11.1 If lifelong learning is to become a reality for all, a major focus for policy and for operational support must be the home and the community. According to the Community Development Foundation, about 50% of all local residents are either involved in unpaid voluntary activity or benefit directly from the initiatives of community groups. Although the shorthand of 'community' is often used, this encompasses a wide range of activities, "a bubbling cauldron of activity and experience which crystalises into hundreds of small groups and initiatives, from lunch clubs to parent and toddler groups. Local groups and organisations are not haphazard phenomena: they form a permanent stratum of social life, the community sector even as particular groups come and go." (Community Development Foundation, 1977, Working for Communities)
11.2 The task of extending lifelong learning into the community cannot be left entirely to provision through the formal institutions of education. This additional focus will represent a distinctive and challenging feature of the new strategy we envisage in which the aim is progressively to develop a national culture of lifelong learning for all. It will require adjustments all round, to practice, in respect of provision, to funding arrangements, to partnership activities and in the effective measurement of what the Kennedy Committee calls 'learning gain'.
11.3 To the extent that encouragement and practical support can be directed towards learning in families and in a variety of community settings, both provision and achievement in the various formal institutions of education and through work will also themselves be markedly improved. Successful learning at home and in the community will provide a major new basis on which to build other learning, which is itself more explicitly concerned with economic regeneration, the improvement of skills and the application of new technologies. Widening horizons to include support for learning at home and in the community will thus result in many benefits, both directly and indirectly.
11.4 Learning in the family and community is valuable for a number of other reasons, which should be central to a new national strategy for lifelong learning. First, both represent an important context for learning where people can respond to their own immediate circumstances and where their learning can begin from their own experiences. Secondly, both home and community can provide an important stimulus to learning, increasing motivation by relating learning directly to people's own interests, involvement and commitment. Thirdly, and related, this kind of learning at home and in the community can provide a focus for wider political understanding, enlarge the realm of politics itself and thereby strengthen commitment to active citizenship. Finally, and most importantly, learning at home and in the community can represent a resource with which to challenge continued social exclusion, especially that which is too often reinforced through the institutions of education themselves.
11.5 Government, funders and providers of learning should recognise the valuable contribution which learning at home and in the community can make to educational achievement, economic success, community development, well-being and social cohesion. They should adjust their policies, resource allocation and programmes of activity to give greater support to learning at home and in the community and to its development.
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