“The whole story is quite interesting really, I’ve gone full circle to what I should have been doing years ago. If it hadn’t have been for the education I received I don’t know what really."

ABSTRACT: All across Wales, Objective 1 is helping to fund the initiative of lifelong learning with projects such as Wales Summer University (a summer taster course at University which can lead to further studies); Science Circuit, a mobile science lab for adult learners, and Dysgu’n Gyda Gilydd (which targets adult learners in disadvantaged locations in Ceredigion). Across the county of Ceredigion, Summer University for example has so far helped hundreds of beneficiaries to go and study to develop their knowledge base through successful use of the European Social Fund. For many individuals, courses like this have helped changed lives. Phillip Hughes, Chairman of Friends of Cardigan started out on a similar scheme in Wales. Currently Phillip has achieved a HND in the department of Continuing Education in Aberystwyth and has gone on to publishing government reports on Ceredigion reefs. Phillip entered into higher education at the age of 38.

FULL INTERVIEW (2005) by Natalie Moyce

Ok, so how would you describe your experience as being different and how it fits in with the lifelong learning?

I left school at the age of 16, and I was supposed to be pretty bright at school. I decided I’d had a taste of the countryside by the time I was 14 and I wanted to escape at the earliest opportunity. Then I left home. Right from an early age, I always had a great interest and felt at home around fishing vessels, boats. By the age of 21 I had my charter boat ticket and was working on angling out at sea. I had never pursued things academically, but I did start to have a yearning by the time I was in my early 30s, I realised that I probably wasn’t’ achieving what I could. I suddenly had a desire to educate myself. I had a great love of the sea and I wanted to learn more about it, I wanted to strive for a little more knowledge on that side.The department in the University – Continuing Education, they always put small modules on for one thing or another and I fancied doing a module in marine biology.I plucked up courage and I started this module in marine biology, and environmental law and planning. I thought if I can scrape a pass I might consider stopping. These were 15-week modules at the time. The marks finally arrived and I had 69% in this Environmental Law and Planning. And I stayed.

So tell me a bit about the course you took.

It was a modular system, all parts of a Higher National Diploma (HND), if I had done just 12 modules I could have had a HNC at that time, all Science based. I’ve done 24 modules, Statistics, everything. I ended up with now on paper – a HND.

When did you start this course?

2000 I think. It gave me a lot of things at the time; it started to give me confidence again. It was fantastic to be learning things properly and to be shown things that firstly could be understood and secondly to obtain reasonable marks with it. I got reasonably computer literate in the last 2 years.

How did this course help you with your career then?

Funnily enough I saw a letter in the paper, by the late Monroe Taylor, one of the founders of Friends of Cardigan Bay, who was looking for new blood to do research for the Sarns here. I’ve always been interested in. Anyway I wrote him a letter and before I knew it I was in with Cardigan Bay and I was out doing the boat thing, The Sarns are glacial moraines which run offshore, the one off Aberystwyth here called Sarn Confelin, they’re a mixture of boulders, cobbles and rocks, stuff like that, washed debris, and they actually extend 7 miles out to sea. And I’ve always been fascinated, because very little work has been done on them, particularly here. So anyway, before I knew it Monroe died of a heart attack, very unexpectedly, and before I knew it I was Chairman of the organisation. And before I knew it as well I was dumped heavily into the research side of things. Government meetings with CCW, so that was a quite daunting experience really.

I bet!

So I ended up writing our first research report, which has ever been done on Sarn Confelin, that I have just been sent the published version from CCW. It’s delivered through different lead partners or whatever, to the National Library.

What’s the thrust of the research on the Sarns here?

This was particularly looking at, a lot of our work is bottlenose dolphins, and this was particularly looking at Sarn Confelin as an area, for foraging, of the dolphin at certain tidal times, a concentration of animals who are utilising that habitat as a feeding resource. And we’re very interested in looking at that correlation, tidal times, and looking at prey species, on the reef. CCW really want to know because all of this goes into the overall management of the SSE’s. In the meantime, little old me got together all the local divers and the university to start some work on here. This university town has not been looked at properly, in terms of its biological content.

Is this cutting edge research?

Take the bottlenose dolphin, that’s just physically going out there, and looking for them basically, and then observing what they do. And only over a course of time can you start to build a pattern, like I did last year, I started to identify hotspots on the reef, where we continually find them at different times, then we combine that with Benzonics survey, which is actually a physical survey of divers on the bottom. we can capture on film at times what they’ve got in their mouths. This is really unique stuff. There’s very little information, full information, on what these animals eat, for here, and this is obviously crucial to their ongoing utilisation in this area, because there are only actually 2 groups of them, one’s in the Moraine Firth and one’s here, that are resident, so you need to know. Being higher animals, if they suddenly disappeared all of a sudden that would mean that there are serious problems. Trouble is if you have those problems, you’ve left it too late. There are 2 sides to this the other being to look at the biological content on the reef.

Do you think you will go on and complete the degree?

Well I would like to yes, actually the Dean of the University approached me and asked me if I would be doing so.

If you hadn’t have done the course what do you think you would be doing now?

I don’t know. I certainly believe sometimes in fate, and I certainly believe I’m doing now what I should have been doing all along, because this is my biggest interest, and I’ve gone a long way round, to get there in some respects, I could NOT have done it without the education I received. I was thrown into one of the first government meetings, in the Uni, to give a speech about what I’d been up to that year. They’ve got professors there from all over the country, all over Europe and I have to say something about something I don’t know anything about. It was a very daunting experience to start off with.

But now you’re comfortable in that role?

Oh very much so yes. It’s having the language to communicate as well isn’t it? I also enjoy it because I come from both sides of the fence in some respects.

What about your peers on the course?

There were originally 18 of us on the course, which came down to a steady 6 quite quickly. That was the great thing about this course – small classes, enthusiastic teachers who had the time. I was told I was bad at maths at school but on this course I was good at stats, I think because I was shown properly how to do it, explained things. Even if I had just done that one module on marine biology I was interested in that would have been enough. I never thought I would continue. 4 years seemed like a long way off, but here I am today.Photo Caption: Phillip Hughes, a recipient of Lifelong Learning in Ceredigion.

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