The name is absent

Meta-competences

Some individuals in the sample had achieved a holistic understanding of various
generic civic skills, networks and local information through learning. Many of them
were engaged in specific learning activities, such as studying for the Community
Development Award (CDA) although it was clear that individuals had already
achieved a level of ‘meta-’ or ‘coordinating’ competence through prior learning
activities, and the purpose of the CDA was to accredit prior learning.

Juliet makes reference to the effect of prior learning through counselling, computing
and ‘make life experience count’ courses on addressing community problems:

“ We really got ourselves so geared up that we could go off for an hour and sort
out the Borough Council and it was a really good learning curve to say that
we’d got those skills and hadn’t realised. To actually have a problem there and
with all the experience we’ve had with the voluntary sector is to say yes, we
know, because it wasn’t a blank sheet. If we’d sat there and thought ‘how do we
do that?’ But it’s because we were working in a community and we could relate
to it. You then thought, yes, we can sort it out. ”

This proactive approach to solving community problems points to the links between
civic meta-competence and a sense of personal agency that has been referred to
earlier. Many respondents demonstrating such a coordinating competence were
women, which suggests that there are interactions between gender and learning with
respect to social capital. This may be due to the affective, as well as behavioural,
components associated with this particular meta-skill, and learning configurations that
include personal development courses such as counselling and life skills seem
particularly fruitful in producing this arrangement. As Jasmine says of the CDA:

“ There’s a lot ofpersonal development on this course. Actually spurring off
your own beliefs, your own thoughts, the way your type of work lies about you,
where it came from you as a person. And also the fact that there’s so much more
room to promote, there’s so much opportunity to sort of go and do things which
will link up with the work which you have been doing. ”

Generic competences

A number of generic skills gained from other learning contexts were directly
applicable to civic life. These included IT skills, secretarial and teaching skills. For
example, Faith used her secretarial and IT skills in order to type letters for a group to
raise money for deaf children. Whilst Faith is motivated by altruistic motives in this
pursuit, Annabel utilised similar skills in a voluntary context to find employment,
showing the close congruence between individual and social benefits of learning:

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