Source: PIMA Bulletin 17, April 2018

Thirty years ago, I wrote an article bemoaning the state of adult and community learning (ACL) in the UK and calling for a Year of Adult Learning to raise its profile and a campaign for a new deal from government. The outcome was the creation of Adult Learners Week, a more modest but practicable initiative than the one I had envisaged, and eventually, a decade later, a commitment by a new government to a Learning Age.

A recent national conference at the University of Wolverhampton looked back to that moment and attempted a balance sheet of what had been achieved. Certainly, there were some advances, everyone was agreed, such as the adult literacy campaign, but more striking were the lost opportunities, particularly the failure to create a framework for lifelong learning. Some ministers maintained a vision of a learning society, but this took second place behind the government’s overriding interest in schools and skills rather than providing a perspective that would underpin the drive towards better schools and vocational education.

The Wolverhampton conference reflected the primary, institutional focus of the organisers, speakers and many of the participants. This had two results. The first was a certain blindness towards developments outside the sphere of education narrowly defined. In some ways, the most important measures in the field of adult and community learning in the New Labour years (1997-2010) formed part of a major assault on urban inequality, the national strategy for neighbourhood renewal[1]. Focused on the most deprived areas and social groups, this funded a significant programme of support for cradle to grave learning, encompassing pre-school children, school children, young people as well as adults. In a limited number of areas of the highest need investment was sharply focused and managed by local partnerships including representatives chosen by the local community. 

Recent assessments of the impact of the neighbourhood renewal strategy point to improvements in schooling, an upturn in the take up of learning opportunities by adults in the most disadvantaged areas, and the value of involving parents in their children’s learning. [2] Perhaps these outcomes have been less noticeable to some ACL practitioners because they resulted from a programme run by the Department for Communities and Local Government rather than the Department for Education. 

A second result of the institutional focus of the conference was the tendency to view the future prospects for ACL in terms of its past. Although there was agreement at Wolverhampton that the hopes raised by New Labour’s early commitment to a Learning Age had been comprehensively dashed by the governments that succeeded it in 2010, the clearest message from the conference was that the way forward was a re-commitment to publicly funded adult learning. Of course, that must be part of the solution but alone it is not sufficient, for two reasons: first because it fails to take account of the extent to which state-funded ACL has narrowed its focus at the expense of enlightenment and critical thinking, in the UK, the EU and countries such as Australia and Canada; and second, because it does not take account of major social and economic shifts that point away from the state as the primary support for ACL.

The rise of the internet and social media have unleashed a massive torrent of learning that is predominantly informal and virtual. People are learning alone or in networks rather than attending courses and preparing for examinations and qualifications. Adult learning professionals struggle to connect with this activity other than to offer courses in IT literacy. It is true that participation in part-time courses, especially by the most disadvantaged, has fallen off significantly in the UK, but it is unclear to what extent it has been displaced by an uptake of the learning opportunities offered by the internet. Does this mean that finally we are heading towards an informal framework of lifelong learning, involving people through the life cycle from childhood to adulthood? How should we respond to this development and how best to support it?

Alongside this and growing symbiotically is the learning promoted by the rise of new social and political movements, much of it face to face but much of it through smart phones and tablets. As we know, these developments take forms that sometimes make us shudder with revulsion, dreaming perhaps of a golden age when the state determined a safer agenda of adult learning. But this points towards a new mission for adult educators, if not as the guarantors of social cohesion, certainly as intermediaries between contending forces, identifying common ground and pointing to the dangers of irresponsible polarization.