The rise and fall of life-wide learning for adults in England

Abstract

This article analyses policy and practice in social and cultural education for adults in England in the post Second World War era, beginning with the flowering of municipal adult education and the expansion of university extra-mural provision. It tracks the emerging policy focus on extending participation to under-represented groups, and on securing a rich breadth of curriculum (life-wide learning), which flowered in the 1990s. It maps, and deprecates the subsequent narrowing of public investment to an increasingly utilitarian focus on qualifications for labour market participation with the rise of Treasury (finance ministry) influence on adult learning policy from 2003. Evidence of the wider benefits that derive from participation in learning is used to re-assert the case for publicly accessible lifelong, life-wide education for adults.

Keywords:

• Adult education
• lifewide learning
• politics
• participation
• England

Notes

1. The Equivalent and Lower Qualifications rule, which limits public funding and loans to higher education courses which are at a higher or equivalent level to that held currently by participants, was introduced as a cost saving measure in 2008.

2. Among other things, Peter persuaded me in the mid 1980s of the potential power of participation research in identifying who is missing from provision as a stimulus to working out what could be done about it.

3. Callaghan’s speech is reprinted in Jarvis and Griffin (2003a), pp. 144–149.

4. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate was free standing and independent until 1992. After that date the independence ended, as responsibility for judgement about quality in further education transferred to the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC)Inspectorate, which reported to the FEFC Chief Executive. In 2002, following further reorganisation responsibility transferred to a newly created Adult Learning Inspectorate, and again from 2008 to the Office for Standards in Education (OfSted), whose remit, like FEFC’s and ALI’s, focused on inspection rather than development of high quality provision.

5. Key excerpts from Hillman’s report are reprinted in Jarvis and Griffin (2003b), pp. 313–321.

6. Since the late 1990s, various devolution measures have meant the UK government has direct responsibility for education only in England – hence the focus of this paper. However, it has retained a UK wide responsibility for economic policy.

7. The UKCES is ‘a publicly funded, industry-led organisation that offers guidance on skills and employment issues’ (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/uk-commission-for-employment-and-skills/about, accessed December 11, 2016).

8. Neither the administrations in Wales or Scotland agreed to participate in the OECD PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) study. As a result UK results refer only to England and Northern Ireland.

9. https://www.unionlearn.org.uk/ (accessed September 24, 2016).