4.18 Community, adult and family learning will be essential in the Learning Age. It will help improve skills, encourage economic regeneration and individual prosperity, build active citizenship, and inspire self-help and local development. We propose to draw on the considerable experience of community development projects to help us see how leadership and involvement in the neighbourhood can be part of the learning process and how community education can support such self-help. The Committee on Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy, chaired by Professor Bernard Crick, will be exploring these issues as part of its remit.

4.19 Voluntary and community organisations, for example tenants' and residents' groups, mother and toddler groups, environmental organisations, and bodies like the Workers’ Educational Association and residential colleges, are also resources for promoting community learning. We will support innovative work with charitable trusts and companies which are keen to contribute. We are proposing to set up an Adult and Community Learning Fund to sustain and encourage new schemes locally that help men and women gain access to education, including literacy and numeracy. We will make £5 million available next year through the Basic Skills Agency and NIACE (the National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education), and will look to match this with contributions from trusts, charities, companies and private donors.

4.20 We would welcome views on how to build on the many ways in which community learning can take place. Over one million people take adult education classes. They enhance retirement for many people and there is a link with the proposal in the Government's Green Paper Our Healthier Nation (Cm 3854) to set up healthy living centres funded from National Lottery money. The University for Industry will also have a part to play in supporting innovation.

4.21 We want to encourage families to learn together. The National Year of Reading will help in this, and our new Early Excellence Centres will promote parenting, family learning, and adult education and training, supported by childcare.

4.22 We welcome Professor Fryer's Advisory Group report Learning for the 21st Century, and look forward to the Group's further advice as part of the consultation process on how this area of learning can be developed.