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The Impact of Lifelong Learning on Poverty Reduction

IFLL Public Value Paper 1

Public Value Papers are a series arising from the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning (IFLL). Each paper grapples with issues about how we should understand the effects of lifelong learning and its benefits to learners and wider society in order to give a clearer focus to the policy options involved, and to prompt further reflection and debate.

This, the first paper in the series, analyses lifelong learning’s impact on poverty reduction in the UK, summarising research-based evidence to contribute to an empirically based understanding of the complex mechanisms involved.

Since 1997 a range of government policies designed in particular to tackle poverty, worklessness and neighbourhood deprivation have been introduced. Ricardo Sabates investigates whether increasing participation in adult education and an improvement in skills over more than a decade have been accompanied by reductions in poverty for the population. Arriving at the overall conclusion that participating in adult learning can help substantially to reduce poverty, Sabates analyses empirical evidence from rigorous large-scale quantitative studies, and existing literature on the income effects of adult education, the impact of financial literacy, the employment and health effects of adult learning, basic skills and health literacy, and the impact of lifelong learning on reducing child poverty.

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