Multigenerational is who's in the room. Intergenerational is what we do about it.
By Emily Abbott, Co-Founder of Intergenerational England
At the Ruskin College and WEA fringe at Labour Party Conference, I asked the room to turn to the person beside them and say what they'd had for breakfast. Not a relationship yet. But people had stopped coexisting and started noticing each other.
That gap is what I came to talk about. I'm not a skills and labour market specialist. My argument was that lifelong learning is social infrastructure: it builds confidence, relationships and belonging alongside qualifications – to recognise this is imperative.
Lifelong learning is intergenerational by nature. Once learning spans every age and every setting, different generations end up in the same room, but, the question is whether we design for what happens between them.
Our systems run on a sequence: learn young, work, retire. But, lives are not linear and whether they ever were is also a question. People retrain, care, get ill, get made redundant, come back. Someone might find their vocation at 21, someone else ight find it at 61.
Right now, the political energy is with young people. Rightly so, we know that nearly a million 16 to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training, and the Milburn review warns that could reach 1.25 million. The government has responded with a Youth Guarantee, £820 million behind it, and a Jobs Guarantee going national in November - six months of paid work for young people who have been out of work the longest.
I support all of it. But here is the number we hear far less.
Around seven million adults in England struggle with basic literacy. That is a parent who can't help with homework. It is someone who can't fill in a job application. Seven times the NEET figure, and nothing like the same urgency. That is a breakdown of priorities at a national level.
Policy still follows the old life cycle: learn when you're young, work, retire. Look at what is on offer for adults.
The Post-16 White Paper mentions adults so rarely that the WEA called it a "pre-24" paper.
The new qualifications (V Levels, new Level 2 routes, new Level 1 English and maths) are designed for 16 to 19-year-olds. Whether adults can take them is still undecided.
The Lifelong Learning Entitlement starts funding courses in January, but,it is a loan, it only covers higher-level study, and it stops at 60.
The Adult Skills Fund, the main pot for adult basic skills, is held flat at about £1.4 billion.
And adults are walking away from learning. In 2024, 52% had done some learning in the past three years. A year later: 42%. One in four say cost stops them. In 2019 it was fewer than one in ten.
Nobody learns in a vacuum
These are not two separate problems. Young people don't grow up apart from adults or live in a world populated only by other young people. There is often a confidence gap before the skills gap, and a connection gap before that.
The same holds later in life. A college, library or community centre is rarely just where a course happens. It is where someone finds company, gets online, starts volunteering and builds confidence before they reach crisis. That is the NHS 10 Year Health Plan's shift from sickness to prevention, delivered in a classroom.
Learning has always happened in shared spaces
Learning used to be part of how communities lived. The club, the library, the union hall, the church hall. Working men's clubs and trade unions were never only places to get a qualification. They were where generations met and where people built the collective power to shape their communities. It was routine.
Today that kind of contact is occasional. We opt into it or in many ases, out. The cost of living and digital life have thinned it out further, and a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on community assets shows how far our social infrastructure has weakened.
We are trying to rebuild some of it. Intergenerational England and our sister organisation, Intergenerational Music Making, run weekly Access All Ages hubs in theatres, community centres, libraries and hospitals. People from across the life course come together and use creativity to spark conversation, mentoring, storytelling and shared knowledge. Lifelong learning, informal and organic.
The effect reaches beyond the room. Communities that feel connected and supportive are better protected against polarisation.
If learning spaces are infrastructure, government should fund and design them like fundamental social infrastructure. I'd start with three asks.
Three asks
Treat lifelong learning as a lever for civic ties and stronger communities, not only a skills pipeline.
Design Level 1 reform around adults with jobs, families and caring responsibilities, not only young people.
Back further education, higher education and adult learning as one connected system, not three competing for the same funding and learners.
Social infrastructure doesn't emerge from good social conditions. It creates them. Whether we fund learning that way is the policy choice in front of us.
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