The Learning Age and after
Labour’s 1998 Green Paper seemed to herald a new dawn for adult learning in the UK but by 2010 it had become a marker of how much Labour’s ambitions for the sector had diminished. In the fourth article in a series marking 90 years of NIACE support for adult learning, PAUL STANISTREET reflects on the Labour years and looks forward to the challenges facing the Institute in the second decade of the twenty-first century
A
new Labour government was elected in May 1997 and wasted no time in signalling its enthusiasm for the education of adults. Secretary of
State for Education and Employment David Blunkett gave his first speech in office at the launch of Adult Learners’ Week 1997 and announced the creation of a National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (NAGCELL) to advise him on a new strategy for adult learning. Its first report, Learning for the Twenty-First Century, published in November 1997, proved significant. It 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, and argued for 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. In 1998 the government published a Green Paper called The Learning Age: A renaissance for a new Britain. Blunkett’s preface to the paper warmly endorsed the spirit of NAGCELL’s report in terms which reflected much of the vision for adult learning NIACE had been developing over the previous decade. Blunkett wrote that we stood
18 ADULTS LEARNING APRIL 2011
‘on the brink of a new age’ in which learning would be ‘the key to prosperity – for each of us as individuals, as well as for the nation as a whole’. The government, he went on, would place learning ‘at the heart of its ambition’:
As well as securing our economic future, learning has a wider contribution. It helps make ours a civilised society, develops the spiritual side of our lives and promotes active citizenship. Learning enables people to play a full part in their community. It strengthens the family, the neighbourhood and consequently the nation. It helps us fulfil our potential and opens doors to a love of music, art and literature. That is why we value learning for its own sake as well as for the equality of opportunity it brings. To realise our ambition, we must
all develop and sustain a regard for learning at whatever age. For many people this will mean overcoming past experiences which have put them off learning. For others it will mean taking the opportunity, perhaps for the first time, to recognise their own talent, to discover new ways of learning and
to see new opportunities opening up. What was previously available only to the few can, in the century ahead, be something which is enjoyed and taken advantage of by the many.
Blunkett proposed a range of measures to stimulate participation in learning at every stage of life, particularly for adults who had previously benefited least from education. These included plans for ‘individual learning accounts’ to ‘enable men and women to take responsibility for their own learning with support from both Government and employers’ and a ‘University for Industry’ which would ‘offer access to a learning network to help people deepen their knowledge, update their skills and gain new ones’. Other recommendations included the expansion of further and higher education to provide for an extra 500,000 people by 2020; increased support for basic literacy and numeracy among adults; widening participation in and access to learning, both in further, higher, adult and community education and through the University for Industry; and raising standards across post- 16 teaching and learning. The paper also launched two new funds to support efforts to
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