Dr Séamus Ó Tuama is Director of ACE (Adult Continuing Education) at University College Cork, Ireland's oldest University centre for the delivery of adult and continuing education. With EPALE celebrating its first 10 candles on a well-deserved cake, we interviewed him to understand how our landscape changed in the past 10 years. 

Dr Ó Tuama, you've been around for a while: how did our adult learning and education systems change in the past 10 years? Do you see an overlap with lifelong learning systems?

I would argue that they surely changed. The very emergence of the term lifelong learning has created a certain kind of terminological confusion. Sometimes we are brought to think that adult education and lifelong learning are the same thing - but that's a dangerous assumption, especially in the way we see lifelong learning as being understood by governments and policymakers. Lifelong learning could start even before we're born and continues for the whole of your life: human beings’ DNA is essentially about being learners. We are constantly learning, whether we do it consciously and purposefully or not. Many people don't believe or think that they are, but in fact, they are constantly learning. But sometimes, in our need for categorisation and siloisation, we see lifelong learning as equivalent to adult education; some other people see lifelong learning as only covering hard skills or learning-to-the-test or even learning-to-the-job; as such, we often forget that kindergarten or primary school are crucial part of our lifelong learning journey, when in fact they are. As such, this has been a huge change in our collective perception, a big shift in terms of the emphasis and accent on learning modalities. 

The problem here is that if you're serious about “nobody being left behind”, then adult education is critically important and needs to have its own space. Let me give you an example: I was listening to a radio report about the recent earthquake in Myanmar and the spokesperson from the United Nations agency dealing with it was addressing the current crisis, but also explaining the context. And she mentioned the number of children who are not in education: right now 4 million people are out of school in Myanmar. So, if just 4 million people out of school in Myanmar today, we can be pretty sure that this figure probably didn't start in 2025 and we can safely assume that there were 4 million children (or maybe more) out of school in 2024; if we went back to 2014 or 2004, I suspect the numbers are possibly even greater. And all of those adults are in the world now, they were not in education back then and are most likely not in education right now. What does this have to do with our current situation? 

I think adult education and especially community education, where we engage with adults in the community, have been critically undervalued in the past ten years and they're not quite understood as being as important as they are. 

Because if we're really serious about changing the world, that is one of the key places we have to start. 

One last thing that has drastically changed and is really important in adult education is the approaches and methodologies that we use. And these didn't just start today or change overnight; they have a long history, a long tradition. If we start downplaying the importance of adult education, then there's a danger we'd lose all those methodologies - in learning but also in data collection and monitoring. And those methodologies and those approaches, those theories, those practices are important for adult learners, but they also have application in other dimensions of learning and beyond. 

Methodologies and data collection methods in adult learning and education are more respectful of the learner, more centred on their needs and the very process of learning, they work on the philosophy by and large, creating a context where the learner knows what they want to learn and they just need support. 

Whereas a lot of the other areas of education and learning are around us deciding the learning outcomes for people and pointing them in that direction. So we have national curricula on primary education, secondary education, we have universities, we have a curriculum attached to every program, and every measure and every index is very structured and very focused in that same direction, focusing solely on the outcomes of education neglecting the process and the learners. This has changed and I am not quite sure it is for the best. 

What big challenges do you see in the years to come, which could potentially prevent us from increasing participation in adult learning and education?

Underfunding is definitely an ongoing issue, and it has been so for a while. Adult education has great flexibility, people can choose what education they want to engage with and so on. But if we start to think about adult education as not important in our grand scheme for lifelong learning then the likelihood is that we put less resources into it; and by putting less resources into it we are accentuating the left-behindness of those who are already left behind. So to me that's a big challenge. In the past 30 years in Britain there was a significant change in the funding mechanism for universities, when Gordon Brown was Chancellor of Exchequer. But by changing the policy and cutting funds for lifelong learning programmes in universities, they ripped out a huge amount of the adult education that was delivered by the universities and that had huge consequences over time. It meant that millions of people missed the opportunities for furthering their education through the university system. And that's just one example.

I know that community education is always a very easy target and when there's any kind of retrenchment in national budgets community education gets cut. We also know that it's already underfunded, and oftentimes on the kind of spurious excuse that supposedly there isn't any clear evidence of success - which is false even by faulty measures that only look at outcomes. 

Linked to this, another challenge is that people working in the front line don't really have time for doing research by and large to justify their own existence. They're just trying to keep the show on the road and their number one priority is around our learners - how many learners can we reach, how many people can we support, how many lives can we change. But governments and policymakers love statistics, they love figures, they love numbers and as for ourselves, a lot of what we know about adult education in some sense is almost anecdotal.

It is important that we realise that adult education does not just impact the learner themselves, it impacts a whole lot of people around them. For many people it creates an intergenerational shift: think of marginalised groups, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, linguistic minorities, people from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. 

They can change not just their own lives but the lives of their children, their siblings, their parents sometimes and all their communities. In the past people were much more conscious of the value of adult education.

If you had a magic wand, what would you change in Europe?

The first thing I would change is the need to acknowledge the importance of adult education as adult education and to realise that it is important in its own right. Of course, we can keep it within the vast ecosystem of lifelong learning. 

Today, people understand education as a big thing and lifelong learning as being a part of it, but it's the other way around. Lifelong learning is the big thing and education is part of lifelong learning. And then adult education is part of that as well, of course. But we need to recapture the language. With my magic wand I would want adult education to be far more visible in language, in policy, in how we speak.

Secondly, I would want us all to have a more holistic view of what lifelong learning is to escape the idea that it should all go back to skills for jobs. It's about people learning throughout their lives. I probably have given this example all too often but when my mother died she had severe dementia for maybe the last five, six, seven years of her life. I came to visit her one day and she had a picture on display - she was well advanced in her dementia at that stage. And so I said "oh, nice picture, where did the picture come from?". It turns out she painted it herself. But she never painted in an artistic way throughout her life, and yet, she was able to learn to paint with dementia - and it soothed her. 

To round it up, adult education needs to have its own space. The same way as we don't dismiss the idea of primary education or we don't dismiss the idea of secondary education as being part of a broader concept, we should not give up on adult education in its own right.