Background

In the ESRC's Learning Society Programme specification, the key concept of the learning society is defined as one “in which all citizens acquire a high quality general education, appropriate vocational training and a job (or series of jobs) worthy of a human being while continuing to participate in education and training throughout their lives” (Coffield, 1994). People with learning difficulties are particularly likely to experience social marginalisation and difficulty in accessing the labour market. It is therefore important to consider what opportunities the Learning Society is likely to hold for them, and to consider what can be learnt from their experiences which may be applicable to wider social groups. This was the central concern of our research. The structure of this chapter is as follows. We begin by outlining developments in a range of public policy arenas which all play a part in shaping the nature of the Learning Society for people with learning difficulties. Subsequently, we discuss findings from our interview survey which mapped lifelong learning services for people with learning difficulties in Scotland and their underpinning discourses. Finally, we discuss ethnographic case studies to explore the way in which dominant visions of the Learning Society shape the identities and lived experiences of people with learning difficulties.

Definition of learning difficulties employed in the study

Clinical definitions of learning difficulty identify approximately 4% of the population as falling into this category. The present study did not employ a medical, but rather adopted an operational definition, so that people were defined as having learning difficulties if they had been labelled in this way by service providers. Accordingly, learning difficulties included those with a background of a Record of Needs and/or special schooling, a small proportion of whom had little or no speech and had spent a significant proportion of their lives in long-stay institutions. In addition, the category included adults who had difficulty with coping skills, oracy, functional literacy and numeracy, estimated by professionals as up to one third of people in areas of social disadvantage (Riddell et al, 1998a). Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who had missed a lot of school due to accident or illness were also categorised as having learning difficulties.