European Social Fund, which supported ALW from the beginning, and learn direct. In 2008 ... 799 individuals received awards. There were also 151 group winners and 15 specialist awards. Some 22 per cent of nominees were from black or minority ethnic groups, 63 per cent were women and 22 per cent, unemployed.


From 1993, the Week moved to May, where it has remained ever since, a ‘national institution’ now copied in well over 50 countries. During Adult Learners’ Week 2010, an estimated 100,000 adults engaged in more than 4,000 learning events. In a survey of participants, 57 per cent of those who took part enrolled on, or applied for, a course as a result. Launching the Week was a ‘decisive moment’ for the Institute, Judith Summers writes: ‘NIACE in effect shouted that it was a very public player and welcomed everyone to the party.’ It was not only a tool for celebrating adult learning, Stephen McNair recalls, but ‘by linking individual learners directly to politicians, it lifted NIACE out of the box in which it had been contained for many years, relating to government either through polite, friendly but marginal conversation with civil servants, or formally arguing in print with ministers. Adult Learners’ Week gave NIACE direct access to, and credibility with, ministers and the wider policymaking community which proved invaluable as government’s interest in adult learning grew through the 1990s.’


Widening participation
 While mainstream interest in adult learning continued to grow, the 1990s saw a further serious erosion of what Roger Fieldhouse terms adult education’s ‘fundamental comm- itment to serving a collectivist social purpose – to make the world a better place’. At the same time, Fieldhouse adds, adult education was presented with ‘a vast new challenge’ to ‘introduce its social values into the mainstream’. In the wake of the 1992 Act, NIACE worked closely and positively with many of the new players. It avoided sectional interests, ensuring that the needs and interests of learners and potential learners, particularly those from marginalised groups likely to have benefited least from their initial education, were at the centre of its advocacy and campaign work. Increasingly, NIACE’s efforts were guided by a core aspiration: to improve, increase and extend opportunities for adults to learn throughout their lives by promoting the private and public benefits of a wide range of learning opportunities. The Institute undertook a wide range of creative work on the needs of different groups of learners, such as older people and adults with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. Its 1991 study of participation, Learning and Leisure, was followed by a series of surveys of adult participation in learning, published annually during Adult Learners’ Week. The surveys looked at people’s current and previous experiences of learning and their aspirations and intentions to learn, giving NIACE an opportunity to interrogate the impact of government policy and other economic and societal factors on who benefits from learning and who is missing out. In 1996 the Department for Education and Employment funded a further national study, published as The Learning Divide in 1997, including, for the first time, a study of participation in Northern Ireland alongside England, Scotland and Wales. It provided the most comprehensive coverage so far of adult participation in learning in the UK.


The participation surveys were complemented and reinforced by qualitative studies, such as Veronica McGivney’s hugely influential Education’s for Other People: Access to education for non-participant adults (1990), which examined the factors affecting adults’ access to learning and proposed strategies to overcome these barriers and reduce inequalities. McGivney’s study, which described the financial, practical and motivational barriers experienced by excluded adults, was followed by qualitative studies of particular non-participating groups, such as women returners, excluded men and part-time and temporary workers. NIACE’s work was influential and, between 1994 and 1997, the Institute made substantial contributions to two important reviews, set up by the Further Education Funding Council as part of its brief to promote access to further education ‘for people who do not participate in education and training but who could benefit from it’ and ‘to have regard for the needs of students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities’. One, chaired by Professor John Tomlinson, was to review further education opportunities for students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. The other, chaired by Helena Kennedy QC, was to encourage more people to participate and succeed in further education. The Tomlinson report, published in 1996, proposed the influential notion of ‘inclusive learning’ – a process whereby institutional procedures and practices are fitted to learners rather than learners being expected to adapt to institutions – and had considerable impact on attitudes and practice in the further education sector.


The Kennedy committee’s final report, Learning Works, published in June 1997, also had a strong impact on policy and practice. It argued that learning was the common foundation for economic prosperity and social cohesion and provided practical strategies for addressing the inequalities NIACE had been highlighting in its advocacy and research work for many years. The report condemned the inadequacy of the policies which has achieved significant growth in post- 16 learning during the 1990s on the grounds that they had failed to include socially and economically disadvantaged adults. It called on government to take a lead by creating a national strategy for post-16 learning to support the aspiration that all should achieve at Level 3 (A-level or equivalent) and to reinforce this by establishing new national learning targets taking in those outside the workforce and recognising achievement in basic skills, partial achievement and non- certificated learning. The committee saw the opportunity to achieve at Level 3 as the essential basis for the creation of a self- perpetuating learning society and argued that public funding should be redistributed towards those with less success in earlier learning, moving towards equity in funding in post-16 education.


The Learning Age
 The newly elected Labour government and the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett, warmly endorsed the vision and spirit of the report. Blunkett established a National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (NAGCELL) to advise him on a new strategy for adult learning. The Group, which was chaired by Principal of Northern College Bob Fryer with Alan Tuckett as vice-chair, published its first report, Learning for the Twenty-First Century, in November 1997, in preparation for a White Paper on lifelong learning. Drawing heavily on Learning Works and reflecting the vision for adult learning NIACE had been developing over the previous decade, the report called for the development of ‘a new learning culture, a culture of lifelong learning for all’ to meet the challenges of economic, social and technological change. Achieving such a culture change would require a ‘revolution’ in people’s attitudes to learning, the report said, particularly among those least engaged or with fewest opportunities to participate in education, and a simplified, coherent framework for the promotion of lifelong learning, giving increased emphasis to the home, the community and the workplace as key places of learning.


Labour’s 1998 Green Paper, The Learning Age: A renaissance for a new Britain, endorsed the report’s calls for the creation of a ‘learning society’. ‘We stand on the brink of a new age,’ Blunkett wrote in his foreword. ‘Familiar certainties and old ways of doing things are disappearing. Jobs are changing and with them the skills needed for the world of tomorrow. In our hearts we know we have no choice but to prepare for this new age, in which the key to success will be the education, knowledge and skills of our people.’ Learning, he continued, was ‘the key to prosperity’, both for individuals and for the nation as a whole, and that was why the government was putting it ‘at the heart of its ambition’:


The fostering of an enquiring mind and the love of learning are essential for our future success. To achieve stable and sustainable growth, we will need a well-


 

Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32