Lifelong Learning in the UK

An introductory guide for Education Studies

Anne O'Grady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136340956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written specifically for Education Studies students, this accessible text offers a clear introduction to lifelong learning and the impact it has on all areas of society. Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, it explores what lifelong learning is, where learning can and does take place and who is accessing it.

Offering a clear overview of the different strands to lifelong learning, the book examines the concept of lifelong learning drawing on key policy initiatives and strategies. Each section outlines the types of individuals who are most likely to access lifelong learning within and across these strands including, for example, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, unemployed adults, carers and guardians, older age-groups and returning learners.

Chapters cover:

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• adult and community learning;

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• higher education;

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• further education;

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• work-based learning;

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• prison and probation learning.

Including supporting tasks and reflection activities, this textbook will give students a broad understanding of lifelong learning and its role in supporting adults throughout their life both socially and economically. Lifelong Learning in the UK is an essential introductory text for students on undergraduate courses in Education Studies.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to lifelong learning

Introduction

Lifelong learning has been variously considered over the decades as the key to the development of a society that is economically successful within a global market, but that is also inclusive and just (Hodgson and Spours, 1999). Lifelong learning has been discussed within a framework of emancipation and oppression (Freire, 1996) and has often been portrayed as the key to survival; as the foundation of learning organisations, a learning society and a learning culture (Kerka, 2000; Field, 2002). More recent discussions regarding lifelong learning have identified it as a concept that has at its core the notion that learning takes place throughout one’s life (Schuller and Watson, 2009).

This chapter will introduce the concept of lifelong learning. It will discuss the emergence of this concept and its relevance and importance for society today.

To aid the flow of discussion, the chapter sets out a series of questions. It is important to note that I do no expect to be able to answer these questions fully, but to draw on my experiences, reading of the literature and research to assist in the development of answers to these questions. I say this because often as a student, when you read an academic text, it is not uncommon to make some assumptions that the academic community has all the answers and that what is written is the ‘truth’. You are invited during the course of this book to question what is written, challenge the response, and perhaps most importantly think about what is missing. For example, in writing my responses what have I chosen not to write?

The key question for this chapter is: what is ‘lifelong learning’? In developing a response to this question I will explore some of the key terms often drawn on to inform thinking about the subject, and which may create contradictions or ambiguity. By then end of the chapter you should be able to develop a definition of lifelong learning. You should begin to be able to understand the challenges and difficulties associated with developing this definition which will, in turn, inform your reading throughout the text.

Task

Attempt to write a definition of lifelong learning. You will be able to reflect, and build on this definition as you engage with this text.

What is ‘lifelong learning’?

Defining terms

Lifelong learning, as a concept, should not be as difficult to understand as it seems. While it should be acknowledged that lifelong learning happens in a variety of places, in a variety of ways, and engages with all sectors of society – and so is not as ‘neat’ as the compulsory sector of education – extra layers of ambiguity are developed by the changing nature of the terminology that is used to describe or discuss lifelong learning. Some common terms used by the sector and throughout the literature around lifelong learning include: post-compulsory education, vocational education, continuing education, adult education, lifelong education, learning through the life-course and continuing professional development. For the purpose of this text the term lifelong learning will be used to explore this sector of learning.

In discussions around lifelong learning, multiple terms are used, often interchangeably, in the same text as well as across texts. In order to develop a clear understanding of lifelong learning, you should be able to distinguish the different underlying meanings of each of these associated key terms, particularly ‘adult’, ‘education’ and ‘training’, ‘globalisation’, ‘skills’ and ‘lifelong learning’.

In order to understand lifelong learning, it is important to be able to distinguish it from other terms that have been used across the decades to explain learning that occurs outside of the compulsory education framework in the UK. The following section invites you to think about some common everyday terms that we use in society unquestioningly, and asks you to query them and develop your own understanding of the terms and what they might mean within the context of lifelong learning. By doing this you should develop a stronger understanding of what lifelong learning might mean for you.

Adult

The term ‘adult’ is one that we use every day without any particular thought. However, it is essential for us to understand who we are referring to when we talk about an ‘adult’. Often we think about being an adult as reaching a particular age, and legally in the UK you become an adult at the age of 18. However, many lifelong learning funding streams consider ‘adult’ as 19 and often 25 for ‘mature learners’, or indeed 24 for learners with learning difficulties and disabilities.

Rogers (2003) provides a very broad and helpful discussion on the notion of ‘adult’. In his argument, he identifies that the term ‘adult’ has been, and continues to be, used in a number of ways. Often ‘adult’ is associated with chronological age, but to be ‘adult’ is also associated with particular attitudes, values and beliefs, and linked to certain types of behaviour. ‘Adult’ or ‘adulthood’ is often rooted to a cultural specificity, and can be seen as a social construct that holds particular meaning and perception for specific cultures. Examples of a range of definitions for what it means to be an adult can be identified in the literature, ranging from an adult ‘defined as anyone aged twenty-one or over, married, or the head of a household’ (Johnstone and Rivera in Rogers, 2003: 26) to people defined as ‘adults because they have assumed responsibility for managing their own lives’ (Merriam and Caffarella in Rogers, 2003: 393). Rogers asserts that adulthood, in Western societies, is seen as the opposite of childhood and that ‘adultness’ can be identified by three signifying characteristics: maturity, autonomy and a sense of perspective in relation to self.

Importantly, notions of adulthood, and what it means to be adult, are fluid and ever changing. Individuals construct their own conceptions of what it is to be adult based on their own contexts of culture and society. Throughout this book ‘adult’ is used as a chronological reference to people aged between 19 and 65 and associated with paid employment, rather than as a concept with associated value and belief systems, although these are implicit. When thinking about ‘young people’, this will refer to those people between the ages of 14 and 19 who form a significant part of the lifelong learning sector.

Education and training within lifelong learning

In the UK, compulsory education has been in place since the nineteenth century. While it has undergone many changes and developments, fundamentally children and young people are required to engage in formal learning processes identified by the government from the ages of approximately 5 to 16. Forms of compulsory education are explored in detail in other texts and will not be discussed here. However, it is important to note that the term ‘education’ has been widely used in discussions around learning beyond compulsory education and it is important to be clear about what ‘education’ means in the context of learning, as this can significantly inform and influence how we think about lifelong learning.

Education

‘Education’ is a term that is frequently interchanged with the term ‘training’. However, these terms have very different meanings which are particularly important when thinking about what constitutes lifelong learning. Education is often regarded, and commonly thought about, as:

organised and sustained instruction designed to communicate a combination of knowledge, skills and understanding valuable for all the activities of life.

(Jarvis, 1987: 105)

Education, according to Raymond Williams, is underpinned by a series of philosophical ambitions: to enable individuals to understand social change; to enable them to relate social change to their own context; and to enable individuals to become the authors of social change. This framework for education provides a good platform for thinking about what lifelong learning is, and supports the work of influential writers in the world of lifelong learning such as Dewey (1916), as well as people such as Knowles (1975) and Jarvis (1987, 1995, 2006, 2007, 2011) amongst others. These thinkers based their philosophy of learning on a humanistic model which will be explored further in this chapter.

Task

Take a moment here to think about your own experience of education and what education means for you. What do you think you learnt as you went through your education? What was the purpose of your education and who decided what should or should not be taught? Was it, for example, to be economically successful, or was it so that you learnt the appropriate way to behave in society? Perhaps you think it was so that you could influence your own engagement with society or others.

Training

The term ‘training’ can be used to denote something different to the term ‘education’, and is generally considered to be an activity which involves the transfer of knowledge and skills from an ‘expert’ or ‘professional’ to a ‘new student or employee’ in order that the student becomes enabled to undertake the newly learned skill independently. This is usually experienced within an economic environment or a workplace (Jarvis, 1995).

There is extensive debate and tension around, and between, the terms education and training, with a value hierarchy associated with them being evidenced in discussions around curriculum models (Jarvis, 1995); often described as the academic–vocational divide. An academic curriculum largely incorporates material that may be deemed to be important in its own right without any real concern about whether the material can or should be useful for economic activity. Such a curriculum is likely to incorporate elements of cultural heritage, with associated political and cultural value-judgements. Alternatively, a vocational curriculum predominantly incorporates only materials that are based on what participants will need to know in order to carry out a particular activity, job or role; the use of the new material is given more importance than the knowledge of the material. Academic learning, or education, is most often privileged over training or vocational learning (Armitage et al., 2003).

Coffield (1997) highlights the difficultly of interchangeably using the terms ‘learning’ and ‘education’. He argues that when the word ‘learning’ is used, particularly in policy documents, as part of the term ‘lifelong learning’, the intended or implied meaning is ‘planned, purposeful and intended learning’ which is more closely associated with ‘education’; rather than the type of learning people engage in all the time – the ongoing process of change and adaptation to life circumstances, which may more closely align with lifelong learning. This is what Rogers (2004) refers to as informal learning, and is arguably most closely associated with original perspectives on the purpose and role of lifelong learning.

What is apparent is that education is a politically driven instrument that fundamentally influences the ways in which society both exists and evolves. Education generally has a clear curriculum outline which leads to the opportunity to demonstrate that learning has been achieved through qualification – the model of education in the UK. While some elements exist within lifelong learning discourse, the learning opportunities encapsulated in the concept of lifelong learning are much broader than this narrow perspective of learning.

Globalisation and a knowledge economy

It is important to recognise the role of lifelong learning in the UK within a global framework. ‘Globalisation’ is an umbrella term used to explain increasing global connectivity, integration and interdependence in a range of spheres, particularly economic activity, and has become increasingly popular during the twentieth century as a way of explaining the relationships that exist to bind people into one global system of activity. The rapid growth in globalisation is largely identified through three primary areas of activity: economic, social and political, resulting in a ‘global economy’.

The role of lifelong learning as a tool for both economic prosperity and social responsibility is widely acknowledged by governments across the world. The emergence of lifelong learning as part of a ‘knowledge-based economy’ (Drucker, 2003) refers to the use of knowledge to produce economic benefit. Drucker (2003) described economic globalisation in terms of ‘transition’ – moving towards a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘information society’. The rise of globalisation, and the associated knowledge-based economy, has resulted in the development of goods and services that can be bought, sold and delivered, and as such globalisation demands ‘a more educated and continually educated, workforce’ (Jarvis, 2007: 63) – arguably, a lifelong approach to learning that, importantly, is seen as the responsibility of the individual, not just the state.

Globalisation and lifelong learning

Lifelong learning has gained increasing prominence. During the 1970s influential debates on the role of lifelong learning were undertaken by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, online), resulting in the publication of the Faure report in 1972 (Faure et al., 1972). This report continued to support a largely humanistic view of learning, recognising formal, non-formal and informal learning for all people throughout their lifetime.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) approach to lifelong learning, however, went on to develop a much more human-capital (economic) view of lifelong learning, conceptualising lifelong learning as ‘recurrent education’ (OECD, 1973) that enabled individuals to experience phases of paid work, leisure and learning. In Britain, the Russell Committee was appointed to advise Government on adult education policies and to support the creation of a number of lifelong learning pathways, including the provision of basic literacy teaching (DES, 1973).

As a result of the changing nature of the global economic market, ‘lifelong learning as a concept became rooted on an economy of full employment’ (Field, 2001: 8). However, the association of lifelong learning with economic outcomes is open to criticism (see, for example, Coffield, 1999), particularly around turning education from a ‘public good’ into a private commodity. By shifting responsibility for learning to the individual, Coffield argued that the socially constructed nature of learning becomes ignored and instrumental and vocational learning becomes overemphasised, with only those activities that show a visible and quick return being rewarded (Coffield, 1999). This is an important area of argument and debate in relation to the purpose and function of lifelong learning and one you are encouraged to review and reflect on as you analyse the concept of lifelong learning throughout the course of this book.

Following the work of UNESCO and the OCED, the European Year of Lifelong Learning was established in 1996 and lifelong learning became a central part of national policy debates. It has continued to play its part in legitimating a wide range of policy activity. Field (2001: 3–4) argued that lifelong learning has increasingly become ‘a tool for the reform and modernisation of aspects of national education and training systems’ and consequently ‘is likely to become one among many factors that are transforming the governance of late modern societies’. Writing a decade later, it is interesting to note both the continued and heightened political engagement in lifelong learning and its role in economic and social activity in the UK.

Perspectives and interpretations of ‘learning’

The concept of lifelong learning is complicated by the interchangeable use by writers of the terms lifelong ‘learning’ and lifelong ‘education’ (Rogers, 1992, 2002, 2004), and also by how ‘learning’ is regarded and defined. These discussions are premised on a philosophical perspective and view (or theory) of learning, and are often discussed as ‘schools’ of thought. A very brief outline of these various perspectives are provided here to aid understanding of lifelong learning, but you are encouraged to read more widely to develop broader understanding of these various philosophical perspectives of the notion of learning.

These philosophical positions can be broken down into four distinct schools of thought. Firstly, the behaviourist approach contends that all learning involves observable changes in behaviour. Key writers in this school include Pavlov and his stimulus–response model of learning, Skinner’s operant conditioning model of learning and Thorndike’s law of effect (see Armitage, et al., 2003 for a brief introduction).

A second perspective is the gestalt branch, founded in the 1920s by Wertheimer, Kohler and Koffka (see Jarvis, 1995). This approach focuses on the mind’s perceptive process and is based on the idea of whole structures...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction to lifelong learning
• 2 The development of lifelong learning in the UK: The policy context
• 3 Adult and community learning
• 4 Higher education
• 5 Further education
• 6 Work-based learning
• 7 Lifelong learning in a prison context
• 8 The future of lifelong learning
• Notes
• References
• Index