Scotland's High Road to Lifelong Learning: A Foreigner's Observations

Abstract

The final report on lifelong learning of the Scottish Parliament's Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee is distinctive in being one of the few national lifelong learning policies of such breadth, which apparently express a deep and long-term national commitment to lifelong learning. The Committee's core proposal to make a standard basic entitlement to lifelong learning available to every citizen may have its greatest effect in increasing the demand for post-compulsory education from under-represented groups, since as the Committee observes, one of the challenges in redressing the relatively low participation of under-represented groups is to increase their aspiration to study at the highest level. However, the Committee qualifies its recommendation that part-time learners be entitled to the same fee and loan arrangements as full-time learners, thus undermining one of the main points of a lifelong learning policy to encourage a seamless transition between, if not integration of, study and family, work and civic engagement. The breadth and ambition of the Committee's proposals is also its main challenge, and the development of priorities and measures to assess progress will be crucial to the policy's success.