• Centre for Nursing Research
• Centre of Physical Activity Across the Lifespan (CoPAAL)
• Creative and Authentic Leadership
• Credo
• Early Christian Studies
• Golding Centre
• Institute of Child Protection Studies
• Lifelong Learning
  • Partners
  • Revitalisation
  • Infrastructure
  • Significance
• Mathematics and Literacy Education Research Flagship
• Plunkett Centre for Ethics
• Quality of Life and Social Justice
• SIMERR

Significance of Lifelong Learning

In recent years, the topic of Lifelong Learning has assumed immense importance in the discourse and policies of a number of bodies and agencies across the international arena. An increasing number of countries have concluded that a lifelong approach to learning should be instituted, extended and deployed as one of the main ways of addressing some of the major issues of the twenty-first century.

The deliberations of OECD, UNESCO, the European Parliament, the Nordic Council of Ministers, the Japanese Parliament, APEC and the Australian Commonwealth Government reveal a growing commitment to policies of learning across the lifespan.

A number of themes runs through the work of these international agencies and national governments:

• The emergence of an awareness of the importance of the notions of the knowledge economy and the learning society 
• An acceptance of the need for a new philosophy of education and training, with institutions of all kinds - formal and informal, traditional and alternative, public and private - having new roles and responsibilities for learning 
• The necessity of ensuring that the foundations for lifelong learning are set in place for all citizens during the compulsory years of schooling 
•  The need to promote multiple and coherent sets of links, pathways and articulations between schooling, work, further education and other agencies offering opportunities for learning across the lifespan 
•  The importance of governments providing incentives for individuals, employers, and the range of social partners with a commitment to learning, to invest in lifelong learning 
• The need to ensure that emphasis upon lifelong learning does not reinforce existing patterns of privilege and widen the existing gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged on the basis of access to education.

Continued access to education and training for all a country's citizens is seen as an investment in the future, a pre-condition for economic advance, democracy, social cohesion, and personal growth.

As Thomas Groome in Educating for Life - A Spiritual Vision for Every Teacher and Parent argues:

"Consider the worthiest purpose of education as that learners might become fully alive human beings who help create a society that serves the common good (1998:52)."