For Albert and Francis “getting the nation learning” meant opening up opportunities for those who didn’t have them.
The working class men and women who were excluded from routes into higher education and who would enjoy expanding their knowledge if offered the chance.
Albert saw learning as a means of finding joy which should available to all:
Every living person is potentially a student, though not necessarily in the technical sense of the word. There are few men and women, tired though they may be in the industrial work of the world, whose faces will not light up at the sight of a beautiful picture if only there be someone to help them see its message.
Albert Mansbridge, Adventures in Working Class Education, 1920
In the context of modern education policy, exemplified by the recent Education & Skills White Paper, that contrast between work and being shown a brighter world is a telling one.
It is increasingly hard to find funding for courses which help learners enjoy art or to gain any knowledge not immediately linked to work. Central government and the Mayoral Strategic Authorities who now hold most of the skills budgets both speak increasingly in terms of work outcomes at the expense of any other. The modern approach is almost the reverse of Mansbridge, concentrating only on those technical skills you will need to compete in the workplace.
The WEA of 2025 certainly wants to support learners to progress into work. The opportunity to find good work is a key part of tackling inequality and supporting people to fulfil their potential.
But Mansbridge would be disappointed to find that policy makers and funders had made employability (a word he surely would have disliked) the only aim.
The most educated man is he who most completely fulfils his allotted task in spirit and in act, whether it be the digging of a trench or the writing of a poem.
Albert Mansbridge
In 2025 investment in construction skills is certainly going up. Poetry writing, not so much.
But why is this? Why have policy makers turned away from the wider curriculum?
We know it’s part of a wider trend across the whole of education. The Cultural Learning Alliance has looked at arts in schools. Their 2025 report card found “a 42% decline in Expressive Arts GCSE entries over the past 15 years”. When they explored their data further they found that: “only 6.6% of GCSE entries in the most deprived areas are in arts subjects, compared to 8.3% in the most affluent.”
So not only are arts subjects being sidelined at all ages but alongside this is a story of increasing inequality of opportunity.
Which brings us to back to Albert. The old WEA magazine was called Highway for a reason. It’s because, Albert described education as a Highway in deliberate contrast to the usual imagery of the time which was education as a Ladder. In other words, education could be a broad road on which everyone can travel not only a thin piece of apparatus which enables one person to climb up in a straight line.
By taking out the opportunity to learn multiple subjects for multiple reasons, education is going back to being a ladder not a highway.
Fewer people will be able to make progress. Fewer people will see education as something they take part in alongside others in their community. Learners will pass through far fewer landmarks in their education journey. They will also most likely finish an education journey at a much younger age.
If the motivation for this narrowing of subjects is economic rather than (or as well as) ideological then it is also a false economy.
Participation in adult learning has fallen considerably in the last twenty years and funding has plummeted alongside it. There is less money in the system and what is there is being directed towards some of the most persistent economic problems, such as attempting to bring young people not in education, employment or training into the workforce.
Where does this leave those who are not in the workforce and not intending to be: retired people, carers, those with limiting health conditions and disabilities? They benefit from learning which is directed towards wellbeing and social connection, precisely the types of courses which are disappearing.
And will purely vocational courses really meet the needs of those furthest from the workforce? What is there for those already in the workforce whose employers fail to support through training and development? In order to increase attainment in higher level technical skills we first need to crack the persistent challenge of the third of the working age population who have not reached level 3 qualifications and the 8.5million who have low literacy or numeracy.
Adult community learning works through building confidence, embedding essential skills into subjects that grab the learner’s interest, building support and friendship groups at a local level and focusing on the learner’s wellbeing. This type of approach is generally referred to as “tailored learning”. It gets one mention in the whole White Paper.
The over-riding issue is that current policy has too narrow a view of education. It has lost Albert Mansbridge’s Highway-wide vision of a route to lifelong and life-wide learning.
Rather than a functional White Paper, we need a full national lifelong learning strategy which sets out a proper vision for the role of learning in 21st century society.
When asked for his definition, he said:
To define education would be to define life.
Albert Mansbridge
This didn’t discourage him from creating a nation-wide network of learning opportunities in the shape of the WEA. A big vision with a practical approach.
That’s what Albert and Francis would want from the government – a proper visionary strategy to really Get The Nation Learning.
