Good ideas have many parents, bad ones are often orphans. And since it is now 20 years since the first Adult Learners' Week in England, and the idea has been adopted and adapted to local circumstances in 55 countries, there must be something going for it. As the twenty-first Adult Learners' Week gets underway, the author reflects on the origins of…

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…

NIACE's 2010 representative sample survey of adult participation in learning in the UK shows something of a sea change in adults' engagement in learning. After years in which the numbers reporting participation in learning fell overall, and the gulf between the learning rich and the learning poor widened dramatically, there has been a major…

Adult learning is not a tidy business: adults fit learning into the spaces left by the other demands on complex lives, and into the spaces left in administrative structures overwhelmingly designed for other people. No simple metric can capture adults' diverse purposes and achievements, and no single programme can capture the full range of things…

In anticipation of CONFINTEA VI, this article critically reflects on the last decade of English adult education policy. The United Kingdom played an important role in 1997's Hamburg conference by putting forward International Adult Learners' Week, and inspiring delegates by its enthusiasm for adult education. However the trajectory of the past ten…

This article presents 2007 report on the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) survey on adult participation in learning. With overall participation among the poorest groups stuck at less than half that experienced by the upper and middle classes, the survey suggests the need to ask if the balance of public investment in adult…

Adult participation in education and learning in the United Kingdom was examined through a Gallup survey of a stratified (by region and town size) national sample of 4,673 adults aged 17 years and over from England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Interviewers were given quotas for sex by respondents' age, class, and employment status.…

Adult participation in education in the United Kingdom in 1999 was examined in a survey during which a sample of 5,054 adults over the age of 17 (2,366 men and 2,688 women) throughout the United Kingdom were interviewed. The following were among the major findings: (1) 23% of adults enrolled in courses were taking computer courses; (2) the rate of…