The name is absent

are in the broader literature examples of education’s modernising role bringing severe
costs to traditional communities. (For example, the idea of the first generation
working-class student was seen as sometimes in conflict with traditional ties and
affiliations in the family and outside.)

The family acts as a kind of junction point or switch in many instances. It is itself a
major locus of learning, a mediator of its effects and a principal outcome variable.
People are individually transformed as members of a family, or they may play a part
in sustaining the social fabric through family involvement that has been significantly
enhanced through learning. So the family, in whatever form, is often centrally present,
but does not form part of the matrix.

This matrix is sufficiently broad and simple to act as a kind of umbrella within which
our very diverse results can be located. We turn now to a brief overview of the kinds
of causal relationship that map onto it.

3.2 Confidence

The most fundamental and pervasive benefit from learning of every kind is a growth
in self-confidence. This is probably the most commonly reported effect from all
relevant research, and our study confirms it. It is in one sense ‘grindingly familiar’, as
one of our collaborators once put it. The task here is to transcend that familiarity by
distinguishing and illustrating the principal ways in which learning improves
confidence, and how improved confidence together with other outcomes of learning
lead to additional benefits so that policy implications can be derived.

Below is a schematic list of benefits flowing from greater self-confidence, ordered
roughly in accordance with the matrix given above, i.e. running from individual to
community levels. They refer to changes within individuals, but the benefits are often
wider. Our respondents describe how, by enhancing their confidence, learning has
enabled them:

Individual

▲

- to draw on and make sense of their own personal experience;

- to put forward their own views;

- to acknowledge mistakes;

- to confront problems rather than hide from them;

- to challenge the views of others;

- to ask for help;

- to accept the views of others even though these may differ from their own;

- to accept the views of others even though this entails them changing their
own viewpoint;

- to put themselves in unfamiliar situations;

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