14th August 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The Labour party has called for action to help encourage more adult learners in the UK. Reported on the BBC, the opposition party pointed out that funding for post-18 education has fallen by 45% in real terms since 2009-2010 and something need to be done to offer more support for adults who need to train or re-train so that can be productive members of society.
The government have said that further education and skills is a priority in response to claims that many adults lack basic skills and have no access to the training needed to improve. Lifelong Learning is something which both parties agree should be available to everyone and free at the point of use. However, the government say that there are more opportunities available to adult learners than ever before, yet the participation in these schemes has continued to fall steadily, explaining the decrease in funding.
The Department for Education has been trialling a National Retraining Scheme in Liverpool at a cost of £100m, in particular to help to retrain adults who are at risk of losing their jobs because of automation. So far the programme has shown that the main barriers to lifelong learning are cost, the working patterns of employees and bad experiences of education in the past.
It is known that participation in lifelong learning declines as employees grow older, and involvement is disproportionately skewed towards employees who are already well skilled and affluent. One reported recommendation is to make loans available at any stage of an adult’s career.