‘From worthy margin to lively mainstream’

The seventies and eighties saw the adult education movement renew and re-examine its commitment to opening up learning opportunities to ‘disadvantaged’ groups. In the third article in a series marking 90 years of NIACE support for adult learning, PAUL STANISTREET looks at the Institute’s role in taking these ideas into the mainstream and the challenges it faced in defending them

The Russell Report’s vision of ‘a comprehensive and flexible service of adult education, broad enough to meet the whole range of educational needs of the adult in our society’ was not accepted by Margaret Thatcher, the Secretary of State for Education and Science who received its recommendations in 1973. Its calls for a coherent and consistent service ‘integrated with all other sectors of the educational system but at the same time firmly rooted in the active life of local communities’ were not acted upon, either by the government of the day or by subsequent Labour and Conservative governments. Yet the Russell Report, and, in particular, Peter Clyne’s influential report, The Disadvantaged Adult, which informed it, had lasting influence. Clyne’s report, written in his capacity as research assistant to the Russell Committee, identified a wide variety of learning needs, contending that general words like ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘deprived’ did not offer sufficient guidance as to the nature of the learning opportunities required by specific groups and individuals. ‘Disadvantaged’ adults, he argued, ‘do not form a uniform group, identified by their common difference from the norm, however normality may be defined. Each minority group, within a wider category of the disadvantaged, expresses particular demands and makes apparent specific needs’. The final report of the Committee called for suitably designed, structured and delivered learning programmes for the many people excluded