Figure 1: Learning through the life-course
But why might this matter? I offer two arguments here. First, I would suggest that
recent UK education policy has been imbalanced. It has been driven by a desire to
challenge educational accountabilities and to improve ‘standards’, but has lacked any
really secure appreciation of how learning actually occurs. The result has been a
succession of requirements, measurements, targets, inspections and initiatives at
each level of the system. Analytically, much provision is underpinned by a ‘delivery’
model of teaching and learning.
Problems arise if the desire to support lifelong learners, with positive dispositions for
the challenges of the 21st century, is taken seriously, for content-crammed, over-
assessed youngsters can just as easily be turned off learning for life. We therefore
certainly do need ways of thinking about teaching and learning which are more
informed by evidence of how people construct their identities as learners and how
they create, appropriate, or reject, knowledge. We need, in other words, more
attention to the learner passing through successive sectors of system - to the