Britain’s comprehensive spending review process has sharpened minds. Work is now under way to produce evidence for the next round. Interested groups can and do make submissions, but the exercise is essentially a private dialogue behind government doors. Occasionally there are exceptions - such as when televised promises shape the outcomes, recently to the benefit of the health budget.

The British way is in stark contrast to budget-making in Rio Grande de Sul in Brazil. There officials prepare detailed spending priorities, highlighting implications for communities. A quarter of a million people then meet to weigh up the options - a new primary classroom or better street lighting or pooling resources with neighbouring communities to pay for a health clinic. Representatives from these meetings then help to select options until a budget with wide popular support is produced. The Popular Planning Programme that flowered and died with the Greater London Council had the same idea. As a result in Brazil we find support for substantial public investment, and a recognition that this involves taxation ... and 250,000 people each year learn active citizenship.

Here, we wait anxiously to hear if the case for significantly greater investment in colleges has succeeded, and whether departmental ministers, like champions returning from a medieval joust, have secured victory or defeat.

This year’s review was good for adult learners. The adoption of the new public service agreement target, aiming to secure a 40 per cent reduction among adults of working age who lack level 2 qualifications or their equivalent, and the doubling of the basic skills target to 2007, were both welcome. However, the language has shifted from the first term of the Labour Government. Then, social and economic prosperity were twin goals. Now attention is much more clearly focused on the relationship between learning and work.

The spending review charges the Department for Education and Skills “to undertake a review of the current arrangements for funding for adult learning post- 19, including how the Government’s various support mechanisms for learning could be more effectively applied”.

So far, so good, but the review adds “to provide incentives to employers to engage in training; cause institutions to be responsive to employer needs, building their capacity to work with employers; widen participation in learning by the low-skilled; and enable regional development agencies to play their full and effective role in developing and implementing regional skills strategies.”

No one can object to the value of those goals. But what about the other sides to adult learning? Where is money to be spent to revitalise democratic engagement? Where is learning for later life? Family learning? Learning to develop the capacity to regenerate neglected communities?

Beyond the headlines these issues are apparently covered by the review - which will stretch from community-based learning to employer-provided training. But who would know from the remit? Ministers and the key civil servants who will work on the review certainly. But what about junior staff, new to the patch, who may be misled by the headline?

One local Learning and Skills Council interpreted policy priorities by issuing contracts to local education authorities with the maximum number of people over 60 fundable under the contract, explicitly laid down. The figure was drawn from the proportion in the whole population (including 0s to 16s who are outside the LSC remit). Fortunately, the contracts were withdrawn and reissued without such crude rationing. But the lesson is clear - language, and especially the headline targets, shape perceptions among over-pressed and busy folk.

This is where the mood music of ministerial speeches makes a big difference. They can reassure partners in the field, and check over-enthusiastic pursuit of the major priorities at the expense of the others.

Adult skills minister Ivan Lewis made just such a welcome intervention in a speech to the Local Government Association in July when he recognised the role of local authorities, and the broad remit of adult learning. Estelle Morris’s speech to the TUC had the same effect. But unless we can develop popular budget-making in Britain in the near future, we shall need plenty more such speeches to keep the breadth of government’s concerns in the public (and the policy-makers’) eye.

Alan Tuckett is director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Learning