INTRODUCTION

1. The Learning Age

2. Learning's potential

3. The purpose of this consultation paper

4. The scale of the challenge

5. Principles

6. The way ahead

7. Consultation process

Delivering our principles........ We propose to: expand further and higher education to provide for an extra 500,000 people by 2002; make it easier for firms and individuals to learn by creating the University for Industry and launch it in late 1999; set up individual learning accounts to encourage people to save to learn, and begin by allocating £150 million to support investment in learning accounts by one million people; invest in young people so that more continue to study beyond age 16; double help for basic literacy and numeracy skills amongst adults to involve over 500,000 adults a year by 2002; widen participation in and access to learning both in further, higher, adult, and community education (including residential provision), and through the UfI; raise standards across teaching and learning after the age of 16 through our new Training Standards Council, by ensuring implementation of the Dearing committee's standards proposals, and by inspection in further and adult education; set and publish clear targets for the skills and qualifications we want to achieve as a nation; work with business, employees and their trade unions to support and develop skills in the workplace; build a qualifications system which is easily understood, gives equal value to both academic and vocational learning, meets employers' and individuals' needs and promotes the highest standards.

The skills of the Learning Age....... In the Learning Age we will need a workforce with imagination and confidence, and the skills required will be diverse: teachers and trainers to help us acquire these skills; carpenters and bricklayers to build the homes we need; designers and engineers who can create the products of the future, craftsmen and women to manufacture them, and people with the confidence to sell them right across the globe; researchers pushing at the frontiers of science and technology; scientists and technicians using the new technologies to help us communicate in ways unimaginable to our grandparents' generation; carers, nurses and doctors to heal and look after us; and musicians, artists, poets, writers and film-makers to lift our hearts and our horizons. All of these occupations - and thousands of others just as important - demand different types of knowledge and understanding and the skills to apply them. That is what we mean by skills, and it is through learning - with the help of those who teach us - that we acquire them.

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