Lifelong Learning

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, lifelong learning should be the central element of our future educational strategy. It would apply to every citizen and constitute a completely new way of rejuvenating and perpetuating knowledge in the present and bringing fulfilled lives to all our citizens.

I declare an interest as president of Birkbeck. Lifelong learning exists already in London’s only specialist provider of part-time higher education. Some 13,000 of Birkbeck’s 15,500 students are part-time because they have full-time jobs. Over 8,000 of those students are over 30, some are over 60 and one or two are even over 80. They manage to mix a life of work and earning with study and application. I went along to a session where a lot of young people—at least, people younger than me—were studying accounting, having come from accounting companies. The way that they learned was to interrogate the teacher as much as the teacher interrogated them, because they brought to their learning the background of their daily job. That is a wonderful way of perpetuating the skills of one generation and confronting the dilemmas of the next. This revised way of learning might well change the way that the human psyche learns and passes on information. It is only when that has happened for the whole population that it will be successful.

The people who come to Birkbeck have full-time jobs yet study for full-time degrees. The master of Birkbeck often says he wonders what other students do with their days because our students graduate with honours to full-scale university degrees. Indeed, it is a commonplace that an employer who gets a CV that says “Birkbeck” on it will put that CV pretty near the top of the list, because Birkbeck students want to learn, are highly motivated and combine their jobs, their incomes and their working experience.

I have a vision that, in future, working life throughout the country will include regular financially supported breaks for further learning. That should be built into the expectations of today’s schoolchildren and graduates as it has the potential to bring fulfilment to the whole population. What matters crucially now, not least for the Minister, is finance. It is difficult to finance these enterprises, but the Government have said that they support part-time maintenance loans. There is to be an official consultation on this, and I ask the Minister when that can begin. It cannot be too soon.