About the Transformation Fund
What is the Transformation fund?
The Transformation Fund delivers on commitments made in The Learning Revolution White Paper, published earlier this year, which announced a new approach to improving people's lives and prosperity though learning for pleasure.
The Government's £20m Transformation Fund to support informal adult learning - learning for pleasure, self-development and community development will award money to a wide range of projects all with the objective of seeing creative learning flourish across the country.
The projects will introduce a range of innovative adult learning initiatives for the benefit of a wide range of communities and individuals.
A series of ‘Early Bird' bids have been awarded with 18 projects sharing £1 million of the fund. Single parent families, carers, black and ethnic minorities and disadvantaged communities will benefit from this funding with the remaining £19 million to be distributed amongst a variety of other projects.
The Transformation Fund encourages new partnerships between public, private and community organisations to create informal learning activities which:
- encourage more and different people into informal learning, particularly people from disadvantaged groups;
- open up access to learning in new places, in new ways and at more flexible times;
- support people to set up self-organised groups and learning clubs;
- widen choice, by developing and sharing innovative content;
- build partnerships and strengthen the capacity of informal adult learning organisations;
- improve connections and progression between different kinds of learning; and
- make better use of broadcasting and technology to stimulate and support learning.
Who manages the Transformation Fund?
The tender to manage the Transformation Fund has been awarded to the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) which will oversee the distribution of the remaining £19 million grant fund.
Alan Tuckett, Chief Executive of NIACE, said:
"NIACE is proud to have the role of supporting the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills managing the Transformation Fund. We argued in our response to the Informal Learning Consultation that there is no better stimulus for local adult learning providers than the creation of a fund to trigger innovation and new partnerships."
"There's already evidence from the ‘early bird' bids of how creative and imaginative community-based adult learning can be when it's given the opportunity for blue-skies thinking and the money to put those ideas into practice."
