12.8 Fostering effective needs analysis and outreach work, and creating effective inter-agency partnerships, and stimulating innovation is a formidable challenge for many institutions, working with the constraint of tight budgets, on sharply delineated funding-driven programmes. It would prove prohibitively expensive for Government immediately to commit large amounts of new funds to meet the full range of learning aspirations of local communities in the short run. Much will be expected from the creative use of existing resources, and from new resources released by imaginative partnerships.

12.9 The experience of the DES/ED-funded REPLAN programme for unemployed adults between 1984-91 offers a number of strategies that could usefully be applied to foster more broadly based community education targeting those people who have enjoyed least benefit from statutory and formal education. These are working within a national strategic framework, identification of effective practice, and skills in disseminating these in different sectoral contexts, regional co-ordination by experienced change agents, experienced in working with local organisations and partnerships to negotiate learning- friendly provision and the management of small grant innovation budgets

12.10 Local Authorities should also take the lead in convening local lifelong learning partnerships. These should secure cross-departmental and cross-service provision, especially for those whose needs will otherwise be overlooked or assumed not to exist.

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