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Editor's Letter - November 2006

“Adult education is not just about ‘learning for earning’; it has a wider contribution to make in a civilised society, to the promotion of happiness, to active citizenship, to personal and community development”

This issue of Adults Learning considers, from a number of different perspectives, the issue of demographic change and looks forward to the forthcoming report of the Leitch Review of Skills and next year’s Comprehensive Spending Review, which will set priorities for government for the three years from 2008/09.

Due to publish this month, Sandy Leitch’s review will seek to identify ‘the optimal skills mix in 2020 to maximise economic growth, productivity and social justice’ and will consider ‘the policy implications of achieving the level of change required’. Its interim report anticipated that demographic change would place ‘an even greater premium on the UK’s skills profile’. In 2020, as Colin Flint points out in this month’s Commentary, there will be more people in Britain in the 50-54 age bracket than in any other five-year group, with the next biggest the 55-59 year olds. Clearly, these are seismic shifts.

Yet, as the House of Commons Select Committee on Further Education recently warned, the challenges posed by demographic change, which will see our economy increasingly dependent on older workers, are unlikely to be met by a strategy that puts certain types of adult learning at risk, albeit inadvertently.

The spending review, according to Age Concern’s Andrew Harrop, represents ‘an opportunity to create a shared understanding of the choices we face as a society and of the role of enabling government in making ageing an opportunity for all’. While the Government recognises the value of learning in later life, Harrop writes, its strategic focus on young people with few or no qualifications has seen older people’s participation fall rapidly since 2003, with adult courses disappearing and learners staying away.

As Help the Aged’s Kate Jopling writes, there are serious gaps in the Government’s Skills Strategy, which Leitch will need to address. New age discrimination regulations are, on the face of it, good news for older workers, but, Jopling argues, the Government has chosen to exclude ‘the big issue – the funding issue – from the scope of the regulations … [and] decided that whether or not training [for older workers] is funded is not relevant to the question of whether it is accessible’.

Many of the older people we need to attract back into the workforce are those who would most benefit from training, writes Jopling, yet they are also those who can least afford to fund their own education.

Among a range of options suggested for debate, Andrew Harrop calls for a review of ‘safeguarded’ funding for personal and community development learning, to establish whether adult courses which are disappearing should be included within its remit – followed by annual increases to its budget.

We cannot afford to continue to alienate those whom we most need to attract. For Colin Flint, what is needed is a change away from a culture of learning which has, historically, operated on an implicit assumption that access to learning is ‘an elitist right, offering benefits to the already privileged’.

As Paul Mackney argues, recalling David Blunkett’s 1998 Green Paper, The Learning Age, adult education is not just about ‘learning for earning’; it has a wider contribution to make in a civilised society, to the promotion of happiness, to active citizenship, to personal and community development. In looking forward to the challenges of 2020, we could do worse than retrace our steps a little.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning