John Denham
Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills
We’ve got a real ambition today, and that ambition is to kick off, as it says, a learning revolution. We want to raise the profile, the accessibility, the take-up of accessible learning for adults wherever it happens, and this is something that the whole of the Government is committing itself to, not just my department, because in every part of Government we recognise that informal adult learning transforms lives of individuals, it boosts national wellbeing, people’s individual sense of worth, and that’s why, as you’ll see if you’ve had a chance to look at the White Paper, the commitment is there from health, from local government, from culture, media and sport, and from education and other government departments all of whom are contributing to what we want to do.
We know that the learning that people do for its own intrinsic value, not necessarily or perhaps at all to get a qualification but the learning that people do because they want to provides personal fulfilment, it helps older people stay active and independent, it challenges stereotypes, it can bring generations together, it contributes to community cohesion. We need these things at all times, but perhaps we need them even more at a time of economic downturn and stress. For people whose skills levels are lower, people who have bad memories of formal education, informal learning can also be a stepping stone back into learning, to qualifications and to better jobs.
Informal has always meant more than traditional adult education classes at a local college, there’s still a big demand for it, it’s still going to continue, we still ring-fence £210m to support adult learning, and my own department supports learning in many other ways, through union learning reps, through the specialist institutions and there’s a great deal of support across the rest of government because the world’s changed, there’s been an explosion of online education resources, of book groups, there’s huge growth in the University of The Third Age, of course the Government has helped bring about free access to museums, and much of this wider learning is also supported by Government, free museum entry for example of £28m a year, UK Online centres in libraries and community centres £10m a year, and the union there that I mentioned £21½m a year.
So we’ve launched the Learning Revolution Pledge to help bring this learning revolution alight. We’ve launched it for organisations that are keen to bring their influence and their expertise and to share their resources to help people learn. We want to help get more people involved in doing their own thing, supporting new ways of learning, including technology and broadcasting. And I think it’s a measure of how much this initiative is needed and wanted that the Pledge has already been backed by groups which include the Women’s Institutes, the Church of England, the National Trust, Microsoft, BUPA, Unison, right across our society there’s been an extraordinary response already to our invitation to come and support the Learning Pledge.
We know as part of this we need better links between different kinds of learning. Learning can take place in the public sector, the private sector, in the voluntary sector, in self-organised groups. There is a huge already rich mix of opportunities out there, but we’ve got to find the ways that enable people to navigate round their system, to move from one stimulus to another form of learning to the next group. So we’ll be doing that in the months and years ahead. We also want to support people who want to organise their own groups and classes in the most convenient place, so not just in a college or a library but perhaps in a church or in a pub, in a café, an office or a shop, and part of the Pledge is to encourage all kinds of organisation to open up the spaces they already have for learning.
We’re going to be setting up a competition to design and web director which can tell people what’s out there and also the learning spaces and other resources that are available to them. We’ll be setting up a broadcasting forum to encourage not just the development of educational content but much better ways of sharing what is already produced for people who want to learn in different ways.
We know that informal learning makes a unique contribution to people who face disadvantage, for people who may be marginalised, so in the strategy you’ll see the next steps in widening opportunities for older people, the ways in which we’ll develop a package of support for community learning champions, and new moves to increase the availability of informal learning in the workplace, including already a commitment from Union Learn to open up 50 Union Learning Centres to wider education.
A lot of this is, and I’ll be quite straightforward about this, and it came to me very strongly in the consultations and conversations, about a commitment to start with to make the best use of the resources that are already out there. And time and time again people said to us you could achieve more if you were better coordinated, better organised and making better use of the investment you’ve already made right across government. But it will take some extra resource. We’re putting this year an extra £30m into informal adult learning. It’ll include a transformation fund of £20m to help set about new partnerships and innovative ideas in informal adult learning.
Like one idea that’s come through quite strongly in the last few weeks is where as a result of the downturn there are empty shop units, perhaps there are people with time to give and expertise to share, small amounts of money to open those up, so learning centres can be started in local communities, perhaps local voucher systems to enable groups of people together to organise their own learning activities.
What I want to do is to put as much energy as I can into getting this learning revolution under way, and the back end of this year we’ll be organising a national festival of learning to take what many people have experienced already over the last few months in our consultation at national level out to local level to highlight what’s already there. We’ll be working with local authorities because people in all of our consultation said that the local council was going to be the place to bring together the different things that are going on and make sure we’ve got a well organised strategy. And we’ll be pushing at this movement by asking all of you here and many other organisations to sign the pledge to espouse its values, to get more people involved, to introduce more innovation and learning, and to celebrate success.
My final note again is I happen to lead on this because it’s my department that has had the lead responsibility, but none of this that we’re celebrating today would have been possible without people like Andy Burnham who’s here, Hazel Blears, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls and many other Ministers who’ve given their support enthusiastically to this work, and I’d like to thank them too because they are as much part of what we’re trying to achieve here as what we’ll do directly through my own department. Thank you.
