3.2 Individuals can seldom articulate such clear links with previous educational experience, and the ‘presenting’ barriers often relate to individual motivation or attitude: e.g. fear of change, fear of failure, loss of status, perceived lack of relevance, and disinterest.
3.3 Accreditation can prove to be a general barrier – through resistance to the idea of being assessed where it is offered, or as a disincentive to participation where it isn’t.
3.4 Broader structural issues can bar participation in ongoing learning – e.g. cost, pressures of work or other time-related factors.
3.5 A major example here is the lack of affordable childcare, which is the single barrier most frequently highlighted by women.
3.6 Poor previous learning experience is often part of a complex picture – contributing, as it often does, to a broader negative spiral of social exclusion and deprivation.
4.1 All of the general barriers to adult learning can be experienced in rural contexts. But these contexts can exacerbate some general barriers (e.g. childcare provision, and where genuine rural deprivation is often very hard to identify and deal with).
4.2 The profoundest barriers to adult learning in rural areas relate to geography – i.e. isolation, dispersion, distance and community size.
4.3 Some of these barriers are magnified by specific issues of travel – e.g. lack of public transport; limited access to private transport. Travel difficulties are reinforced when courses are run in the evening and during the autumn or winter time.
4.4 Associated opportunity costs may heighten the impact of geographical or transport barriers – e.g. time taken for journeys, or increased financial outlay on transport.
4.5 Community size and population density may limit the (financial) viability of courses in rural locations, often resulting in only a small number of quite similar programmes being offered.
4.6 Although extension services offer possibilities for rural delivery of adult learning opportunities, there are potentially serious barriers to this: (a) funding cuts and centralisation of resourcing or provision; (b) recruitment of tutors willing to travel to rural locations; (c) failure of local rural facilities to meet basic standards; (d) decreasing numbers of rural communal spaces.
4.7 Factors related to the nature of rural communities can also provide barriers to learning; e.g. lack of anonymity, community divisions, exclusion of sub-groups, roles of community gatekeepers, and innate conservatism or parochialism.
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