In May 2010, Adults Learning published one of the first interviews with new Prime Minister David Cameron

communities together, challenge stereotypes and contribute to community cohesion. It can unite the generations and help people remain active and independent into old age’. It was a marked and welcome contrast to the rather grim utilitarian philosophy that had characterised Leitch and successive stills strategies. NIACE won the tender to manage the Transformation Fund, which was to offer £20 million in grants to organisations in England to promote innovation and partnership to support informal learning. The grants supported more than 300 projects, with awards ranging from £100,000 to just a few thousand pounds. NIACE also undertook a number of other projects critical to the Learning Revolution vision. It was part of the partnership that managed the Community Learning Champions Support Programme, which has since helped more than 2,000 volunteers promote learning in their homes, workplaces and communities, and has developed a project to raise awareness of the benefits of learning for older people in care settings.

Despite its support for the delivery of the

Learning Revolution agenda, NIACE continued to press the case for a rich mix of informal and classroom-based adult education. The

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Institute’s 2009 survey of adult participation in learning, Narrowing Participation, was a stark reminder of the challenges the sector faced. It showed a sharply widening gap between the educationally privileged and the educationally excluded. While the proportion of adults reporting current or recent learning had risen, by one percentage point to 39 per cent, the proportion of adults currently learning in the UK was at its lowest level since 1997. Current or recent participation by the lowest socio-economic groups (DEs) had fallen to a 10-year low of 24 per cent, compared to 53 per cent for ABs. It was a sobering illustration of the price being paid for the government’s skills strategy. As Alan Tuckett argued, the opportunity to gain a first qualification for a small cohort of the least qualified was being bought at the cost of engagement by large numbers of others from the same groups. Learning Through Life, the main report of the

Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning, was published in September 2009. The report proposed a new model of the educational life- course – divided into four stages: up to 25, 25- 50, 50-75 and 75-plus – and demonstrated how expenditure on learning, currently skewed in favour of young people, could be re-balanced, with little financial pain, to reflect major

demographic and labour market changes. Its recommendations, which included proposals for a framework of learning entitlements, a more flexible credit-based education system and a curriculum framework for ‘citizen’s capabilities’, quickly became a part of the lingua franca of the wider adult learning community. They were widely quoted and debated, both within the sector and beyond it, and were used by campaigners to put lifelong learning firmly on the political map during the 2010 general election campaign. NIACE’s press and advocacy teams worked hard to ensure the proposals remained a dimension of mainstream political debate.

Challenging times In the run-up to the general election, NIACE produced a set of recommendations for the new government, drawing on some of the Inquiry’s key findings. Lifelong learning in challenging times identified the main challenges facing us as a country – financial, demographic, technological, environmental, social and democratic – and called on the government to take action to create the sort of learning society that would be capable of responding to them; a society in which everyone is engaged in learning at key points