'We're Laying down a Marker'

Every year, access to affordable adult learning transforms lives and life chances, giving people new perspectives on themselves and what they are capable of achieving. Yet, despite the Government's significant investment in adult learning and skills, opportunities are in ever-shorter supply. Over the past two years, 1.5 million publicly funded adult learning places have been lost as a result of rising fees and the "rebalancing" of the adult learning budget to the employer-led Train to Gain programme. Increases in work-based provision have been bought at the cost of a decline in publicly funded opportunities for adults--including those outside the workforce--to take courses below or beyond Level 2, laying waste to the range of affordable opportunities available for adults to study what they choose outside work. Little wonder then that the founding meeting of the Campaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning (CALL) in September last year attracted almost 200 people, including learners, union officials, educators and college managers. Within two months, more than 100 organisations had registered support, joining the five founding organisations--NIACE, the National Union of Students, the University and College Union, Unison and the Workers' Educational Association--in lending their voices to the deep concern already being felt across civil society at policies which, in the words of Paul Mackney, CALL campaign co-ordinator and NIACE associate director, "have turned what should be lifelong learning for all into an expensive hobby for reasonably-off dilettantes". On 25 February the campaign culminates in a lobby of Parliament. In this article, the author discusses what CALL's organisers and supporters hope it will achieve.