Why a national lifelong learning strategy is a permanent necessity

to get across, and that is that adult education and lifelong learning is not, as many politicians insist on saying, all about skills to for the world of work, to play a part in the economy, to help with growth.

12:46
Very important as all those things are, we wanted to leave them with the message that education and learning is an end in itself.

12:57
It can enrich people's lives, it can inspire them, it it can enable them to be participants in society and the local community and in the joy of the world around them.

13:10
And people need pathways from wherever they are now to wherever they want to go to.

13:17
And that is as true today in 2026 as it was in 2019 and as it was in 1919.

13:25
And so the message of our report, I think is even more important today than it was when we produced it.

13:31
Thank you.

13:34
No, thank you, Helen.

13:35
That's, you know, absolutely fascinating.

13:36
And, and thank you for doing that.

13:38
The the parallels between the the two, you know, between that centenary report in 1919 and the Centenary Commission.

13:46
Sorry, 2019, that tyranny of machinery.

13:49
I I like that from the 1919.

13:52
I'm just thinking about it as we talked about we will, we've been having one conversation about AI in 2019, but now in 2026, just seven years later, you know, the rapid rise of AII think even over that short period, you know, brings it into stark focus.

14:08
And again, that comment around the role that lifelong learning and community based learning plays in building democracy and citizenship as needed now, as you said, as as it was back in 1919.

14:20
So you're absolutely fantastic sort of kick off for us.

14:23
Thank you that that's let's see really well and good luck with packing the boxes.

14:29
You know, I hope you know, they're off camera.

14:31
We can't see them.

14:32
But you know, and whatever comes next for you, Dave, Helen, thank you very much.

14:36
Thank you so much.

14:37
I look forward, I look forward to the rest of the session.

14:39
Thank you.

14:40
Thank you.

14:42
It gives me a great pleasure.

14:43
Now to hand over to our panel.

14:44
We've got three of the commissioners with us today.

14:47
I'm going to introduce each one individually.

14:51
They'll they'll give you an overview for sort of 10 minutes or so each and then hopefully we'll have time for Q&A's then on, on the back of these contributions.

15:00
So again, you can find the Q&A under the three dots, the more button on Zoom.

15:04
If you log your questions there, Chris and and Mariano sort of try and group them together for us and, and we'll make sure we, we have time at the end.

15:12
So I'm going to start the the introduction and of our panellists with Professor Sharon Clancy.

15:18
She's Associate Press professor in education challenge writing, focuses on education, class and culture and along with cognitive and social justice issues.

15:28
And she's currently chair at the Raymond William Foundation's big strong links there with, you know, the WEA as well and a trustee of the Association for research in the voluntary and community sectors.

15:39
As I say, she was a commissioner on our Centenary Commission and she also works with Scruteria and the is Co editor to the Studies in Education of Adults journal.

15:52
So Sharon convenes with Ian Jones, the research circle for fostering democratic debate and dialogue and that emerged from the Centenary Commission.

16:02
It's something that we've been really pleased to see sort of carry on.

16:06
So I'll finish that, Sharon, I'll give you the floor and again, thank you for thank you for your time.

16:11
Thank you very much, Simon.

16:12
And just to say that I'm also here to present some thoughts from Silla Ross, who sadly couldn't join us today.

16:20
Dame Helens already introduced you to to to some degree, but just to say that I'm, I want to give some time to her thoughts around democracy, in particularly the democratic deficit and the some of the struggles that we're having.

16:34
Which leads into my own thoughts around the role and function of the research circle that I currently convene that Simon's kindly introduced.

16:43
So Silla's explicit interest was around the way that the democratic deficit really can be found in the UK and globally, of course, and where we see in a common lack of accountability and transparency.

16:56
And Helen alluded to this, how we're seeing decision making taking place by unelected people behind closed doors and there can be a genuine abuse of power.

17:06
So in her perspective, the democratic deficit means that global citizens tend to feel disempowered so often now in terms of how they might actually influence or affect this anti democratic behaviour, something I'm sure we can all relate to.

17:24
And we, I guess we need to use an intersectional lens to understand this powerlessness.

17:30
So it really results really in what we perceive as a lack of engagement, a lack of belief and active participation in the civic realm.

17:38
And this includes voting in elections.

17:41
We might call it akin to Marx's idea of alienation.

17:46
It's increasingly unsurprising, given the immiseration of many people and what they're experiencing, and the fact that democracy, when appropriated, flawed and corrupted, tends to serve elites and the already powerful, but can harm the rest of us.

18:03
So our contention, mine ancilla, is that it's absolutely vital to recognise the importance that adult education needs to play in developing criticality, belonging and particularly in change making.

18:19
And we go back to the 1919 report so eloquently outlined by Dame Helen and the the focus of the report on adult education was very much about overcoming the demographic democratic deficit at the end of World War One.

18:35
And then the bridge but version of the report was produced in 1956, which I found really fascinating, which was entitled A Design for Democracy, making the democratic focus absolutely explicit.

18:49
The 1919 report focused on the social, civic and humane function of adult education.

18:57
It argued that public funding was essential if we were going to expand political and and industrial democracy, and only of that expansion would challenge and remedy the abuse, the discrimination and inequality especially experienced by working class people.

19:14
And, as Dame Helen's already said, it was perceived as a permanent national necessity.

19:21
It was absolutely it was recognised as fundamental to enabling adults to meet their civic responsibility to help in the solution of the common problems of human society, one of the key phrases in the report.

19:35
So content should focus on subjects most directly relevant to the governance of democracy, but also to the intellectual emancipation of workers.

19:45
And really, of equal value was the role of adult education in developing the humane, which was understood as education for fuller personal development, self-expression being human, so political education, as well as that for arts appreciation.

20:02
So where are we now?

20:03
Of course, we have real major concerns to note, which Siller explicitly asked me to mention.

20:09
The rise of populism.

20:11
The far right the rise of conspiracy theories and misinformation.

20:16
Simon alluded to this earlier.

20:18
So according to the Guardian, very recently in June, reporting on research by led by the University of Amsterdam for the Populist Project, which was a survey of far left, far right and populist parties, one in four people are now voting for far right parties.

20:36
That obviously includes reform from 2% in 2019 to 14% in 2024, the National Rally in France, etcetera.

20:47
And so this has been happening for some time, but we're seeing the implications in terms of the democratic deficit, in in terms of voting behaviours, particularly.

20:57
So in 2024 at our own general election, this was the lowest turn out at 59.7% since 2001, almost as low interestingly as 1918, which was 57.2%.

21:14
So we are seeing something about a kind of shift in populism and a shift in the kind of status of our own electoral system.

21:26
By May 2025 in the local elections, we thought we saw 34.3% of registered eligible voters who've actually voted in the County Council elections and 30.8% of registered eligible voters voted in the combined authority mayoral elections.

21:45
So we are not meeting the needs of a of a broad majority in in the country.

21:53
And I guess I wanted to bring it on to my own work and research to think a little bit about what the function of the research circle has been and some of my own research around the diminution in learning spaces in adult and community education and also adult residential education.

22:12
So we've seen a huge decline in the availability and purpose of adult education and we wanted to come to some of those key points.

22:22
So in the early 2000s, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, around 5.4 million publicly funded adult courses were taken annually in England.

22:33
But by last year that had fallen to 1.7 million, a drop of 70%.

22:40
And the biggest contraction amongst adults aged 25 and older, We've seen a huge drop in public spending on adult education and skills.

22:51
And this has fallen by around 30% between 2003 and 2025, from 6.8 billion to 4 billion.

23:01
We're seeing a damage in implication really for public education as a whole.

23:07
And I just wanted to ring bring in a Raymond Williams quote who's very dear and very important to me as a thinker.

23:14
He said that education should be as much a matter for concern in challenging inequalities in society as were questions about the ownership of capital or the means of production.

23:27
And this he saw as being absolutely central, that it should be about challenging inequality, it should be about public based education.

23:36
We're seeing a huge drop in publicly funded classroom based qualifications, a huge decline of about 58% in 2025.

23:46
We're seeing clamoke the closure of community based adult education centres, which I can speak about personally.

23:52
In my own home county of Derbyshire, we saw eight adult community centres closed last year alone by reform LED councils.

24:03
We're seeing a huge decline in residential and community adult education.

24:07
This was an enormous project post Second World War.

24:11
Well, we had something like 35 to 40 sometimes figures place it at 50.

24:16
Short term and long term residential colleges often in the homes of the former aristocracy.

24:24
And they were very much about growing a growing need for second chance and progressive education for adults.

24:31
We now have one remaining fully independent college left.

24:35
Two have merged or closed very recently within the last two months.

24:40
So this is a an issue that cannot be ignored.

24:44
We're also seeing a kind of closure of the kind of subjects that people can access because these spaces, these residential colleges, these adult community centres have given access to people from all backgrounds to arts and crafts, farming, ecology, environmental issues, political history, local history.

25:04
The subject range is enormous, a huge space for innovation and I think all motivated by the desire to change society, a genuinely society first approach, a kind of depoliticization of education, recognising education can't just work on portable models, but it has to be socially organised, it has to acquire meaning through the alliances, even the conflicts and some of the institutional ecologies that sustains learning.

25:35
And is it?

25:35
It is ultimately about the labour of hand and brain.

25:39
It brings together the best of adult education, vocational and intellectual learning.

25:46
It has a lyricism, it is an interdisciplinarity, It brings subjects together, doesn't try to break them down into measurable chunks and it gives tremendous intellectual freedom and critical thinking.

25:58
I'm seeing all this now in my own research which looks at lost spaces and untold stories of adult education, a leave a Hume funded project that I'm currently doing.

26:09
And I'm what I'm picking up is the quality of scholarship, the quality of teaching has been absolutely formidable in these spaces that I'm describing.

26:18
But now we see a a complete domination of conceptualizations of employability based learning being the only subject in town.

26:28
As Dame Helen said, and I query this very deeply, the research circle, just to come on to that briefly before I run out of time, really came directly out of the 19 the 2019 Centenary Commission report.

26:43
We had a key chapter in the report based around fostering democracy, debate and dialogue and the research circle was one of we tried to get several off the ground based on the different chapters, but that was the one that took off.

26:56
I'm delighted to say the one myself and Dr.

26:58
Ian Jones have have run and we're now into our sixth year and we are a network of 180 members now.

27:06
We host 3 events online each year.

27:09
These are powerful conventions bringing together national and international figures in senior policy, figures like Professor Sir Michael Mama who spoke at one of our events, senior academics, community activists, practitioners, grassroots agents.

27:28
And it is very much a space to think about how adult education links with and fosters our democracy.

27:36
Why are our shared histories, our memories and instances of managing previous struggles so all important?

27:43
Why do we need to remember them when why do we need to know our own histories?

27:49
And this has been my interest in particular.

27:52
We have national and international colleagues joining these events, so we also get to learn from Canada, from Scandinavia, etcetera.

28:01
And we've talked about the importance of being backward backs, backwards travellers, being able to look backwards in order to look forwards, to learn from the past, to inform the future.

28:13
We are deeply concerned with making invisible education, the community based, the tacit learning visible.

28:21
And we're deeply concerned with voice and inequality, who gets to speak in our education system.

28:28
And so our primary observation is and focuses around developing and building a dialogical learning community and creating space and place for conceptions of culture, being ordinary, being something we all share.

28:46
So there's a huge amount of energy and work going on, enormous amounts of informal community needs based learning going on.

28:54
We see lots of examples at grassroots level of radical and pioneering efforts, people getting together to Co create, to engage, to learn collaboratively, but we also question whether it's enough with very little funding, in fact virtually no funding.

29:10
We start to, we're starting to think about how we reconceptualize community development.

29:15
So often it's delivered to us top down at community level and in the Raymond Williams Foundation we're seeing brilliant examples in Wales of real grass roots based, community based efforts coming from the people themselves.

29:31
So we know that adult education must continue to be strived for and, and it must and it is resonating with new people doing new ways of learning and thinking all the time.

29:44
It has to be about democracy and politics too.

29:47
We have to recognise that we've lost a lot of credibility in terms of the old markers.

29:53
The capitalist state society, we think have to think of new ways of organising, being responsible in this post capitalist, post growth situation we're now in.

30:04
And we do need to recognise the growth yet again of the autodidact, self-directed learning, adult education and we need to mitigate against fragmentation and act collectively.

30:17
Thank you.

30:19
No, thank you, Sharon.

30:21
Thanks a lot for that.

30:22
I think you're right to flag that clear and present danger and the, you know, community based adult learning is being limited to skills for work.

30:29
You know, we're certainly feeling that, you know, the WEA.

30:32
I'll move on quickly to Professor John Halford.

30:35
And John is the Robert Pierce Professor of Adult Education Emeritus at the University of Nottingham, sociologist and an adult educator.

30:44
He's worked for us at the WEA.

30:45
We're proud of that.

30:46
And he's also worked at universities of Hong Kong, Surrey and Nottingham, spent over 25 years, published extensively on aspects of lifelong learning, so Real Expert and the most recent Open Access book, Lifelong Learning, Young Adults and the Challenge of Disadvantage.

31:03
And so without further ado, I'll hand over to John.

31:06
John, thank you for giving us your time and thoughts this afternoon.

31:12
Thank you, Simon.

31:14
What I'm going to do my, my task is to actually explain or set up some highlights from a research project which Sharon and I, among others, have been involved in for the last couple of years, which is about adult participation in trends in adult participation in learning between 2002 and 2023.

31:41
I hope you can, you can see my slide and I hope you can, you can hear what I say.

31:48
I'm going to give it.

31:49
What I'm going to give you is a few highlights of the findings.

31:53
We, this is a project which is carried out as that slide explains.

31:59
We use data from the Adult Participation in Learning survey, which is conducted by the by the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education and then since it took over the Learning and Work Institute basically every year it's been done since 1996.

32:18
There are one or two exceptions.

32:20
The survey involves around 5000 adults every year and it aims to be representative of the UK adult population aged 17 and above.

32:34
We we to summarise the we we we can see the trends over time, but we also drill deeper into why adults learning and why they don't.

32:47
So we also gathered it's responses, gathered all the responses into a much larger data set of 67,000 adults between 25 and 64 that is bringing all the different years together.

33:00
So we have a much larger sample of, of adult learners and their and their reasons for learning and not.

33:07
We've also been able to compare pre and post COVID periods in some detail.

33:13
There's a lot more on the project website, which is the connect the what's the word for AUUURL or link is is on the it's given there on the bottom of this slide.

33:27
Overall, what we found is young adults, younger adults, those who finished their education, their initial education at or after the age of 21 and those who belong to the highest social grades and those who are in full time employment are most likely to take part in adult education.

33:48
I think that all bears repetition, but I will repeat it at the end.

33:55
Current and recent participation in adult learning is also by far the strongest predictor of the intention to take part in future.

34:05
So if you're taking part now or have recently, you're much more likely to take part in the future.

34:10
Over 80% of adults participating in learning at the time they're surveyed say they want to do so do do so in the future.

34:19
And that compares with under 20% of people who haven't participated since leaving school.

34:26
I'm not going to move on to the second slide, I hope, which gives you a shape of participation and what drives it in.

34:36
In adult learning and education, there are one or two things which are, which are broadly demographic.

34:45
I suppose women are slightly more likely to participate in adult learning than men, and they're also more likely to mention time and cost as as challenges to participation.

34:58
So you can see those that slide that graph in the top left hand corner.

35:05
Actual and future learning intentions decline by age, particularly after the age of 55.

35:15
With regard to ethnicity, current and recent participation are broadly equal between between white and ethnic minority groups.

35:29
People from minority ethnic backgrounds, on the other hand, are more likely to participate voluntarily and see benefits from learning.

35:37
These are interesting findings, but, and I just leave them with you, it's when we get into prior education that we begin to see some of the things what I would call the major social impact of, of on adult education.

36:00
People who leave full time education before they're 21 participate less than those who leave education later.

36:09
They're also likely to indicate that participation in learning wasn't their own choice.

36:15
So there's what we might think of as an ongoing cumulative effect.

36:20
Earlier educational success fuels future success.

36:24
It's known in in in the in the in the trade as the Matthew effect.

36:30
Those who get from the Gospel of Saint Matthew, those who have, who who have get more.

36:37
Those who those who have who don't have get less.

36:42
That's a it's a sad the reality of many areas of social policy.

36:48
Then we can turn to social class or social grade.

36:52
Class differences are much more powerful than gender or ethnicity.

36:58
Participation rates and the future intention to learn decline by social class.

37:03
Around half of those in the DE social group that is semi skilled and unskilled.

37:09
Manual occupations and the unemployed.

37:12
I haven't participated in learning since leaving school.

37:17
Compared with the social with us, the the what's the word the top social class.

37:23
If I use that term social class A&B that's higher, higher and intermediate managerial, administrative, professional occupations.

37:33
The participants, participants that is the semi skilled and unskilled are more likely to select non monetary benefits such as friendship, health and well-being.

37:44
It's it's people from the higher social groups who tend to select work related benefits, which I think bears comparison or bears thinking about.

37:55
When we when we think about what the power it is that we encourage, we try to encourage people to learn.

38:04
People from from social groups D&E are also much more likely not to have received any benefits from their learning.

38:13
Among non participants, cost barriers are stronger in Group in the social Group D and EA and B participant non participants were mainly they found time the main difficulty again.

38:28
So again, what we see here is a Matthew effect that is the people who've been well, who have higher from higher social classes and are paid better and have better back better education and so on.

38:44
They do better throughout.

38:46
They do better in adult education as well in works in relation to work status.

38:51
Those in full time work participate more.

38:55
They're also more likely to say their participation isn't voluntary.

38:59
That may be because they're they're their employers that require them to take part their motions.

39:04
Their motivations are also tend to be more related to things like improving job skills.

39:10
For part time workers.

39:11
The main barrier is cost.

39:14
And part time workers are also more likely to say they haven't seen any benefits from their learning.

39:21
I'm not going to move on to what I think works.

39:24
No.

39:24
What was going to be my the chain, How things have changed by year.

39:33
Are you still?

39:34
Yeah.

39:34
OK.

39:34
I hope you're still seeing that screen.

39:37
What you can see is that adult participation in learning has declined pretty much from from 9 from 2002 to 2019 with a few ups and downs along the way.

39:50
And you'll see we've put in some into that graph, some, some little or some big things that happened along the way.

39:58
I'll also come back, one of those was COVID and I'll come back to the COVID effect in a few moments.

40:04
The COVID effect is partly methodological, but perhaps also partly real.

40:10
The decline in participation rates during the 20 tens coincided and this is this underlines what what Sharon was saying under coincided with lower spending on adult learning, lower trade union membership and a rise in zero hour contracts and precarious work.

40:32
So we really have to think seriously about the the impact of of spend public spending on adult learning of trade unions membership and of right and of security of work in order to encourage adult learning.

40:55
It seems that the shift in a much towards a much sharper focus in public funding to make sure it concentrates only on work related skills since the early 2000s has coincided with a marked decline in participation.

41:11
I'm going to make that point and raise the question as to whether that is cause and effect.

41:19
Then on to my final slide which will compares the pre and post COVID periods and really what I want to draw attention to.

41:30
Well, I suppose so it's there's a methodological point which needs to be made because we do as you've seen in the in the previous slide there appear, if I come back to here, there appears to be a marked increase in participation after the COVID.

41:51
It needs to be said that surveys prior to COVID were conducted by an interviewer.

41:57
Since COVID-19, they've been online.

42:01
So this this represents a significant methodological change.

42:06
And I have to be say, say that we don't really know whether the leap in participation that you see is real, perhaps because people got more used to participating online or whether it's not real.

42:21
But we can see, if we look at this area up to the left, we can see that there's a much higher proportion of people are identifying leisure and personal interest as their main motivation rather than work and career after COVID than before.

42:41
It remains true that the main motivation seems to be the dark blue one of work and career, but the light blue one of leisure and personal interest.

42:53
It is much more marked after COVID and seems to be around 40% of the motivations.

43:01
So to sum, if I can summarise, the people most likely to take part in adult learning and education are younger adults, people who finish their initial education at or after age 21, people in the highest social grades and people in full time employment.

43:22
These are facts which which in effect have been suspected for meant for quite a while.

43:30
And the, one of the, one of the intentions of both the 1919 report and the 2019 report, and indeed I should say of the Workers Educational Association was hosting this discussion was, was to address that inequality and to, to, to, to bring more, bring opportunities more to people who have been profoundly excluded from education.

44:03
What I'm going to make in terms of what these findings suggest, point to, I'm going to make just three suggestions, which mostly come from the Centenary Commission.

44:16
1 is that we need a breadth of provision because when you focus more, you also exclude more.

44:24
When you focus provision more, you also exclude people who don't fit within that focus or whose intentions and motivations don't fit within that purpose.

44:36
We need to have a well funded adult, adult learning services able to provide effective and sustained outreach into communities with coordination and funding at the local level.

44:49
And we need to work with both the voluntary sector and social movements.

44:54
And that is my lot.

44:56
Thank you very much.

44:59
Thank you, John.

44:59
And I'm going to move quickly to to Jonathan as well.

45:03
I'm not currently seeing many questions in the Q&A, Jonathan.

45:06
So I think, you know, you're full, the full sort of 7 minutes or so that we'd allocated.

45:11
So Jonathan's professor of innovation and knowledge exchange at the University of Oxford.

45:16
He's pro vice chancellor with our portfolio and president of Kellogg College as well and an honorary Norman Fellow in the Department for Education and a member of that department Scopes research team.

45:26
He's held many, you know, roles before that and he was also one of the commissioners for our Centenary Commission.

45:32
So Jonathan, I'll pass the floor to you.

45:35
Great.

45:35
Thank you very much.

45:36
Well, everyone's always talking about the, the AI revolution and robotics and machine learning and so on and acknowledging that that's going to change everything at the world of work, you know, at least including for all of us who are already working.

45:51
And that's, so it's going to require rescaling, upscaling, you know, etcetera, etcetera.

45:56
So I might think, well, our arguments been made, everyone's accepted it, but I'd make 4 caveats.

46:01
The most most obvious 1 is that this rhetoric recognition hasn't been accompanied by the huge increase in funding for and provision of lifelong learning that everyone recognises is required with the huge changes in the world of work and more broadly.

46:19
The second point I'd make is that while the current developments in artificial intelligence are clearly new, new technology isn't new, and indeed technological revolutions are new.

46:33
The it's the 1919 report, and this is the Centenary Commission report, by the way, which is available free of charge from www.centenarycommission.org.

46:47
And that's the front cover, which has got the little blue front cover of the 1919 report produced by the Ministry of Reconstruction, which had to consider how one got out of the crises at that time represented by the past World War.

47:04
And they argued that adults education, lifelong learning was absolutely crucial, not just get out of those crises, but then to be a permanent national necessity, you always would need this.

47:16
And one of the reasons they gave is very relevant to artificial intelligence because they they said because of the new technologies, including the as yet unknown technologies.

47:30
And that leads on to a very important Third Point, which is because the a lot of the new technologies are as yet unknown.

47:38
Just training today's work isn't today's skills is clearly completely inadequate.

47:44
What we need is for a workforce for all of us to have the capabilities to be able to make the most of the as yet unknown technologies as and when these do arrive.

47:54
And what that needs is creativity, innovative thinking, imagination, etcetera.

48:00
And what that requires is adult education and lifelong learning in its fullest sense in order to have that breadth of vision, creative thinking and so on.

48:12
Now the fourth point I make is that the really big one, which is the impact of AI, is absolutely massive, of course, and will only get bigger, but it's also huge beyond the world of work.

48:24
It's going to be great societal changes, huge impacts on individual lives.

48:30
So all of this requires lifelong learning, not just for the changing world of work, but also for individual well-being, for the changing nature of the world around us as individuals and for society, societal cohesion, for healthy democratic participation and so on.

48:51
And then the final point then is, well, who's going to deliver this life while learning how, where.

48:58
And the, the Centenary Commission 2019 report, two of its recommendations were close to link because it said on the one hand, you have to have a, a national funding, a national strategy administered to deliver all this proper funding, etcetera.

49:17
You have to have that national commitment recognised.

49:20
But then there has to be local delivery, delivery on the ground in the localities with partnerships, educational partnerships with everyone collaborating universities and Fe colleges, local authorities and mayoral combined authorities, employers and bodies such as the the WEA.

49:39
So I would argue echoing the the 1919 report and repeating what was in the 2019 report that yes, we do need this rescaling, upscaling and it's it's anxious that that's not being delivered, but we need much more than that.

49:57
We need adult education, lifelong learning with the full breadth of provision.

50:02
Thank you, Jonathan, amazing.

50:05
Thank you.

50:06
And again is back on time as well.

50:07
That's, that's fantastic.

50:09
I just want to pick up on Jonathan's point there about, you know, for so long wrongly.

50:14
And we used the term soft skills when we talked about critical thinking, communication, teamwork, These are essential human skills.

50:23
I think that's the label that we should give these now in, in that sort of land of AI.

50:29
So I think that's a really important point.

50:31
Graham, I'm going to come to you in exactly 2 minutes because I want to answer one of the questions.

50:35
Yes, there's a problem with funding that one of our contributors asked, and it'd be great if adult education was funded to the same level as adult sport participation.

50:45
That would be good.

50:46
Miss Fires asked a really good question.

50:48
Very quick, one line answer from each of you, each of the three of you, which set out the challenges.

50:53
This is a massive job.

50:55
We are going to do this.

50:56
We're going to produce a national lifelong learning strategy.

50:59
What is the one thing that gives you hope that we can learn this?

51:03
Sharon, I'll come to you first very quickly, and then we can we can get to Graham.

51:07
So what's your hope in all this?

51:09
Yes, some of the newer grassroots social movements that I'm seeing.

51:12
Simon, Northeastly in Wales.

51:15
Northeast.

51:16
Yeah, absolutely.

51:18
Thank you.

51:18
That's it.

51:20
Very quick.

51:20
Thank you, John.

51:23
I'll come to you as well.

51:24
What gives you hope in this?

51:26
You need to come off mute and give us those words of inspiration.

51:34
So still on mute.

51:35
I think John, I have to think about how do I mute myself?

51:44
I think what gives me hope is that we can't.

51:48
It is the importance of discussion and and face to face encounters in, in, in normal life.

51:58
And we, we, we need these things.

52:01
We, the human race doesn't work without them.

52:05
And if we, if we leave things to artificial intelligence, we shall be much the poorer.

52:15
Thank you.

52:16
So that's human connection, bringing people together.

52:18
We say this all the time at the WA almost regardless sometime of what the curricular subject is just bringing people together to discuss some debate.

52:27
You know, is, is fantastic.

52:28
And then you're still with us as well.

52:30
So I'll come to Jonathan 1st and then I'll get your one open.

52:33
Then we'll go straight to Graham.

52:36
Well, we need a government and political leadership that recognises the need to combine both the world of work and the importance of community cohesion, that recognise the need to act nationally and also region in locally.

52:49
And it's just possible that we might get a new Prime Minister recognises that we're we're all located.

52:56
It's the king of the North.

52:57
Yes, hello.

52:59
Well, in fact, you're 1 hold.

53:01
Well, I, I would just just picking up Jonathan's point.

53:04
I, I know that Andy Haldane, I, I should have held up my copy of this wonderful report is very close, I gather to the person who might become our Prime Minister.

53:12
So one hopes that the recognition of the importance of adult education will be very close to a potential new Prime minister's heart.

53:22
Thank you.

53:22
Thanks, Graham.

53:24
And we've just been talking of one king of the North, so over to another King of the North, or maybe not king of the North, but not in the North anyway.

53:32
Yeah, thank you.

53:33
I guess, obviously my role just to reflect on what's been said so far.

53:36
And obviously there's very little in this, in this wonderful seminar today that that I would disagree with, particularly how how we bring together both the need for skills and the need for cohesion and citizenship and democracy within the work that we do.

53:50
I, I think though, I suppose the question should move on to, to how we achieve what we want to achieve.

53:55
I mean, I guess there's very few people on the call who would not agree mostly what's been said, but we all know that those who do not agree with that position and it's how we move to that point.

54:05
I mean, clearly new political leadership provides help, but that's all potentially does.

54:12
I mean, I think therefore, what do we do as a community if we want to move forward what we believe in and what we discussed today, what points are there?

54:21
I think the role of place and geography has come through.

54:24
I mean, particularly differences across place.

54:27
Clearly the, the, the role for devolution, which the new government Prime Minister will take forward has been on, on the, we've been on that road for a while anyway, but there are lots of things around that really means.

54:39
I mean, regions are important, but I think as Sharon pointed to, regions are very big areas where Sharon seen innovation is very much a local and play space level much below that.

54:48
How do we align those things with, with the new priorities that, that the government may move forward with?

54:54
I think alignment's really important as well.

54:57
I, I think that, you know, for adult education involves adults and a lot of adults do different sorts of qualifications.

55:06
Possibly they're the ones we discussed a lot today and the alignment between what say higher education, Fe adult education, the sector does is important.

55:15
I, I think without that kind of alignment we can achieve within sectors, then the progress we make might be limited.

55:26
I think the discussion of, of what that means rather than the seeing these areas as separate, then seeing them as maybe a place based and, and more aligned, more combined, because of course those, those will adjust the problems that we see.

55:39
And what are those problems as well?

55:41
I mean, where do we see ourselves as an ad education aligned with others adjusting some of the real problems of today?

55:46
I mean, obviously I'm interested.

55:48
So far we haven't discussed the million or so young people out of education, employment and training, which which of course has moved up the political agenda because we have a relatively high profile politician driving forward a report on the area.

56:02
But this is a new challenge either and it's not to decry from the millions of older adults who who have qualifications either.

56:09
But again, where do we see or are coming in to to solve those challenges?

56:14
And that isn't just a skills issue either.

56:16
It's beyond that, I mean adult education role beyond that, that there are those who remain in that category who need support to re enter and move into learning, which isn't just a skills based agenda either.

56:27
Needs isn't a skill based agenda.

56:30
Yeah, if we talked about AI as well, but that's an area of uncertainty.

56:34
We we could have got whole new areas on that seminars on that.

56:37
What do we mean by AI?

56:38
What do we mean as the impacts on on the economy, on society?

56:41
We know there's going to be changes what they look like, but again, how we are proactive in that, how we position the work we're doing as a solution to what it possibly don't understand.

56:51
But that is our challenge if we're going to move this agenda and work forward.

56:54
And also, again, finally, I'll talk about that about pre role for collaboration.

56:58
I think the fact that we a convenience is wonderful, but we see a range of organisations that came together for for the 2019 report.

57:06
Let's continue working together and it it won't be to achieve any of the the things that we believe we want to achieve in policy terms won't be an easy ride there.

57:16
As I'm going to be reading the other day, I think already, I think Burns team had 100 policy papers covering everything and no doubt from sports and gardening or whatever you got a policy on right until I learn education.

57:30
So it won't be an easy journey.

57:32
Even me, even we believe the importance of this work to move that up, whatever cap policy we're looking at, but it won't be achieved other than by collaboration, working together.

57:41
And I think that alignment's crucial as well, adjusting the problems which not just the government sees, but we see in society as well as some as we're alluding to today.

57:50
And I look forward to being part of that collaborative journey, hopefully with you, Simon and others on this call because it is an onward opportunity possibly.

57:57
But at the same time, as I say, without and that strength and enough ideas, but also being focused in what we need to go on to see as well.

58:05
I think how do we cut through the lot of noise that's going to occur over the past six months to a year in terms of achieving policy change?

58:12
I'll leave it there.

58:14
All right, excellent.

58:15
Thank you, Graham.

58:16
And and yeah, I think that alignment and almost making that case, how do we make that case that lifelong learning is is part of the solution for a range of policy issues.

58:25
So it's not just a stand alone issue.

58:27
We can write a policy paper to the antid to antid, but it's not that.

58:31
How do how do we position lifelong learning across both national policymakers and increasingly devolved policymakers to say this is part of the answer to a number of the issues that that your, your communities and your neighbourhoods may be facing?

58:45
Because I think you're right, it is at that that very local level.

58:48
Increasingly it's fine on devolution as well as you know this is a forming picture as well with the parts of the country that achieving new established housing back in the both wonderfully and only last week in Blackpool and talking about they've read Lancashire's recently got a foundational devolution deal there.

59:06
So there are areas this is an area where people are forming the new forms of of local government organisation.

59:13
Where within that do we see life and learning policy advocacy for life and learning sitting as well it it it this opportunity is not just nationally but locally as well regionally as well.

59:24
I think in terms of how these areas are forming, aside from the fact, as I said before, there are those political forces which appear by the roles are showing alluded to earlier on to things we believe in.

59:32
Nevertheless, there are the one when there is change, there is hopefully opportunity.