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Editor's Letter - February 2008

“It may be that what we have here is a ‘call for help’ from a Secretary of State who sees the diversity of learning needs, but who has very little money to spend”

he Government’s consultation on the future of informal adult learning, launched in January, is unusual, and very welcome, for two reasons. First, it comes from a Secretary of State, John Denham, who appears to have a genuine interest in and enthusiasm for adult learning. It is rare indeed to find a minister who genuinely recognises the value of the learning adults do, for example, in museums and libraries, in book groups, in the community and online. It is rarer still to find one who has some sense of the history of the adult education movement.

Second, while most government consultations aim, in Stephen McNair’s words, to ‘give a final polish to a well-developed plan already prepared’, this consultation appears genuinely open. It may well be, as McNair suggests, that what we have here is a ‘call for help’ from a Secretary of State who ‘sees the diversity of learning needs, but who has very little money to spend’.

No doubt, the consultation paper, Informal Adult Learning: Shaping the Way Ahead, has its faults. Few historians of adult education will be satisfied with the fairly superficial treatment the movement receives in the paper. And some commentators will find the paper incomplete without some account of how the ‘quiet revolution’ Mr Denham talks about developed in spite, rather than because, of recent government policy.

In fact, the agenda promoted by Mr Denham’s government has, as Richard Taylor argues, been generally hostile to ‘learning which does not fit into tidy packages, and is hard to inspect and quantify’.

Many will see the parallel, drawn by a number of contributors to this issue, between The Learning Age Green Paper and this consultation as less than encouraging. The Learning Age, or rather its oft-quoted preface, has become, in the minds of some critics, a marker of how far New Labour’s ambitions for adult learning have slipped in the past decade.

Nevertheless, it is important that we take up the challenge offered in the consultation to help shape ‘a new vision for informal adult learning’ and ‘identify the most appropriate support that Government can give’.

The volume of responses the Government receives will be important if we are to demonstrate that this is an issue about which people feel passionately. John Denham appears to share this feeling but his colleagues will take more convincing.

We want to ensure that the debate is reflected in the pages of Adults Learning. The spread of reactions featured in this issue is a good start. We hope you will continue to share your responses with us at: comment@niace.org.uk.

To read the paper in full or to respond to the consultation directly go to: www.adultlearningconsultation.org.uk . The consultation ends on the 15 May 2008.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning