More, Different and Better

Today NIACE launches On the up, a book which could be said to have been 21 years in the making. It celebrates the stories of Adult Learners’ Week award winners over the week’s 21-year history and reflects on the long-term impact their learning has had, on their lives, and on the lives of their families and their communities.

Adult Learners’ Week first took place in 1992, after NIACE’s policy committee agreed to release £5,000 to support a national festival of learning. It had two core objectives: to celebrate the lives of adult learners and to encourage others to take up learning through their stories.

Of course, a good deal has changed since 1992. The world has changed. We learn in different ways, and we communicate what we have learned in different ways too. The benefits of learning are better understood and more widely accepted. The high public profile of adult learning – supported by groundbreaking research on its wider benefits – has helped create a political climate in which the value of adult learning is recognised by politicians of all parties. Adult Learners’ Week itself has grown, becoming a national institution, now copied in more than 50 countries around the world.

Despite this, those two core objectives remain at the heart of the Adult Learners’ Week, as do the stories of adult learners.

Those stories – often humbling, frequently inspirational – are remarkable in themselves, demonstrating how learning can help people re-evaluate, rebuild and, in many cases, wholly transform their lives. But, until recently, we knew little about the longer-term difference learning made to the lives of our award-winners.

That’s why we decided to catch up with them, conducting dozens of in-depth interviews, essentially putting to them the question: what happened next?

Their stories are the heart of On the up. They demonstrate the deep and varied impact adult learning has on people’s lives, the wider benefits it brings to society, and the power of learning as a movement for individual and societal change.

They show, above all, that the positive effects of learning continue to ripple out, often throughout a learner’s lifetime. They demonstrate that the changes and benefits that flow from learning are no short-term fix – they persist throughout the lives of the learners, enriching, inspiring and encouraging, helping them become better parents, more active citizens and more understanding neighbours, binding people together in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Unsurprisingly, given the clear links between parental education levels and the performance of their children at school, the benefits of learning often span the generations, with learners passing on the learning bug to their children, and to their grandchildren. And there are plenty of examples of this spilling over into the wider community.

Many of the learners featured in the book were failed by the education system first time around. Some were written off because they were distracted by their lives outside school; others were dismissed as stupid because they had dyslexia – establishing a pattern of exclusion which would continue for much of their lives as adults.

On the up confirms what many adult educators know instinctively. Second, third and fourth chances are critical, particularly in an ageing society such as ours where it is not only the young who need to learn new skills and adapt to change. As Learning through Life, the main report of the Inquiry into the Future for lifelong Learning, argued, whilst people are natural learners, they need different kinds of support and different kinds of services at different points in their lives – we need to take seriously the notion of opportunity for all, at whatever age. Adults need opportunities to re-engage with education throughout their lives, to retrain and reskill, to renew and rebuild, to find a new direction or to progress on a journey they have already begun. When they get it, they often blaze a trail that is visible to dozens, sometimes thousands of other people, creating multiple benefits over and above the outcomes of their learning programme.

The stories speak for themselves. This quote, from Sylvia Wright, who won the 1999 Adult Learners’ Week Senior Learner of the Year award, sums up eloquently both the impact learning can have on the lives of adults, and the fire it can light in learners to pass on what they have learned and to inspire and challenge others to get involved:

“Active learning gives you something to think about. You don’t just focus on yourself and your aches and pains. If your mind is active, you make an effort. You don’t have time to be ill. It helps you health wise. It keeps you positive. In our [adult learning] group I am involved in supporting other people to write for the group. I organise other people and convince them they can do things. If you help other people it gives you a sense that you are needed. You have a reason to be alive. Ill-health is bound to come along if you have negative feelings about life. When you are in learning you are part of a group, part of a family.”

Nominations for 2013 Adult Learners’ Week awards are open until 5pm on Thursday 13 December 2012.

Visit NIACE’s YouTube Channel for more inspirational learner voices.