Albert Mansbridge, founder of the Workers’ Educational Association and a member of the Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee, was instrumental in founding the British Institute of Adult Education, as a branch of his World Association for Adult Education.

Mansbridge attended a range of

university extension classes while working as a clerk and later became a teacher of evening classes. He came to the conclusion that university adult education was ‘mainly a middle-class movement’ except where the courses were managed by the students themselves. Inspired by this experience within

the co-operative movement, Mansbridge recognised the need for a new adult educational organisation, one in which ‘the consumers of the education must themselves take an effective part in its provision’.

He founded the Association to

Promote the Higher Education of Working Men with his wife Frances in 1903, with the aim of making university education available to working-class adults. It became the Workers’ Educational Association in 1905.

Mansbridge was a member of the Adult Education Committee from 1917 and contributed to its final report, published, famously, in 1919. It has been described as ‘probably the most important single contribution ever made to the literature of adult education’ and as the ‘Bible of British adult education’. Mansbridge founded the World Association in 1919 and chaired the meeting which led to the creation of the British Institute of Adult Education, in January 1921.

Source: Mansbridge: A Life, Graham Marsh: http://www.wea.org.uk/ pdf/Mansbridge.pdf

including G.D.H. Cole, the guild socialist and political theorist who helped shape the early aims of the WEA, Barbara Wooton, economist and Director of the London Tutorial Classes, and Grace Hadow, Vice-Chair of the Women’s Institute and Principal of Oxford Home Students, a network for women students eager to enter higher education but unable to study full-time. Her group was the embryo of what was to become St Anne’s Society and, in 1952, St Anne’s College, Oxford.

‘Auxiliary services’ Early activities of the newly autonomous Institute included an ‘inquiry into the methods and principles of adult class teach- ing’. However, the Institute was already moving away from its early focus on the university extension class and was taking an interest in ‘various auxiliary services’ (meaning the wide array of voluntary agencies, many with primary purposes outside adult education, involved in creating less formal, and often more accessible, opportunities for adults to learn) and the ‘remoter provinces’ of the adult education scene. These activities included: collaboration with the BBC on

developing an educational use for the wireless (building on earlier work commissioned by the World Association); setting up a Commission on Educational and Cultural Films; assisting loan exhibitions of pictures in small towns and villages; an inquiry into public reading habits; and, in 1933, setting up a National Advisory Committee, in co-operation with the National Council of Social Services (NCSS), to develop educational work for the unemployed. Using a grant from the NCSS, the Institute published details of the kinds of educational work which was feasible for unemployed groups and the agencies which were able to provide them, with the aim of stimulating both the supply and demand for adult education in occupational centres and unemployment clubs. By the mid-thirties, the Institute had come

a long way from its initial emphasis on non-vocational university adult education. Reflecting on its early years, it now saw its work as ‘analogous to that of a research laboratory’: ‘It conducts the experiments; it prepares the blue-prints … Since its inception in 1921 … it has set itself to discover where the defences of adult education were weakest; it has devised

a strategy for the advance into new territory; it has brought together every kind of interest and expert opinion to consider the revision and development of educational policy’. Between 1921 and 1934 the Institute set

up numerous commissions, undertook inquir- ies and produced reports on: educational settlements and adult education centres; the relation of library services to adult education; the possibilities of broadcasting in adult education; educational and cultural films; the educational uses of the gramophone; the supply and training of tutors in adult education; and mechanical aids to learning. It also started a book scheme for unemployed people, building on the work of its National Advisory Committee. The Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, which the Institute set up in 1929 to explore the use of films in education, the development of public appreciation of films and the establishment of a ‘permanent central agency’ to achieve these aims, produced a report in 1932, The Film in National Life. It recommended the creation of an independent film institute funded by public money. This resulted, the following year, in the creation of the British

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