Introduction

There has been a long tradition of education and learning in community spaces, both formal and informal. Much of this emerges from a 20th-century movement that itself evolved from three main strands. The first was the school-based village and community college movement initiated by Henry Morris in Cambridgeshire during the 1920s. This led to the establishment of ‘integrated adult education’ in the 1930s to backfill the gaps left by inadequate childhood provision (Fairbairn, 1979). It is also closely connected to trades unions and mutual aid movements, such as the Fabian Society, Settlement House, the Cooperative Movement and places like Ruskin College, where working-class people could engage in education for activism, democracy and rights. The second strand concerned experiments arising out of the UK's Educational Priority Area Projects between 1969 and 1972, which attempted to provide ‘compensatory education’ in disadvantaged areas in inner cities and was also intended to equip adults who had been let down as children (Hawley and Svara, 1972: 26). The third strand was community education work undertaken by a number of the UK government's community development projects in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These were area-based regeneration initiatives designed to address the problem of so-called ‘sink’ housing estates. The community education approach often takes a radical stance, drawing on the Freireian concept of ‘conscientisation’ (Freire, 1985: 74), which sees education as the route to the discovery and surfacing of innate talents and abilities in everyone. It is regarded as the route to empowerment and liberation (Lovett, 1975).

These traditions of adult and community education have in common a concern to challenge the deficiencies of early education and to seek to fill gaps in children's and adults’ education and skills that have arisen as a result of poverty and disadvantage. The liberation dimension has emerged and somewhat displaced the ‘deficiency’ focus with the idea of education for emancipation and empowerment. More recently, critics have observed ways in which the empowering radical dimension has given rise to a type of ‘active citizenship’ that instrumentalises people for specific policy purposes.