"In areas like ours, everything we've ever had we fought for. It wasn't just handed to us," says Anna Hutchison, a community activist and one of the founders of the North Edinburgh Social History Group. For decades, Anna tells the author, the community has had to struggle for the basic amenities others in the city take for granted, waging campaign…

The eviction of the Occupy London protesters from their tents outside St. Paul's Cathedral marks the end of one of the most interesting experiments in popular education in recent times. For the past few months a string of leading writers, activists, journalists and academics have held workshops, led discussions and given lectures beneath the…

The Reader Organisation's Get into Reading programme is all about getting people together in groups to engage with serious books. The groups are mixed and the participants sometimes challenging, but the outcomes are often remarkable. Jane Davis, who founded the Reader Organisation and continues to oversee Get into Reading, has witnessed a massive…

Adult Learners' Week is based on a simple idea--that extolling the achievements of adult learners and promoting the benefits of learning will encourage others to take the plunge. Each year, through thousands of events and award ceremonies, and in media coverage that would cost millions of pounds if purchased as advertising, Adult Learners' Week…

Popularly known as "the biggest housing estate in Europe", Ely is the most deprived area of Cardiff and one of the most disadvantaged parts of the UK. It has, by the admission of its own residents, a bad reputation as an area associated with poverty, gangs, street crime and burnt-out cars. That is only one part of the story. Those who live in Ely…

Dismissed as "brainless" at school, Alan Markland's one saving grace was his ability to read. It grew into a passion for books and reading which survived years of alcoholism and eventual homelessness. He was in his sixties when he began to realise his true vocation as a writer. Markland describes his early education as "perfunctory." An early…

While her background leading a variety of public, private and voluntary sector organisations was not an obvious preparation for her new role as General Secretary of the Workers' Educational Association, the WEA is, nevertheless, in Ruth Spellman's blood. Her grandfather, who left school at 12, became fully numerate and literate through WEA courses…

Les Ebdon, the new Director of the Office for Fair Access, faced a campaign of vilification from the press. Ebdon, a prize-winning chemist who was, until recently, Vice Chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire and Chair of the new universities group Million+, was called, among other things, a "social engineer," a "friend of the Mickey Mouse…

Few university leaders can speak with as much authority about the transformative power of learning as Mary Stuart, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lincoln. She knows first-hand both what it is like to be poor and down on her luck and how "second chance" education and a willingness to work hard and take risks can turn lives around. Stuart is…

On January 19, 1921, Albert Mansbridge, founder of the Workers' Educational Association and a member of the Ministry of Reconstruction's Adult Education Committee, chaired a meeting at 20 Tavistock Square, London, to consider the formation of a British Institute of Adult Education. The Institute was to be a branch of the grandly--and somewhat…

In the second article in a series marking 90 years of NIACE support for adult learning, the author charts the changing shape of adult education in the decades following the Second World War, and the Institute's emergence as a "major non-governmental force" in the development of adult education. In 1983 the NIAE changed its name to the National…

The seventies and eighties saw the adult education movement renew and reexamine its commitment to opening up learning opportunities to "disadvantaged" groups. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) was now part of the mainstream of public policy making in lifelong learning and had a significant role in delivering the…

A new Labour government was elected in May 1997 and wasted no time in signalling its enthusiasm for the education of adults. Secretary of State for Education and Employment David Blunkett gave his first speech in office at the launch of Adult Learners' Week 1997 and announced the creation of a National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and…

When 75-year-old Margaret Corston saw a poster in her local library advertising a course in basic radio broadcasting skills, she little thought that some 18 months later she would be hosting her own weekly show, with thousands of listeners, on community radio. From small beginnings--her first course was called "First Steps in Radio"--she began to…

Derek Legge, who celebrated his 95th birthday at the end of last month, is one of the most dedicated and influential of the largely unsung heroes of the adult education movement in Britain. As modesty is one of the many qualities with which his friends and colleagues credit him, he is certain to shrink from the description, but there is little…