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Editor's Letter - May 2007

“Overall participation among the poorest remains fixed, at less than half that experienced by the upper and middle classes”

This issue of Adults Learning celebrates the achievements of some of the winners of this year’s Adult Learners’ Week Awards – but it also reflects on shifting patterns of participation in adult learning and the continuing failure of public expenditure to reach the poorest and most socially excluded adults.

NIACE’s annual survey of adult participation in learning shows that, despite an increase in the skills of the British workforce and a reduction in numbers of adults without qualifications, overall participation among the poorest remains fixed, at less than half that experienced by the upper and middle classes.

This has been the persistent message of NIACE’s annual surveys: no significant progress has been made in increasing participation among those who left school earliest, or among the least well-off socio-economic groups.

The Skills for Life strategy has been a success and participation has increased significantly among skilled manual workers, and the Government deserves credit for its serious and effective work in these areas. But even if we accept the Government’s rather limited vision for adult learning, we must ask whether its objectives for employability and economic competitiveness can really be reached while those on the very lowest rungs remain off radar.

Leslie Morphy, Chief Executive of Crisis, the charity for single homeless people, is clear that they cannot. Only by funding the kinds of activity often characterised as ‘soft’ and ‘hard to measure’ can we hope to engage those who currently participate the least. By doing so we help them turn themselves not only into economically useful citizens, but also into active citizens.

The ‘Community Experts’ project in South Leeds – described later in this issue – shows just how effective adult learning can be in changing people’s perceptions of what it is possible to do within their communities. Learners, aged from 18 to 80, interviewed hundreds of fellow residents to get both ‘honest perceptions’ of life in some of Britain’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and concrete suggestions as to how public money should be spent in improving the area.

Ironically, the benefits of this sort of provision have never been better understood – or more widely invoked. The stories and achievements which, for one short week each May, have the attention of the education press, demonstrate what a powerful thing learning as an adult is, just what it can do for people: changing their lives for the better, making their communities more vibrant, more democratic, safer and more cohesive.

Yet the Learning and Skills Council reports a reduction of almost a million learners in publicly funded further education over two years, while participation by learners over 60 has halved. Something is going badly wrong. Paul Nolan, reflecting on the role education is likely to play in the return of devolved government to Northern Ireland, reports the same debate on the other side of the Irish Sea and predicts the same results: ‘devastating’ cutbacks in adult learning.

More than ever, adult learning matters, but, as Paul Nolan observes, you don’t need a meteorologist to know which way this wind is blowing.

 Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning