articulate their needs and understand the services delivered to them. This is a major
efficiency factor.
Finally, learning helps health and well-being by providing people with a sense of
purpose. The horizons may be long or short, the aspirations high or low, realistic or
not. What matters is that learning helps people to formulate goals, and have a sense
that they have a chance to control their own lives.
12.4.1 Policy conclusion 6
Education can have a large effect on ill health, especially mental health. In addition to
specific measures designed to improve ill health, education has a major sustaining or
preventative role, which deserves far greater support.
12.4.2 Policy conclusion 7
There is much scope for exploring cost-effective learning-based provision with
positive health impacts. Initiatives such as Prescriptions for Learning point the way to
creative collaboration between education and health services. This may require new
or refined methodologies to compare the impact of learning on health with that of
clinical or other professional health services.
12.5 Social capital and social cohesion
Learning promotes social capital of different kinds. We identify a number of skills
that help civic engagement. These range from meta-competences, which enable
people to understand the system and networks within which they operate, through
generic competences that help them to function effectively in civic roles, to basic
skills that are a necessary condition of participation at any level.
Networks are a basic component of social capital. Learning helps people develop and
maintain networks in ways that may be unavailable otherwise. It brings them to a
common place, and even where the content of the learning is technical it places them
in a position where communication and even friendship are possible. This is
fundamental, but its obviousness should not diminish its importance. Learning also
enables people to reanimate dormant networks, or to disengage and move on.
Social capital is not all about formal modes of civic engagement. Men and women
tend to vary in the mode of engagement, with women manifesting less formal modes,
often to do with neighbours and daily transactions, while men take part more in
representative modes. We make no value judgement on these different modes; but the
link between learning and participation is strong.
Learning helps people acquire, maintain or change their sense of identity. This is
linked to the point about goals and horizons made above in relation to health, but it
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