Lifelong learning and the Labour governments 1997–2004

Abstract

Lifelong learning has been a key theme of New Labour’s education policy agenda since 1997, but is a broad and often amorphous concept. This article analyses New Labour’s ideological perspective in this context, outlines the main developments and difficulties, and evaluates the record over the seven years in office.

New Labour’s policy on lifelong learning can be divorced neither from its general education policy nor from its broader human capital approach to education, within an ideology of ‘marketised welfarism’. The article discusses these characteristics and notes both the continuities and differences between New Labour and traditional Labourism.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Janet Coles for her preliminary work on sources for this article.

Notes

* Professor Richard Taylor, Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, Madingley Hall, Madingley, Cambridge, CB3 8AQ, UK. Email: [email protected]

Even this has to be qualified, however. As Jean Bocock and I have argued, education in the UK and Europe does not occupy the absolute policy centrality that it enjoys in the USA (Bocock & Taylor, 2003a).

O’Brien provides a useful taxonomy of terms associated with this twin track approach. Thus, ‘economic progressivism’ encompasses such terms as diversity, choice, efficiency, pressure/accountability, market, business values, league tables, and so on; whereas ‘social progressivism’ correspondingly refers to such terms as support, partnership, democratic choice, fairness, equality of opportunity, guidance, entitlement, democratic process and so on (O’Brien, 2000, Appendix 1, p. 11).

All this of course applies in differing degrees to all the more advanced economies of western Europe (see, for example, Osborne & Thomas (Eds), 2003).

This section draws on Fullick, 2004 and I acknowledge here the debt I owe to her excellent overview analysis of the whole, complex lifelong learning sector.

However, several commentators and academics based in parts of the UK other than England have argued that devolution has resulted in a more radical and desirable pattern of lifelong learning development in their ‘devolved’ context (for example, Paterson, 2003).

The formal titles of these committees were: the Dearing Report: National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997; the Kennedy Report: Learning Works: Widening Participation in Further Education, 1997; the Fryer Reports: the National Advisory Group on Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, 1998 and 1999 (the two Reports were entitled: Learning for the Twenty‐first Century, and Creating Learning Cultures: next steps in achieving the Learning Age).

For a good overview summary of these and other bodies see Fullick, 2004, p. 24ff.

Numbers of students in UK higher education have risen from approximately 200,000 in the early 1960s to just under 2 million in 2002 (see Slowey & Watson (Eds), 2003).

• There is much truth in the following exchange from the 1980s’ BBC TV series, ‘Yes, Prime Minister’.

• Sir Humphrey (Cabinet Secretary): ‘There really is a funding crisis in the universities, Prime Minister.’

• Prime Minister: ‘What, both of them?’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Taylor *

* Professor Richard Taylor, Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, Madingley Hall, Madingley, Cambridge, CB3 8AQ, UK. Email: [email protected]