Adult educators are well-versed in the gap between rhetoric and practice - it is, after all, a field where no more than three or four gathered together on a wet January evening is described as “this great movement of ours”. But seldom has such a large aspiration been accompanied by such a ragbag of half-hearted, optimistic and, above all, inexpensive measures.

We should, of course, be grateful for small mercies. To have a consultation paper which recognises that Government needs effective partnerships to improve provision - and seeks a broad debate on how a coherent lifetime learning strategy can be adopted - is welcome and a measure of the journey covered in a short time. If someone had suggested to me a year ago that 1995 would bring a combined Department for Education and Employment, with a Director General for Employment and Lifetime Learning, and a Government consultation about lifetime learning, I would have said ‘chance would be a fine thing’.

All of my working life, adult learners have been marginal to the main narrative of social policy, falling between the schools’ and universities’ focus of the DESDFE, and the relatively narrow labour market focus of the Employment Department (though, to be fair, ED was always more adult learner friendly), so there seemed no good reason to suppose that things would change this year. When the Departments were amalgamated, and lifetime learning was declared as the third priority for the DFEE’s work, I felt like the recipient of that old Chinese curse: May all your dreams come true, and may you live with the consequences.

At first sight, Lifetime Learning reads promisingly, with three Secretaries of State supporting the contention that: “Lifetime learning is not just about the economy and competitiveness. It is also crucial to our national culture and quality of life.” It is a pity then, that the subsequent text concentrates almost exclusively on the contribution learning at work can make to economic prosperity. And unfortunately, there is too large a gap between the general and the specific in the document, so that by the time you finish reading it you wonder whether the lifetime of the title means ‘when you are in the labour force’, suggesting that retirement, or unemployment, or unwaged caring are kinds of a shadowy afterlife.

For anyone who was party to the passage of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, it is sweetness itself to read of the merits of Employee Development Schemes, like that pioneered by Ford, where workers are funded to undertake non job-specific learning of their choice: “Experience suggests that these schemes bring business benefits and are successful in promoting a culture of learning in employment, helping many non-learners to acquire a taste for learning, or to revive a dormant interest... The learning encourages more thoughtful activity in the workplace. It allows a greater insight into what employees are capable of achieving. Most importantly, it gives them the confidence to do more, to innovate, and to ask more informed questions. ”

All well and good. But what if you work somewhere which doesn’t offer an employee development scheme, or, worse, you don’t have a paid job at all? The undeclared principle of the paper seems to be that learning can be open, imaginative, inclusive and general - as long as employers pay. Yet the lesson of this policy review is that employers, as a rule, fund short-term, and job-specific training. When people study for qualifications over a sustained period, most pay for themselves.

The paper asks what next we should do to encourage small- and medium-sized companies to invest in learning, but despite an overwhelming focus on the labour market, has nothing to say about the ever-increasing development of part-time and temporary employment, and employers’ intransigent resistance to paying for part-time and temporary workers’ learning.

There is no mention of groups who don’t benefit from the current post-school offer until page 29. And it is the absence of attention to the under-represented that is the paper’s greatest weakness. The paper encourages everyone to invest more in learning, in the belief that learning pays. But it does not recognise that, whilst Britain’s black communities invest heavily in their own learning, they get dramatically fewer opportunities for employer-supported training than their white colleagues. Nor does the paper mention our failure to develop robust measures to identify equivalences for qualifications gained overseas, which leads to 85 per cent unemployment levels for refugees with professional qualifications. Little here, either, for people with disabilities, for carers, for governors or for Britain’s older people.

The best the unemployed are offered is that the change in the 21-hour rule should leave broadly the same number of people studying part-time as now, if for shorter periods. Yet if we are to create the learning culture (and for that matter hit the national targets), we need 2,000,000 unwaged learners, not the 80,000 who currently slip through the scrutiny of the benefits system.

In the end, Lifetime Learning fails to celebrate the creativity, passion and pizzazz released when adults learn together. The dynamic success of the family literacy movement; the re-creation of self you find at Castleford Women’s Centre, built out of the experiences of miners’ wives after the 1984 strike; the delight of making sense of a poem, or a painting, of making a pot, of making a learning city all point to the transformative power of learning.

Certainly, learning pays, but not everyone can pay for learning. A civilised society needs to build its strategy for lifetime learning around ways of supporting all those other dimensions of our shared lives, as well as the narrowly economic. The Government is right that this means working together, but it lacks the vision to be inclusive enough.

The challenge for everyone who works with adult learners must now be to ensure that the responses to the consultation enlarge and give life to its agenda, and that the ensuing debate addresses the social as well as the economic case for a learning society.

Alan Tuckett is director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education.