Hope-Advent Day 1

Our advent calendar this year is here on blip for a change. We're going to follow the four themes traditional for the season starting with hope-a week of hope sounds good to us.
 
Since March of this year the Learners' Forum has been delivering some key programmes during the pandemic. Adult Learners' Week, Family Learning Week and in this first week of December One Hour A Day For Learning-all moved online to keep people safe, all very different from our normal networking, training and events programmes.
 
We ran a new normal programme in the Spring/Summer bringing people together online to chat about the adult learning of the future, encouraged by heightened talk of plans for a better future for our disadvantaged communities and not going back or sticking to the old ways. We joined in enthusiastically, we set about delivering an ideas and solutions programme bringing over 700 people together to talk new ideas and find solutions. Our European Agenda for Adult Learning Impact Forum worked harder, had more meetings and brought together more policy makers to talk about what was needed. We set up a friend's telephone line with a small amount of funding from the Scottish Government and have talked to about 9,000 adult learners now...about what they want for the future.
 
Motivated and buoyed by the ideas being discussed around #BuildBackBetter we were thrilled by the prospect of adult learning being central to the recovery, in fact we were delighted to read about the role of adult learning in the Scottish Government's Route Map out of COVID, but like many exciting ideas it appeared as fairy dust that has all too soon been blown away. The same old things still happening, same old things still being funded and same old organisations still part of the same old boys (and girls) network. 
 
We were asked to be patient there wasn't a lot of money around and we have been, but we listen and read daily about the money being allocated to areas and work like ours, but there's none for #AdultLearners or #AdultLearning, none for the most disadvantaged who've been hidden out of view by this pandemic, who need help to read and understand the health messages we're faced with every day. No new technology to support us to get online, no new funding to support our mental health, no new ideas or places to go-just same old, same old so what can we do?
 
Our Autumn/Winter programme is definitely a somewhat quieter affair since there’s been no funding or reduced funding-learning packs with telephone support and for those who can some Zoom and Teams classes, but for the majority of adult learners their community-based adult learning fix is their only lifeline outside of their four walls. Adult learning (particularly community based) more often than not works with people who live on their own, people who are isolated, lonely and very much alone-we are their family.
 
We know we don't have Lords, Ladies and Knights of the realm to support us and make our case, bending the ears of politicians to make them listen; we're not pretty enough for photo opportunities and not visible enough because we're not all cooped up in one building, we do know that. We've sometimes wondered what has happened to the (Scottish) caring and kindness agenda for us, the wellbeing economy, the better future for everyone? Sounds grim doesn't it when you read it on paper we thought so too, being discarded is soul destroying and anxiety provoking, being disregarded has consequences we don't always see at first, but we can't give in. We owe it to the adult learners who've lost their lives this year and we couldn't be with them, or say goodbye to them, we owe it to the people who will need us in the near future for their future, we owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to our ageing population because we do want a better future for everyone.
 
So now we're working harder than ever before, meeting three times more than ever before, and looking for funding to support our adult learning communities five times more than before. We’ve all recently had the change to read ‘Adult Education-too important to be left to chance’ commissioned by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Adult Education and in preparation for our session on the future on Thursday.
 
We know that against all the big players we have a small voice, we can't all send emails to politicians daily to remind them we're here, we simply don't have the skills or technology to do so. We don't have the money to call them regularly, we don't have the finances to make a big noise in the press or even the basic resources to just go away and get on with it. We have wondered at times what do we have.. thankfully that is becoming clearer now and we’re all agreed-we have hope.
 
Hope that there are a few good people who are listening (we've met some of them recently); hope that we can get together with all of our members (27,860 of them) to see them again soon (vaccine permitting) and hope that above all else hearing us becomes easier when you can see us all together again.
 
We want to share that hope for the future because adult learning is a lifelong gift, one you can never lose, break or tire of.
 
Hope Springs this December-and we’re hoping we don't have to follow the pattern of the recent 'Beaver Moon'-we don’t want another winter out in the cold.
 
Love 
 
National Adult Learners' Forum
XXX