Towards people’s palaces of culture?

For more than 50 years, governmental and independent reviews have published proposals for strengthening adult learning opportunities, showing a remarkable consistency in the advice offered to government. They have, however, had little more than short-term impact on policy or provision. Since the early 2000s, under the influence of neoliberal thinking, UK policymaking has increasingly seen education, and particularly postschool education, as simply a tool to support the economic policies of the Treasury, with devastating consequences for adult participation in learning for a diversity of purposes. At the same time, the end of ring-fenced funding for adults in further and higher education has seen a decline and disappearance of provision for adult part-time and community-based adult learning. The article proposes relocating responsibility for community-based adult learning to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in order to recover stability of provision, to revitalise local authorities’ role, and for adult learning to be, again, a source of joy and personal fulfilment.