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Editor's Letter - May 2008

“Adult participation in learning has fallen among the key target groups for the Government’s learning and skills strategy”

For seven days each May, the efforts and achievements of adult learners, in all their bewildering diversity, are recognised, in all sorts of different ways, at national and regional events, in award-giving and in the media. The often remarkable stories of adult learners get rare space in newspapers and on radio and television. People get inspired by the stories they read and by the taster sessions and other work and community events they attend. Meeting Adult Learners’ Week award winners, as I do every year, is an invariably uplifting and inspiring experience.

But Adult Learners’ Week isn’t all about celebration. And this year’s festival takes place against a backdrop of lost adult places and cancelled courses. NIACE’s annual survey of participation, published this month, shows that adult participation in learning has fallen among the key target groups for the Government’s learning and skills strategy. Participation by skilled manual workers has fallen from 40 per cent to 33 per cent in the past year, while, among full-time workers, participation has fallen from 51 per cent in 2006 to 45 per cent in 2008.

Overall, the numbers of adults participating in learning is down from 41 per cent in 2007 to 38 per cent in the current survey. Most dispiriting of all, there has, once again, been no change at all in participation within the DE socio-economic group, which includes unskilled and semi- killed workers, the unemployed and disabled people. Taken alongside the latest Learning and Skills Council figures, showing that 184,600 adult learners have been lost to publicly funded ‘safeguarded’ provision in the past three years, this makes for depressing reading.

The NIACE survey is a challenging one for government. It shows that the very groups ministers have identified as essential to the achievement of skills strategy targets are bearing the heaviest burden of the re-balancing of funding. It’s important that we use this year’s Adult Learners’ Week to make the policy case for a wider appreciation of the value of adult learning, and that we ensure that policymakers see the connection between the remarkable stories of adult learners and the interventions required to ensure that transformational opportunities such as the ones on which their lives have turned are open to all.

There are, as ever, as many journeys as there are opportunities to depart, from the ex-policeman who retrained following two strokes to become a gym instructor to the beauty therapist who became a motor mechanic. For John McAnuff, whose efforts to preserve his native Jamaican language and culture have been recognised in an award, learning is not about career change or ‘getting on’ in a narrow sense. Those are the things one does to make time and space for the things that really matter; for him, to strive ‘to know’, to learn new things.

That isn’t an understanding of learning we’re likely to hear on the lips of many ministers but it is one that is reflected in the lives and learning of many of the adults whose efforts are recognised during this week. With policymakers in attendance, it is a rare opportunity for these learners’ voices to register alongside the more familiar, though not necessarily more effective, voices of the movers and shakers of the adult learning world.

Paul Stanistreet Editor, Adults Learning