revisit the ILA project and look elsewhere in the United Kingdom where kindred initiatives did not founder. We should look to the experience of the Open University, both in terms of their engagement, communication, and structures for progression successes, at what came out of the Learning Through Life inquiry, and at the ideas that have been floated by, among others, the Banks review, City and Guilds and unionlearn. There are big questions but, spurred on by the looming problems with FE loans which I believe the government should seriously revise and revisit, we need to draw on those resources, and make progress. We have to do so – because lifelong learning is not just increasingly an economic necessity, it is a social and economic good. Fifty years ago this month my grandfather died, someone I remember vividly, though I was a small child at the time. He was born a cobbler’s son into a large Derbyshire family whose circumstances never allowed him to satisfy the thirst for learning that won him a scholar’s medal (struck from the copper taken from Nelson’s flagship HMS Foudroyant) in the 1890s – though the books I saw on his shelves as that small child testified to his enduring passion for history, which I have inherited. The progress we have made since the 1960s, in opening up aspirations to lifelong learning, must be maintained. Not least because it is a vital cultural good, a mechanism for bringing twenty-first century people of differing backgrounds together, whether person-to- person, in groups or online. Not only can it help banish the tale of waste and thwarted talent which was a staple in English literature from Thomas Gray’s ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ through to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and beyond – it can challenge the atomisation and alienation that twenty-first century technology can sometimes bring unwittingly in its wake. As such, we must make sure it stays centrally on all decision-makers’ agendas, locally and nationally – and not least that of the Treasury.

Gordon Marsden is Labour’s shadow minister for further education and skills

Perspectives on further education loans An Adults Learning special issue

This special issue of Adults Learning – the first in a series of single-topic ‘extras’ – aims to inform the ongoing debate about the introduction of further education loans for adults aged 24 and over in England from 2013.

The short, sharp contributions gathered together here – from across the adult and further education sector – were published in January 2012, as the government began to work with stakeholders to develop options for the implementation of the policy.

This Adults Learning special issue can be downloaded for free from: http://shop.niace.org.uk/adults-learning-extra.html

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