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Beyond Skills: Reclaiming the Civic Purpose of Lifelong Learning
Reclaiming Lifelong Learning: Reflecting on John Holford’s Call to Action
SCUTREA Honorary member Professor John Holford’s recent letter to The Guardian offers a timely and urgent critique of the UK government’s Post-16 Education and Skills white paper. Holford argues that the paper’s narrow focus on employer-led skills training marks a continued departure from the “broad and generous, humane and liberal spirit” of lifelong learning once championed by RH Tawney and other Labour educationists. The white paper fails to address education for democracy, community, or social inclusion; values central to adult education’s radical traditions. As Holford notes, participation in further education has plummeted since the 1990s, when policy began prioritising employer needs over holistic learning for life.
“Post-16 education must be ‘employer focused’, yet this – the mantra of decades past – has been a highway to failure… It has no ‘broad and generous, humane and liberal spirit’. Tawney and other Labour educationists and politicians of the past must be turning in their graves.”
As we prepare for the UALL–SCUTREA 2026 Conference, we invite scholars, practitioners, and community educators to reflect on Holford’s words when considering proposals. How might your work resist reductive framings and reclaim adult education as a space for civic engagement, care, and transformation? What does it mean to re-imagine lifelong learning in ways that honour its democratic and inclusive roots?
SCUTREA stands in solidarity with those advocating for a more life-affirming vision of learning and invites responses from across the sector to help shape this conversation.
Save the Date: UALL–SCUTREA Conference 2026
Theme: Re-imagining Lifelong Learning in Higher Education
Location: University of Warwick
Dates: Monday 15th – Wednesday 17th June 2026
Further details on themes, submission guidelines, and registration here.
Read John Holford’s full letter in The Guardian: Adult education should be for life, not just a job
