Survey Confirms Fears for Adult Learning

The annual Adult Learners’ Week survey on adult participation in learning, The Road to Nowhere? – commissioned by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) – reports half a million adults lost to learning in the last year. The proportion of adults currently learning or having done so in the last three years has fallen to 41%.

A third of all adults (34%) say they have done no learning whatsoever since leaving full-time education and the survey also shows – as in previous years - that no significant progress is being made to encourage those adults who left school earliest and those who are amongst the poorest in society to engage in learning. In fact overall participation of poorer people is around half that experienced by the upper and middle classes (27% of DEs compared with 55% of ABs and 48% of C1s).