it’s pretty much the equivalent of following along with Bob Ross. No chance to make friends or have a laugh or learn in a certain way that you need to. But lockdowns, in particular, I think made people realize, “Hey, I can take the time to record a really good Skillshares class for students once, and then people can keep signing up to take it for the next five years without me having to do anything at all except help advertise it.”

Just like everything else, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that there are now evening class social media influencers. Ha. I mean, it’s a bit sad and dystopian (the whole point of the evening classes system originally was education OUTSIDE a vacuum, not inside it) and cuts us off even more from each other, BUT we shouldn’t be surprised.

I remember when I was young my mum doing adult Ed run by the council. I had always wanted to learn a similar skill and couldn’t find adult Ed anymore but found an evening course at the local college in the subject I was interested in.
Its also a lot cheaper than what my mum had paid in the 90s despite inflation and includes everything for the course (hers didn’t). They also checked if I was eligible for adult learning funding, despite the fact I made it clear i was doing it for fun and didn’t want to take funding from someone who needed it. So there is stuff out there…
But, it was hard to find, it wasn’t advertised and I just happened to stumble across it as I really didn’t want like a 1 week course I wanted a long term thing. It might also be a time of the year thing, enrolment was July/august and the course began sept, after I enrolled a friend looked and they were closed until the next term and didn’t have much info about upcoming courses yet.

The U3A do some activities, also some independent people run their own classes.

I do go to counci run adult education but they are much thinner on the ground and more expensive than they used to be.
i wonder if there is a correlation between less night school classes available to everyone and increase in loneliness and mental health.
I bet a badminton class or painting class would help a lot of mental health issues

Yes agree, people are too isolated now and it's not good for them

I did some when I was younger. There were definitely more and in more venues, I know lots of schools don’t want to host them now.
I could still do them locally to me, they are run through the local FE college rather than the council. The choice of courses has reduced right down and they didn’t really appeal. They used to do special one off classes at Christmas etc and they’ve stopped them.
My local art college also used to do them, you could do silversmithing, painting, printing etc, they’ve stopped them all now. Such a disappointment. They reintroduced them on a Saturday morning for a few years but stopped again. Disappointed.

I can do individual courses with artists etc but they are often like £65 for half a day and not really good value.

3A is for retired people though. There's not much for "working age" people who don't want the basic adult education of numeracy and literacy. Very hard to find GCSE or A level courses for anything else, nor "skills" courses that may lead to hobby/part time jobs.

But it was Labour who took it away.

It’s been the same pattern here - decades ago, the local authority switched funding away from ‘recreational’ courses towards ‘vocational’. (My pottery teacher used to point out with some chagrin that it was a recreational beginners’ course which led to her new career, but there you go).

We’ve now got lots of life drawing classes. Every pub seems to have one! I’ve also done courses through a local university, which started (I think) by offering them to its own students but has since opened them up to the public.

Adult education seems to have been massively cut over the last 10 years or so.

I've done a few short courses (usually from 4 - 8 weeks duration, 2 or 3 hours per week) via Zoom, run by 2 local universities. They've mostly been during the day, though. You could have a look for short courses on some university websites, see if there are any subjects of interest to you, and at suitable times.

We get a book each August for our nearest city, unfortunately it's 45 minutes away so not really practical. There were crafts, cooking, languages etc

Yep. I remember doing pottery, cordon bleu cookery, and British Sign Language. My LA dropped doing evening classes long ago. A neighbouring LA still does them, but only for its residents of course.

I think it's a real shame that they don't exist any more in many parts of the country. But it's symptomatic of the financial state of public funds these days.

I have done a couple of Open Learn courses. Yes it's online but it's something new to learn. Lots of topics to choose from.

I am sure my local college does some courses for adult learners.

Yep. As a retired person seeking mental stimulation, I am constantly being told to try U3A, and those people simply will not believe me when I tell them that my local ones are absolutely grim. They amount to carpet bowls, card games and lunch clubs etc.

I envy people who have vibrant branches nearby. But from what I've seen of the website, those are few and far between.

I also noticed that Edinburgh uni (probably others) have free online courses you can do as well.

Had never heard of u3a until reading this thread. Checked out the website - loads of choice! That's amazing.