bs_bs_banner

European Journal of Education, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2015

DOI: 10.1111/ejed.12123

‘The Treasure Within’ and ‘Learning Through Life’:

A Review and Prospectus
Tom Schuller & David Watson

Introduction
In this article, we begin by tracing an historical ancestry to the report for which we
were responsible, Learning Through Life (Watson & Schuller, 2009), by linking it
back to the thinking of the 1996 UNESCO report, The Treasure Within (Delors
et al., 1996.We then give a descriptive account of some of the main features of our
report and lay out the main elements of the rationale behind it.Thirdly, we provide
a stocktake of the progress that has — or has not — been made since the
publication of the report in 2009 and consider the prospects for the future.

Two Major Reviews of Lifelong Learning

The Treasure Within (henceforth TW), the work of a Commission chaired by
Jacques Delors, was a truly historic document. The collective authorship did not
get everything right, nor, of course, could they predict some of the remarkable
technological developments that have shaped the ways we think and learn today.
But they covered a remarkable range of issues; they blended insights from a large
number of countries and cultures; and — perhaps most importantly from the
point of view of leaving a lasting trace — they gave us a set of very memorable
arguments which have acted as reference points for future discussions. The four-
pillar framework — learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together,
and learning to be — has proved remarkably durable.
We would be happy if our report were to have as long an active life. In 2007,
the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), a non-
governmental body covering all forms of adult learning in England and Wales,
took the courageous decision to invest a large proportion of its financial
reserves in setting up an independent Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong
Learning (IFLL). The remit of the Inquiry was as follows: to offer an authori-
tative and coherent strategic framework for lifelong learning in the UK. This was
to involve:
• articulating a broad rationale for public and private investment in lifelong
learning;
• a re-appraisal of the social and cultural value attached to it by policy-makers
and the public; and
• developing new perspectives on policy and practice.
The horizon for the Inquiry was a long one; it was to set out arguments which
could frame the debate for the next 15 or more years. One of us (Watson) was
invited to chair the Inquiry, the other (Schuller) became its director. Our
research and analysis were scrutinised and guided by 10 independent Commis-
sioners. The final report, Learning Through Life (LTL), was published in 2009.
It sat on top of some 30 papers commissioned for the Inquiry. These papers
covered a range of substantive themes, such as employment, demography,

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Tom Schuller & David Watson 215

migration, poverty and citizenship; sectoral analyses, so that we dealt separately

with higher education, colleges, workplace training and community learning; and
specific approaches to what we called ‘public value’ — ways of estimating the
value of lifelong learning for the wider society, bringing together the economic
and social dimensions.
The IFLL Commission began from the premise that the right to learn is a
human right, connected with personal growth and emancipation, prosperity,
group and community solidarity, as well as global responsibility. This echoed
the TW’s ‘fundamental principle’ that ‘all human beings must be enabled to
develop independent, critical thinking and form their own judgement, in order
to determine for themselves what they believe they should do in the different
circumstances of life’ (Delors et al., p. 94) and its argument (in a section
headed ‘Learning Throughout Life’) that ‘Education, no longer temporally
and spatially segmented, can thus become a dimension of life itself’ (Delors
et al., p. 110).
LTL set out a framework of opportunity, structured around investment, incen-
tives, and capabilities. The report’s vision was of ‘a society in which learning plays
its full role in personal growth, prosperity, solidarity and local and global respon-
sibility’ (Schuller & Watson, pp. 8–9). Our goal was to set an agenda for lifelong
learning that would make sense for the next quarter-century.
The Inquiry did not have as long to do its work as did the Delors Commis-
sion, and its focus was on the UK context and so did not have TW’s global
reach, but there are striking similarities between the two reports in their
rationales. The major differences are that TW truly dealt with learning through-
out life, with much of its focus on the school system, whereas LTL focused
only on adults; and LTL paid much more attention to learning at work and in
the community, whereas TW, in discussing post-school learning, referred
mainly to colleges and universities — in other words, to the formal education
system.

Learning Through Life: the Rationale for a New Model

LTL begins with a proposal which is very simple, apparently abstract, and yet with
major practical applications: for a new model of the educational lifecourse. We
wanted to escape from the habits and mindsets which currently dominate our
thinking — and our education and training practice. We suggested that the
lifecourse should be thought of in terms of four main stages, broadly up to 25,
25–50, 50–75 and 75+. In this, LTL was very much in tune, albeit unconsciously,
with the TW definition of learning to be: ‘a dialectical process which starts with
knowing oneself and then opens out to relationships with others . . . education is
above all an inner journey whose stages correspond to those of the continuous maturing
of the personality.’(Delors et al., p. 95, our stress).
An ageing society and extended transitions into and out of employment
combine to require a new approach to how we divide the different stages of the
lifecourse, between youth and adult, and between different categories of adult.
We recognised that any dividing lines would be to some extent arbitrary, but we
set out to influence the way people think about the structure of the lifecourse.
In doing so, we provided the basis for making innovative calculations about how
resources are (and might be) allocated, and for how learning programmes might
be designed.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

216 European Journal of Education

The 4-stage approach was intended to:

• enable society to treat each age group more coherently and more equitably,
strongly promoting policy coordination;
• respond to the diversity of young people’s extended entries into adult life;
• remove definitively some fundamental barriers, notably the increasingly blurred
‘retirement’ age, allowing due recognition of the diversity of exit paths from the
labour market;
• enable coherent debate on the balance of resource allocation over the lifecourse,
notably in recognising the implications of demographic change; and
• encourage the development of appropriate learning materials, recognising the
way learning needs change with age, but without corralling people into age
groups.
The key components of the rationale were a mix of demographic, labour market,
social and cultural factors.
• The population is growing but ageing: as a result of rising life expectancy,
improvements in health, and immigration.
• Life patterns are becoming more complex, and less predictable: with more
job changes for many, more geographical mobility, more frequent relation-
ship break-ups, second and lone parent families, and more multi-generation
families;
• There are proportionately fewer young adults: the number of young people
entering the labour market is shrinking, and they are taking longer to establish
themselves in long- term careers and adult identities;
• There are many more people in the Third Age: with most people spending a
much larger share of their lives in potentially healthy and active retirement,
which lasts for much longer;
• And there are more people in the fourth stage, with many of them (mainly in the
final years of their lives) dependent on others for some aspects of daily life.
Almost all of these apply equally beyond the UK to most OECD countries, with
some variation. The demographic component, which in one sense is the strongest
driver of all, is an obvious departure from the TW approach; still today, it does not
apply to many of the UNESCO countries.
Using this framework, we were able to show how organised learning opportu-
nities are still concentrated heavily in the first phase of adult life, i.e. age 18–25.
This is, obviously, primarily the result of the enormous expansion of post-school
education over the last two decades, so that it is now the norm for young adults to
enrol in schools and colleges directly upon leaving school. However, we argued for
25 years of age as a meaningful cut-off point because, by then, most people have
reached maturity (recent neuro-scientific research shows how this applies to the
brain as well as to the social persona, see OECD, 2007), and have entered the
labour market.
The second stage, 25–50 years of age, is the period of heavy investment in
employment and family — the ‘rush hour’ as it has been called. The innovation
here is to make the cut-off as early as 50. Of course, many — most — people go
on working after that. But the signal is that it is a point at which people can easily
start thinking ahead to what might be called a ‘Third Age’ career: perhaps changing
jobs, or moving to a part-time position, or a portfolio of varied activities, as part of
an increasingly extended exit from the labour market. By contrast, we pushed the

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Tom Schuller & David Watson 217

outer limit of this age category to 75. Whilst increasing numbers work to 70 years
of age, few do so to 75 — at present, at least. But wearing our ‘long-horizon’ hats,
our projection is that more and more people will continue doing at least some paid
work beyond their 70th birthday, and we need to prepare our thinking and our
statistical categories for that extension.
The other major reason for drawing the line between the third and fourth stages
at 75 is that this is when chronic illnesses tend to set in. Of course, this is a huge
generalisation, but it is the most reasonable point at which to fix this transition.
Identifying even the possibility of taking learning seriously in this fourth stage was
a major concern. Learning in the fourth age is an excellent example of where the
‘public value’ argument comes in: as well as providing individuals with some
degree of personal fulfilment, learning in this context can make a big positive
impact on their health and therefore reduce the strain on their families or carers
and on health services — a true win/win/win result. Just postponing dependency,
such as entry into a care home, by a couple of months represents a considerable
economic as well as personal gain.
Including the fourth stage on equal terms with the others sends a clear signal
about the changing demographic balance and its challenge to our understanding of
continuing development that runs all the way through the full lifespan. The
learning needs and desires of this age group have been very little investigated.They
range from the extremely applied — developing or maintaining the capability of
looking after oneself — to the philosophical, even metaphysical: how to make sense
of one’s life, and reconcile oneself to one’s imminent non-existence (see Istance,
this volume, pp. 225–238). The latter end of this spectrum, somewhat paradoxi-
cally, epitomises the essence of ‘learning to be’. It also relates to the question of
resourcing lifelong learning across these different stages, to which we now turn.

Distributing Resources Differently Across the Lifecourse

We then used this 4-stage framework to calculate the current distribution of
learning opportunities and resources. Here, we became much more specific than
TW. TW proposed that a minimum of 6% of GNP should be spent on education.
The authors made no recommendation that there should be an increased share for
adult learning, although they did say that there should be a reappraisal of the
funding system within a broader framework which includes a variety of paths at
the end of post-secondary, and includes employer financing (see also below on
entitlements).
LTL collected and categorised data on all sources of spending on all types of
post-compulsory education and training in the UK, bringing in data from govern-
ment and other public expenditure, employers and private households. This was
the first time this had been done in such a comprehensive fashion in the UK and,
as far as we are aware, anywhere else. Public and private resources invested in
lifelong learning amounted in 2009 to over £55 billion (about 3.9% of GDP —
and going up to something like £93 billion if we add in opportunity costs, i.e. the
income foregone by learners). The result of the distribution analysis was striking:
some 86% of the total public and private resources go to the first stage; 11% to the
second; about 2.5% to the third age; and 0.5% to the fourth. Our conclusion, as
a medium to long-term recommendation, was that we should aim for a gradual
shift to 80:15:4:1, perhaps by 2020. This is a quite modest shift, which could be
done relatively easily over the coming decade because of the decline in the

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

218 European Journal of Education

numbers of young people in the UK and elsewhere; but that window of opportu-
nity is slipping away, and as we note below, the direction of travel is exactly the
opposite to this.We wanted to lay out the facts on the distribution of resources and
to show how uneven and irrational that distribution is, both socially and economi-
cally. At the same time, we wanted to go beyond a predominantly instrumental
view of ‘investment’ in learning, such as would justify public expenditure only in
terms of productive efficiency or savings.

Entitlements
‘Entitlements’ is a word with powerful, and sometimes quite controversial, impli-
cations. For some, our societies put too much emphasis on people’s entitle-
ments, and this generates an unhealthy dependency. In LTL, we were quite
cautious on how we used the term, but also resolute: the Commissioners were
united in believing that the right to learn is a right, as TW strongly declared, and
this must be underpinned by at least some learning entitlements. LTL distin-
guished between legal and financial entitlements. To these two it added the
notion of ‘good practice’, by which we meant that the entitlement might not be as
strongly based as a legal entitlement, but one which good employers would build
into their practices and which would then come to be expected to apply more
generally.
We then drew a distinction between two types of learning entitlement:
a) Three general entitlements: to basic skills (literacy and numeracy); to a foundation
for future competences; and to ‘learning leave’ as part of employment conditions.
The first is commonly understood. The second is to a qualification giving the
competences required to function in tomorrow’s global society, leaving it open
where this should be drawn. These two were to be seen as universal entitle-
ments, with legal and financial underpinning. Their universality indicates that
these are levels to which all citizens should be enabled to achieve.
The entitlement to learning leave was seen as an entitlement in the looser
sense of good practice. It is already something which good employers have,
and we foresaw the practice spreading so that other employers would progres-
sively build it into employment contracts as part of a new mosaic of working
time patterns. We drew the analogy with paid holidays and their introduction
in the 1930s in the hope that learning leave would, in 30 years’ time, be seen
in the same light as a regular part of employment contracts. We suggested
that learning leave could be funded by redeploying the £3.7b of corporation
tax relief granted annually to employers in respect of their expenditure on
training. (We wonder what the equivalent figure is in other countries).
b) A set of ‘transitional’ entitlements targeted to emphasise the particular impor-
tance of key transition points in people’s lives, professional or personal. We
gave as examples the needs of people leaving institutional care, or making the
move from prison back into society; or those moving from one stage of life to
another — ‘retirement’ being a possibly dated example. Migrants crossing
boundaries are a major group with transitional needs.
LTL also recommended that there should be universal access to guidance and
counselling; and to broadband, or whatever succeeds it as the main channel of
communication and knowledge availability. (We acknowledge here, and later, that
LTL said too little about the impact of new technologies on learning patterns).

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Tom Schuller & David Watson 219

Underpinning the entitlements should be a broad mechanism enabling people

to take advantage of learning opportunities across the lifecourse. We envisaged a
system of Learning Accounts as the main vehicle for building and using entitle-
ments, allowing contributions from different stakeholders over time. These should
be set up from the age of 25, marking the transition into the second stage, but
linked to earlier forms of support. We suggested ways in which such Learning
Accounts could be taken forward, integrating them with other common mecha-
nisms for saving, at individual, household or corporate level. There is an obvious
link here to the TW conclusion to its section on economic and financial choices:
It might be worth considering granting a study time entitlement, covering a
certain number of years of education, to very prospective school-goer. The
entitlement would be placed in a ‘bank’ which would manage each pupil’s
‘chosen time capital’, backed by the appropriate funds. . . . He or she could
set aside part of the capital for continuing further education in the post-
school years or during adult life. Each person could add to the capital by
depositing money in his or her account at the ‘chosen time bank’, as in a sort
of educational provident fund. This may seem too radical or sweeping a
reform . . . but its rationale could be retained . . . in the form of a credit
granted at the end of compulsory schooling (Delors et al., p. 169).
It seems to us that TW was correct in its cautiousness at the time.There have been
some initiatives along these lines in different countries, but none has taken proper
root. Nevertheless, the combination of technological innovation and broader
experience in individual savings accounts makes a system of learning accounts
increasingly realistic.
Here again, there is a balance to be struck. On the one hand, introducing or
developing a system of flexible individual entitlements extends the choices open to
individuals and should increase their sense of agency and control over their own
learning and their lives more generally. At the same time, we should be wary of
treating learning too much as an individual commodity or service to be purchased
as other services are. Our hope was and is that such entitlements would enable
dynamic innovations in the relationships between learners and the providers of
learning opportunities. These should improve the flow of information in both
directions, so that providers understand better what learners want (or might want)
and can respond more flexibly. But these exchanges of information and resource
should happen within a framework which preserves and fosters the opportunities
for learners to learn together and from each other in a collective as well as
individual enterprise.

The IFLL Five Years On

This section draws heavily on the ‘stocktake’ that we wrote for a special issue of
Adults Learning, the monthly journal of the National Institute for Adult Continuing
Education (NIACE, 2014; Watson & Schuller, 2014). We set out to look system-
atically at the major recommendations of LTL, and estimate what, if any, progress
has been made in the five years since its publication. The picture, frankly, is not
very encouraging, in a context of post-crash austerity and with international
tensions at a height not seen since the end of the Cold War.
It is worth noting that despite its national focus, there has been considerable
interest in LTL from other countries, which seemed to find the framework that we

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

220 European Journal of Education

set out quite applicable to their own contexts. Arguably, indeed, the report had as
much impact outside the UK as inside it.
The IFLL Commissioners’ tenth and final recommendation was that we must
make the system intelligent, including with the support of a triennial ‘State of
Learning’ report. The system will only flourish with consistent information and
evaluation, and open debate about the implications. Our perception today is that
there is a growing awareness of the need for this, and that the capacity to deliver
the analysis and evaluation is greater than it was at the time.The crucial need is for
a process to bring together the relevant information, and generate informed
discussion on an ongoing basis. The first recommendation has been described in
some detail above: to base lifelong learning policy on a new model of the educational
lifecourse, with four key stages (up to 25, 25–50, 50–75, 75+). What has happened
since then?
Since 2009, inter-generational sensitivities could be said to have increased,
without very much practical attention to their alleviation. The age for compulsory
education will rise to 18 in 2015. The phenomenon of the ‘boomerang’ generation
— of young people unable to leave, or having to return to the parental home — has
intensified. Consciousness of demographic pressures is growing, and has sparked
some creative (as well as some panicky) thinking about pensions, and the need to
reduce the retirement cliff-edge. Longer working lives are now firmly in the frame,
including through the deferral of the state pension, often through part-time and
self-employment. So there is some awareness of the need to change the way we
think about ages and stages. But old categories die hard. The debate has had very
much a zero-sum focus on the costs of an ageing population, and tensions in the
way private wealth and public benefits are distributed across generations. Learning
rarely figures, even when dependency issues are discussed. A welcome exception is
the Foresight Ageing Project, a cross-sectoral initiative based in the Government
Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser, and due to report in 2015/16 (https://
www.gov.uk/government/collections/ageing-society).
The second recommendation used the model put forward to analyse the
detailed empirical work done on participation and funding.This gave us a powerful
account of the current distribution of learning resources — and the capacity to
propose a different one.The report proposed rebalancing learning resources fairly and
sensibly across the different life stages. As noted above, we proposed a shift from a
4-stage allocation of 86: 11: 2.5: 0.5, to a more appropriate one of 80: 15: 4: 1.The
adjustment costs of this change would be reduced by the projected drop in the
numbers of young people in the next decade.
In the UK context, the direction of travel has been almost exactly the opposite
from what we proposed. Resources are now concentrated more than ever on the
first stage. In the formal education sector, the big change in educational funding
has been the shift of a large part of responsibility for the costs of higher education
(except in Scotland) from the State to students, with funds advanced through the
Student Loans Company, and to be recovered on an income-contingent basis.
Enrolments of mature and part-time students have collapsed, marking a major
shift away from lifelong learning. The picture is one of a greatly homogenised
university system, with young, full-time students studying for degree programmes.
Diversity of age and programme has hugely diminished.
In other sectors, there are some slightly more encouraging features. There
are signs that older workers are getting more access to training opportunities.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Tom Schuller & David Watson 221

Apprenticeship numbers dominate the current (2015) pre-election political

bidding war, without being located in the wider context of vocational learning
pathways. However, the political imperatives sparked by severe youth unemploy-
ment and controversy about university fees have excluded any debate on a more
rational allocation of resources across the life-course stages. One key issue is
whether we can have this debate without exacerbating latent intergenerational
tensions.
Thirdly, LTL proposed building a set of learning entitlements, as described above.
Here, the political culture has proved important in shaping the way the debate can
(or cannot) be conducted. ‘Entitlement’ has become a term freighted with negative
connotations. The political ‘bidding-war’ on immigration has led to a presumption
against ‘welcome’ benefits, and English language provision has suffered in particu-
lar. One bright feature is the continued support for Unionlearn, which uses
workplace representatives to expand learning opportunities, strengthening the
entitlement of poorly qualified employees to learning, but, even here, there have
been cuts. The existence of substantial tax relief — nearly £4billion — as unac-
counted public expenditure has been recognised, but there has been no move to
earmark it for learning leave.
Fourthly, LTL argued the need to engineer flexibility, via a system of credit and
by encouraging part-time study. Much faster progress is needed in the UK to
implement a credit-based system, making learning more flexible and accessible,
with funding matched to it. The Commissioners felt that a funding system which
was neutral as to the mode through which people learn was vital.
There has been literally no progress on this front.The UK — even in Scotland,
which has made a great play of policy commitment in this area — remains a
laggard behind North America in terms of credit transfer between institutions and
behind continental Europe in terms of student mobility. The Open University
continues to make a heroic contribution to this effort, but is increasingly con-
strained by funding assumptions keyed to full-time learning.
Here, we should acknowledge one area which LTL insufficiently addressed: the
growth of technology-enabled learning. There are very varying views on how far
online learning (e.g. through MOOCs) replaces or complements more traditional
modes of adult learning, but this is definitely an area where change is accelerating
and opportunity is expanding. The Inquiry produced some analysis of the impli-
cations of technology for adult learning, but we did not develop it sufficiently; TW
did more, a decade earlier.
Fifthly, LTL argued for the need to use learning to improve the quality of work.
The debate on skills has been too dominated by an emphasis on increasing the
volume of skills; there should be a stronger focus on how skills are actually used.
The report pointed to ‘a naïve belief that upgrading qualifications for the popu-
lation as a whole will produce all of the benefits which are only accrued by the
subset of people who currently have those qualifications’. There is an equity issue
here too. Access to training diminishes down the status ladder.
The debate on skills has now become more nuanced, looking at how they are
actually used (or not used) instead of just boosting numbers of qualified people.
Recent academic and think-tank analysis gives us a more fine-grained picture of
the labour market, including recognition that many jobs are created in the bottom
half of the occupational ladder. Job quality is not purely technology-dependent:
there is scope for managing the organisation of work in order to make good use of

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

222 European Journal of Education

a wide range of skills and experience. A particular issue is whether the increasing
qualifications of women will be properly recognised at work, allowing genuine
careers stretching over several decades and including breaks (another argument for
taking our lifecourse approach seriously).
But the big story is about how economic circumstances and policy have bred
precarity (Standing, 2011). The political self-congratulation over the UK’s com-
paratively strong quantitative employment record should be tempered by the
knowledge that many of the jobs are low-grade, fragmented and insecure, taking
us further from a genuine high-skill economy. The rise of ‘zero-hours’ contracts,
the growth of unpaid internships, and the macro-economic evidence about
increasing income disparity make the prospect of more, better jobs increasingly
remote.
Next, LTL proposed constructing a curriculum framework for citizens’ capabil-
ities. A common framework should be created of learning opportunities, which
should be available in any given locality, giving people control over their own lives.
There should be a common core of provision: of content (initially around digital,
health, financial, and civic capabilities — the downsides of lacking these are all too
clear), of local and contextual customisation, of quality assurance, and of support
for teachers and other key ‘intermediaries’ (examples are Citizens’ Advice Bureaux
advisers, probation officers, and health visitors).
The prospect of such a coherent capabilities framework has, if anything,
receded. Confusion and stress have grown in the intermediary services listed
above, often because of privatisation or economic pressure. Entitlements to learn-
ing support continue to fluctuate wildly, including according to political fashion.
Yet, in an unplanned way, the prospects of achieving some of these capabilities are
probably increasing for those who can find their way. There are, for example,
flourishing and imaginative local initiatives around community-based learning, but
they too, struggle against funding cuts.
This led on to recommendations about broadening and strengthening the capacity
of the lifelong learning workforce.What kind of training and professional development
should be given to the very diverse set of professional and voluntary agents who
work on lifelong learning? Stronger support should be available for all those
involved in delivering education and training (including intermediaries like those
listed above).
Most creative thinking here seems to be in the corporate sector. Microsoft
presents a good example, with accredited courses not only for its own employees,
but also for those using their products across the industry. LTL’s prediction of a
growth in private providers has certainly been vindicated, with quality seen as
largely market-determined. The Education and Training Foundation was set up to
promote workforce development within the sector, but overall it is probably true
that the adult teaching force continues to fragment. There is less support for
individuals to maintain their competences, and less pressure on employers to use
professionally qualified staff.
The final two recommendations flowed together. First, there was a drive to
revive local responsibility. In the UK, probably to a greater extent than in almost
any other European country, there has been a continual erosion of local decision-
making powers, and LTL argued that this should be reversed. This could be
achieved by a variety of steps: stronger local strategy-making by local authorities;
greater autonomy for Further Education (FE) colleges, as the institutional

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Tom Schuller & David Watson 223

backbone of local lifelong learning; stronger local employer networks; a major role
for cultural institutions; and local Learning Exchanges: for connecting teachers
and learners, providing a single information point, social learning spaces, and an
entitlement ‘bank’.
It is now common ground across the political spectrum that the current system
in England has become over-centralised and insufficiently linked to local and
regional needs. The Scottish referendum of September 2014 put this issue centre-
stage. Whether this will lead to genuine and effective devolution at different
levels is another matter. Here, there is yet another clear link to the TW, which
favoured ‘a broad decentralisation of education systems, based upon school
autonomy and the effective participation of local stakeholders’ (Delors et al.,
p. 164). But the UNESCO Commission also noted how decentralisation could
increase inequalities.
One of the specific casualties of UK austerity has been local authority finance
and its strategic capacity. Libraries have closed, and the spread of so-called ‘free’
schools and ‘academies’ — financed by public money but relatively outside public
control — has undermined the concept of community service. There are some
signs of fresh thinking on how to restore some strategic local capacity, but it will be
a long road back.
At the same time, national frameworks matter. There should be effective
machinery for creating a coherent lifelong learning strategy across the UK and
within the UK’s four nations. LTL argued that we needed a single department
with lead authority on lifelong learning and an independent body to check on
progress. There is no sign of progress on this. Responsibility for skills ricochets
around ministers, and policy silos are as entrenched as ever. Devolution could
continue the process of balkanisation of policy, provision, and performance —
though it will offer the opportunity for interesting comparisons between national
systems.

Conclusion
We have sketched a rather gloomy picture. We cannot judge whether the same
verdict would be reached on progress on TW’s recommendations. TW was pub-
lished in 1996, and here is a suggestion: it would be very suitable if there was an
appraisal 20 years on — a similar exercise to our brief stocktake, but more
in-depth as a review of progress since its publication. Our sense is still that there
is a compelling logic to the fundamental standpoints of both reports: to TW’s
analysis of the changes needed to make education, including schooling, a closer
part of people’s lives; and IFLL’s vision of a different model of the educational
lifecourse. We do not need constantly to reinvent these rationales. The Treasure
Within started and Learning Through Life continued a debate about all these
issues. How can we revive and continue it?
Tom Schuller, Birkbeck College, University of London; 27 Museum Chambers, Bury
Place, London WC1A 2J, UK, Tom.schuller@icloud.com
David Watson, Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, UK

In Memoriam
Sadly, David Watson passed away shortly after having co-authored this
article.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

224 European Journal of Education

REFERENCES
DELORS, J. et al. (1996) Learning: The Treasure Within (Paris, UNESCO
Publishing).
FAURE, E., HERRERA, F., KADDOURA, A-R., LOPES, H., PETROVSKY, A.V.,
RAHNEMA, M., & CHAMPION WARD, F. (1972) Learning to Be: the world of
education today and tomorrow (Paris, UNESCO Publishing).
NIACE (2014) Adults Learning: Learning through Life: 5 years on (Special Issue), 26
(Leicester).
OECD (2007) Understanding the Brain: the birth of a Learning Science (Paris, OECD
Publishing).
STANDING, G. (2011) The Precariat (London, Bloomsbury).
WATSON, D. & SCHULLER, T. (2014) Learning Through Life: how far have we
come?, Adults Learning, 26, pp. 5–9.
SCHULLER, T. & WATSON, D. (2009) Learning Through Life (Leicester, NIACE).

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd