Adult Learners' Week has whirled round again, but the author has been looking backwards. An invitation to speak at an event to mark the retirement of Richard Bolsin as General Secretary of the Workers' Educational Association prompted him at last to get hold of Jonathan Rose's "Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes." Rose's concern is…

Adult Learners' Week is based on a simple idea--that extolling the achievements of adult learners and promoting the benefits of learning will encourage others to take the plunge. Each year, through thousands of events and award ceremonies, and in media coverage that would cost millions of pounds if purchased as advertising, Adult Learners' Week…

Over the last decade, Adult Learners' Week in Wales has attracted 183,925 people back into learning. With the help of its partners, annual participants have gone from around 4,000 in 2001 to 25,155 in 2011. Despite this success, however, the campaign needs continually to evolve, adapt and demonstrate value for money. It also needs to be open to…

The eviction of the Occupy London protesters from their tents outside St. Paul's Cathedral marks the end of one of the most interesting experiments in popular education in recent times. For the past few months a string of leading writers, activists, journalists and academics have held workshops, led discussions and given lectures beneath the…

Death is often a time of reappraisal for those left behind: of gifts a person may have given, and of lessons that might be learned from their struggles. A number of distinguished adult educators, whose lives were shaped by twentieth-century wars and fragilities, have recently died. They include Roy Shaw, one-time Director of Adult Education at the…

When 75-year-old Margaret Corston saw a poster in her local library advertising a course in basic radio broadcasting skills, she little thought that some 18 months later she would be hosting her own weekly show, with thousands of listeners, on community radio. From small beginnings--her first course was called "First Steps in Radio"--she began to…

Open Stages is Britain's biggest amateur theatre project, a hugely ambitious scheme to bring the professional and amateur theatre worlds together. It is a learning project but, as the Royal Shakespeare Company's Ian Wainwright tells this author, it is not only the amateurs who are learning. Wainwright states that the amateur and professional…

Melaneia Warwick has never found it difficult to empathise with her adult students. She knows first-hand how untidy and unpredictable an adult's learning journey can be. She also knows how difficult it can be to take the first step, and how rewarding the experience can be if the teacher manages to create an atmosphere that is both supportive and…

Derek Legge, who celebrated his 95th birthday at the end of last month, is one of the most dedicated and influential of the largely unsung heroes of the adult education movement in Britain. As modesty is one of the many qualities with which his friends and colleagues credit him, he is certain to shrink from the description, but there is little…

The key message of NIACE's 2011 survey of adult participation in learning is that recession is bad for lifelong learning for anyone over the age of 25. The survey highlights the central importance of workplaces as sites of adult learning--and the challenges posed to a learning society when opportunities to learn reduce. It shows that the gap…

The concept behind "open educational resources" (OERs) has been around for several years. The principle of OERs is simply that teachers and lecturers make their learning materials freely available for others to use. At first, this might sound like a radical, even controversial, idea. Why, after all, should practitioners share materials that they…

The Secrets and Words films had everything one would expect from a BBC drama--great writing, acting and directing allied with high production values. But the dramas were also powerful learning tools, co-commissioned by BBC Learning and aimed at inspiring people who have difficulty with reading and writing to seek help. The BBC's learning vision is…

"Meeting the needs of the learner is at the heart of all our proposals", is the claim in the ministerial foreword to "Putting Learners at the Centre", the document in which recent pre-legislative proposals for reforming the post-16 education sector are set out by the Scottish Government. Such a grand claim warrants scepticism.…

This author retired this summer after 23 years leading one of the country's most creative and enterprising adult learning services. She departs convinced that adult and community learning needs not only tenacity, passion, and imagination but also professional management and support if it is to thrive.

It has been no easy feat getting an organisation the size of City Lit--with 30,000 students, 4,000 courses, and nearly 1,000 teachers--to achieve an overall Grade 1 at inspection. Throw into that mix the funding upheaval and the need to demonstrate repeatedly to new ministers the value of what the college does, and one will get some idea of the…