Final Report: Future Research Priorities

• The Development of the Skills for Life Strategy since 2000. It was not within the scope of this project to deal with the implementation phase of the Skills for Life strategy. Although the NRDC is carrying out impact studies, an independent overview and analysis linking with the findings from Changing Faces would be an excellent complement to the current project.

• Policy comparison between the four countries of the UK. Since devolution, the social and educational policy in Scotland, Wales and NI has diverged in significant ways. The ERSC Seminar series began exploring these differences and a proposal to develop this analysis is being prepared.

• Narratives of adult learners: We did not seek to interview a sample of adult learners from basic skills programmes in this project, but mainly used the NCDS cohort study to represent the learners’ perspective. Such an interview study would be possible though for reasons described in the original proposal, it would be time consuming to trace a representative group. A feasible alternative strategy would be to analyse a sample of student writing from the large amount that has been donated to the Changing Faces archive (described above). A study combining both of these methods would be ideal.

• Continued analysis of our existing data sources e.g. exploring the changing influence of technology on materials and resources and teaching methods; professional development of the field; the key role of the mass media in shaping the field and responses to media mobilizations

• Further developing the link between the qualitative and quantitative data from the NCDS cohort members