Communities are at the heart of the government's vision for the Big Society. And it's the author's strongly held view that skills should be at the heart of each and every one of those communities. If one grows the skills of an individual then the community will flourish. There is a job to be done in building skills to build communities--skilled…

People live in curious political times when it can be hard to match ideology to party. The outstanding example is in penal policy. Kenneth Clarke announces his Conservative determination to reduce numbers in prison, and to develop alternatives to locking people up. Labour denounces this as soft on crime. Is this how people expect things to line…

Adult learning, in all its forms, is a pre-requisite for a dynamic local democracy where councils play a crucial role, politically, socially, and culturally. Local government has recognised that investment in adult learning provides significant benefits for the wider welfare and wellbeing of the community. This investment has not come solely…

Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, has said his three priorities in office will be "localism, localism and localism". What does localism mean for local democracy and, with swingeing funding cuts in the offing, what can one do to ensure the relevance of adult learning to the localism agenda is…

It's almost a year since the revolution--the "Learning Revolution," that is. This was the Government's long-term vision for the development of "informal adult learning", as laid out in the White Paper of March 2009. The vision was expansive, embracing informal learning in the workplace, promoting a "new" culture of…

The spending review brought a promise to protect adult and community learning as well as swingeing cuts to further and higher education and local government. In this article, some of the key players--Lynne Sedgmore, Christopher Brooks, Graham Hoyle, Maggie Galliers, Louise Hazel, Richard Bolsin, Maggi Dawson, Ruth Bond, Stuart Etherington, Brendan…

"Learning for Life--a New Framework for Adult Skills," a thought-provoking report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), manages to be both passionate and well argued. Resulting, in part, from a series of policy seminars during 2006, it makes an interesting contribution to current debates. Simone Delorenzi advocates the…

In a misplaced rush for economic prosperity through vocational training, adults are in danger of elbowing aside their potential as learning and civic communities. In this article, the author argues that a skills strategy must be integrated within a broader learning-for-life vision which ranges over every aspect of learning in health, in social…

Recent policy reports by Lord Leitch and Sir Michael Lyons on educational skills and corresponding government spending raise the question of how a demand-led system for adult skills led by employers can operate concurrent with intertwined policies driven by different factors. There is also the need to integrate with regional policy and policies…

Back in November, voters in the North East of England overwhelmingly rejected the move towards an elected regional assembly. The scale of the defeat (three to one) of a Government-backed scheme was a rude awakening for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the range of regional agencies created since 1997. After all, it was felt that the…