Please find attached the 7^th Briefing Paper in the EcCoWell 2 series, by Tom Schuller, Idowu Biao, and Mike Osborne, entitled, Rethinking Lifelong Learning within Current Contexts of Time and Space. The objective of this piece is to open up some fresh lines of thinking about lifelong learning by looking in a very broad way at the dimensions of time and place, in a global context.

‘Only connect’. Never was this injunction more fitting than today. I scan the material in this issue and realise how much each is part of an interwoven web. As Chris Brooks observes below, we see ‘how poorly policies are tied up into a coherent strategy: housing, education, skills and infrastructure are all conceived and implemented as separate and non-connected policies. If only one could find a clear beginning and untangle strands into a neat and orderly ball.  But there are too many ends and no free ends at all.

Learning transitions can be disruptive and unsettling to any young person. Children aged between 12-25 years old are particularly vulnerable, given how this period can impact on increased risks of anxiety, depressive disorders, and mental illnesses later in life.

Literacy programmes have suffered severely during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet adult literacy and education have been absent in many initial education responses. Even before the crisis, 773 million non-literate adults and young people were failing to acquire basic reading and numeracy skills.