While her background leading a variety of public, private and voluntary sector organisations was not an obvious preparation for her new role as General Secretary of the Workers' Educational Association, the WEA is, nevertheless, in Ruth Spellman's blood. Her grandfather, who left school at 12, became fully numerate and literate through WEA courses…

While people might not be familiar with the term "voluntary arts", they are probably either involved with some voluntary arts activity themselves or they know someone who is. They use "voluntary arts" to mean any situation in which someone is voluntarily participating in an art form for pleasure, social reasons, skills…

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…

The Reader Organisation's Get into Reading programme is all about getting people together in groups to engage with serious books. The groups are mixed and the participants sometimes challenging, but the outcomes are often remarkable. Jane Davis, who founded the Reader Organisation and continues to oversee Get into Reading, has witnessed a massive…

In this article, the author talks about Up for Arts, a Liverpool-based radio project aimed at promoting engagement in the arts. Up for Arts is a unique social action project which uses radio as a means of increasing public engagement in the voluntary arts and crafts. Its success has depended not only on the commitment of its partner organisations…

On the face of it, the restoration of a classic car is an unlikely catalyst for community cohesion, but Nottingham City Council's Brough Superior project is a terrific demonstration of the difference learning can make not only to the lives of learners but also in breaking down barriers between individuals and giving them a sense of shared identity…

The splintering of the public domain makes the development of a coherent lifelong learning system less likely. But while people might want to resist plans to dissolve the boundaries between the public, private and voluntary sectors, debate about the relationship between professionals and volunteers in adult education suggests those boundaries…

Like a lot of people, the author has been trying to get his mind around David Cameron's Big Society agenda, and what it means for his own institution, City Lit. There has already been a lot written about this subject, especially in the press, much of it reflecting a degree of scepticism. Where to start? The author thinks the Prime Minister tried…

Hardly anyone can have failed to pick up on the recent flurry of stories in the national press about the Big Society, sparked off by Dame Elisabeth Hoodless's remarks that funds for volunteers are disappearing at an alarming rate, and that this is undermining the very idea of a "Big Society". At the same time, under the government's…

Gaythorne Row, a terrace of Victorian back-to-back houses in Great Horton, was earmarked for demolition when, in 1986, Bradford Industrial Museum took possession of the three cottages and transported them, brick by brick, to the museum site four miles away. The houses were built in 1876, a year later than the old worsted spinning mill in which the…

Enthusiastic learners acting as community learning champions (CLCs) are scarcely a novelty. There has been a surge of interest in what they have to offer in the last couple of years, thanks in large part to a government programme, which has funded training and support for learning champions through 50 community projects across the country, and a…

The art works in Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral are meant to inspire. Its unique circular interior creates a remarkable space for art; plain and grey, with its cool, bleached walls dappled with occasionally brilliant light, yellow, pink, orange and blue. Sister Anthony Wilson is the cathedral's artistic director. When she arrived in 1981, with…

Philosophy for Children has been offering schoolchildren the opportunity to engage with philosophical ideas since the 1970s. It is a simple idea, already used in schools in Britain and around the world. Children share some reading--or other stimulus--with their teacher. They then devise their own questions, choose one that interests them, and,…

This article features In Touch, a volunteer programme run jointly by the Manchester Museum and Imperial War Museum North, that does more than teach individuals about the museums and their collections, it also gives them skills and experience they can transfer to their lives and future employment. Working in partnership has enabled both museums to…

A project known as SHAID, the Single Homeless Action Initiative, was founded in response to youth homelessness, a problem that had been growing since the 1980s, in a deprived area of County Durham. SHAID provides young people with advice, support, information, and life skills training on subjects such as home safety, budgeting, personal and food…