Education: Lifelong Learning

Lord Bishop of Blackburn Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Blackburn]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for initiating this debate, not least because the Church of England has long experience of encouraging and supporting adult education and lifelong learning, which it does not only for its own members but within the wider community. I believe that churches are very well placed, as we look towards the big society, to work in partnership with others in helping to provide learning facilities.

Many noble Lords will know of the work done by the Church Urban Fund over the past 30 years, which has been responsible for numerous projects. Over the past five years, it has included 30 learning and training projects and the development of specific skills with particular groups including the long-term unemployed, asylum seekers and women from particular ethnic groups.

My cathedral of Blackburn has made its own contribution here, mainly through the work of a body that we named Exchange, which, for the time being, is supported by the North-West Development Agency and others. We have been able, among other activities, to provide public dialogue with various communities and people on the margins. We have been able to lay on various exhibitions and to create internships, bringing young people over from Sri Lanka and South Africa. We have also provided lectures and have organised leadership programmes. This work has presented opportunities for participants to reassess inherited or long-held views. Basically, we wanted with Exchange to create a safe space within which people could look at their assumptions and within which the possibility to change could be real. We wanted to answer the questions that people are actually asking.

We viewed lifelong learning not as taking people on a predetermined journey or topping up, but rather as enabling them to ask questions born out of their experience which they needed to ask and to try to equip them to answer them. One course was the awareness course, which encouraged members to examine in depth what globalisation meant to the local community—what it meant in the local context—from a faith perspective. Lifelong learning is surely about creating access to knowledge where people are not able to find the means to access it. With Exchange, the canon of my cathedral, who ran it, the dialogue development officer and the small volunteer team found that time and again people were hitting up against the access and resource question. “We know that there is something in this”, participants would say, “but how do we follow it up? What are the mechanisms in our community for doing so? Where is the material or the network that we can plug into?”.

I am convinced that adult education and lifelong learning offered through the church make a significant contribution to building social and community capital. I must say that we could not have done what we did in Blackburn for nothing. You just cannot make lifelong learning happen for nothing. I fear that it cannot all be done by volunteers, however well meaning. We need trained and professional people who will signpost and guide such learning opportunities, and such people and their work must be adequately resourced.

I have focused on fairly informal but nevertheless well-developed programmes at a local level because I believe they have real value and should provide a way forward. But I have also done this because it seems that there has been a trend over the past decade to channel resources and funding only to courses leading to formally recognised qualifications. Now, certainly it is easier to channel government support and resources through large institutions, and many need the formal qualifications for employment purposes but, please, let us encourage smaller and more local organisations and partnerships to develop further lifelong learning programmes, ensuring that we do not forget the harder-to-reach groups, and that we do not forget those who would not be likely to access more formal educational opportunities.