John Holford
Biographic Data
| ID | 697296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Holford |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Holford |
| SIGNATURE | HOLFORD J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1666-4525 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 149 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Unravelling the data puzzle
This paper investigates the methodological discrepancies underlying the measurement of adult learning and education (ALE) participation in the UK by focusing on four major surveys – APiL, PIAAC, AES, and LFS. Grounded in the Total Survey Error (TSE) framework, we systematically examined the surveys’ documentation and compared their definitions, reference periods, and operationalisation of ALE. Our review identified significant inconsistencies, in…
Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong
Over the past two decades Hong Kong's higher education institutions have become favored destinations for students from Mainland China. They find Hong Kong society both familiar and strange. Though Chinese, its political history differs markedly from their homeland's. Since 2010, moreover, conflicts have arisen in Hong Kong between local and Mainland Chinese people, culminating between 2017 and 2020 with clashes over issues of autonomy and governa…
Lifelong Learning, Young Adults and the Challenges of Disadvantage in Europe
This open access book explores the role of lifelong learning in the development of Europe through the authors' positioning of adult educators
Professor James Edward (Teddy) Thomas (20 th December 1933–11 th July 2023)
Aligning skills and lifelong learning for human-centred sustainable development
Lifelong education research over 40 years
With this special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, we complete a two-year celebration and critical examination of the field of adult lifelong education, prompted by the journal’s fortieth anniversary. In this editorial we provide a brief account of this celebration and its rationale, but also devote attention to the origins and early years of the journal itself
Forty years of the International Journal of Lifelong Education
Shaping the field of lifelong education through three critical debates in the International Journal of Lifelong Education
The editors approached the 40th anniversary of the International Journal of Lifelong Education as an opportunity to consider the field by exploring how a corpus of 1462 articles (the first 40 volumes of the journal) questioned and shaped the field. A subset of advisory board members and the editors gathered in 2021 in groups to analyse major topics. The records of the reading, analyses and discussions of these groups offer a unique snapshot of th…
A year of Covid-19 pandemic
March 2021 marked one year since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous editorials reflected on social inequality, a longstanding problem in lifelong education, in light of the pandemic (Waller et al., 2020), and on the role of learning cities and regions to make education systems resilient to the pandemic (Webb et al., 2020). Writing when a third wave of COVID-19 is being experienced in several countries, it is wo…
Reassessing the social benefits of lifelong learning in light of the Covid pandemic
This editorial focuses on what is widely regarded as a beneficial aspect of adult education, that is, increased opportunities for socialising, and how they may have been reduced by the general move to online learning in response to the COVID pandemic. Whilst some scholars have previously highlighted the potential negative social aspects of adults engaging with lifelong learning on relationships with those closest to them (e.g. Waller et al., 2011…
Lifelong education international
With this issue, the International Journal of Lifelong Education enters its fortieth year of publication. It was launched, under the editorship of Peter Jarvis and J.E. (Teddy) Thomas, in a different era. We are now embarking on a two-year project to mark the completion of this anniversary, and to launch us into our fifth decade. The project involves looking back and peering forward. It comprises two main elements, the outcomes of which will, we …
Who is ‘competent’ to shape lifelong education’s future
Lifelong education practice and research are about important processes but also generate visions of what those processes should be and lead to. Many are drawn to the field of lifelong education because of traditions that have articulated visions of adults and their communities as capable of growth, emancipation and empowerment, and look to educational policies, systems, institutions, and programmes in terms of how they can foster those visions. F…
Positive education
Recent years have seen much interest in positive education. In this article, we will show how person-centred education, like positive education, is concerned with the promotion of human flourishing. Both offer ways in which education goes beyond traditional skills and knowledge to a concern for the well-being of people. However, we argue that an awareness of the scholarship of Carl Rogers, the author of Freedom to Learn and the originator of the …
Lifelong education, social inequality and the Covid-19 health pandemic
What can lifelong education researchers learn from the COVID-19 pandemic? There are, of course, ‘quick’ lessons: societies, for instance, clearly learn from experience. East Asian societies, and governments, learned from SARS and the devastating effect it had in cities such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Beijing in 2003 (Abraham, 2004). Of course there was the general lesson that a new coronavirus should not be taken lightly: no doubt there was als…
Educational research in authoritarian times
Across the world, political winds are filling authoritarian sails. From China to Hungary, Brazil to Poland, Turkey to Egypt, Russia to the USA, ‘strong leaders’ hold the helm. Democratic institutions creak or crack. Elections are ‘managed’, postponed, abolished; voters are suborned by ‘fake news’; opposition is harassed, banned, branded treasonous or terroristic. Checks and balances on executive power are ignored or derided; leaders’ terms of off…
Adult education, vocational education and economic policy
Adult education and vocational education have a long and complex relationship. At many levels, they remain distinct ideas and each is the focus of a dedicated body of research and theory. At the same time, overlaps have always been acknowledged. This relationship and how it plays out in economic policy settings is the focus of this editorial. The Australian case is taken up as illuminating especially when viewed through the lens of Bourdieu’s ana…
Learning cities and implications for adult education research
Writing this editorial whilst many people are experiencing a second wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it is interesting to reflect on learning and the role of education providers. Arguably, in some countries such as the UK, the media has constructed a bad-news story about online learning in these times. Rather than discuss areas of community and adult education provision that have been neglected or the potential of formal, informal and non-fo…
An inseparable aspect of citizenship”
This year we mark a major adult education centenary: the publication, in November 1919, of the Final Report of the British Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee. This was a landmark in our field – probably the first major official report on adult education in any country to be based on serious empirical research. More important, perhaps, it set out a strong political case for a broad – lifelong and lifewide – adult education curr…
Conceptualising lifelong learning for sustainable development and education 2030
Lifelong learning has been identified as crucial to the achievement of sustainable development and quality education in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By incorporating the need to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all in the sustainable development goal 4 (SDG4), which was agreed by the United Nations member states in 2015, policy makers have recognised that education should reach beyond the formal institutional arrangemen…
Data, artificial intelligence and policy-making
A few years ago, the European Commission commissioned and published an influential report, reviewing what adult education policy-makers could learn from research – chiefly research funded by the Commission itself under successive Framework research programmes (now rebranded ‘Horizon’) (Federighi, 2013). The report covered a range of areas, including the aims of continuing vocational education and training and adult education, how adult education …
The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning
An authentic and generous adult educator
Peter Jarvis, who died on 20 November 2018 aged 81, was not only founding co-editor of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, but a theorist of adult education and lifelong learning whose influence has been felt in every continent. Two years ago we were able to publish a special double issue on his work and contribution: although already ill, he was delighted to be presented with a copy, signed by all the contributors, at his 80th birth…
Economic theory, neoliberalism and the interests of educators
Critical commentary on education policy frequently resorts to the term ‘neoliberal’ to describe the influence of economic theory on the way we understand, measure and reform practices and institutions. This influence reaches a wide range of activities funded by governments such as health care, welfare, and public services in general. The appeal of economic theory to policymakers can be readily appreciated. As Edwards (2007) explains, governments …
University renewal
For three months in the early part of this year, many British universities were in turmoil. Not the turmoil we now treat as normal—the ‘restructurings’ so often the first resort of institutional leaders. Or rather, not that only. In fact, it has been uproar rather than mere turmoil. For decades, university teachers have responded to successive assaults in cowed silence. Politicians and the press have preached the gospel of globalisation: markets …
Adult education, mental health and mental wellbeing
Engaging or continuing to engage with formal education in adulthood has long been seen as being beneficial to learners in a number of ways (Field, 2009; Schuller, Preston, Hammond, BassettGrundy, & Bynner, 2004). These include the obvious social ones – classes are good ways to meet others with similar interests – and economic benefits including enhanced knowledge, skills general employability are often cited as being important too – the encourage…
Adult and lifelong education
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn HolfordJohn Holford is Robert Peers professor of Adult Education at the University of Nottingham, UK.Marcella MilanaMarcella Milana is associate professor at Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and president of the Nordic Comparative and International Education Society.Vida Mohorčič ŠpolarVida Mohorčič Špolar is adjunct professor…
Mass education and community development in the British colonies, 1940‐1960
(1988). Mass education and community development in the British colonies, 1940‐1960: A study in the politics of community education. International Journal of Lifelong Education: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 163-183
Shaping the field of lifelong education through three critical debates in the International Journal of Lifelong Education
The editors approached the 40th anniversary of the International Journal of Lifelong Education as an opportunity to consider the field by exploring how a corpus of 1462 articles (the first 40 volumes of the journal) questioned and shaped the field. A subset of advisory board members and the editors gathered in 2021 in groups to analyse major topics. The records of the reading, analyses and discussions of these groups offer a unique snapshot of th…
The misuses of sustainability
Sustainability’’ has a captivating but disingenuous simplicity: its meanings are complex, and have political and policy significance. Exploring the application of the term to adult education, this paper argues that a particular discourse of ‘‘sustainability’’ has become a common-sense, short-circuiting critical analysis and understanding of policy options. This ‘‘business discourse’’ of sustainability, strongly influenced by neoliberal ideas, enc…
Lifelong education, social inequality and the Covid-19 health pandemic
What can lifelong education researchers learn from the COVID-19 pandemic? There are, of course, ‘quick’ lessons: societies, for instance, clearly learn from experience. East Asian societies, and governments, learned from SARS and the devastating effect it had in cities such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Beijing in 2003 (Abraham, 2004). Of course there was the general lesson that a new coronavirus should not be taken lightly: no doubt there was als…
Widening participation, social mobility and the role of universities in a globalized world
A university education has long been seen as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds in countries the world over, and a well-educated working pop
The role of lifelong learning in building citizenship
This article considers European Union measures to strengthen ‘citizenship’ through the use of lifelong learning in the light of two twentieth‐century British initiatives. European citizenship is discussed, and current EU initiatives to harness lifelong learning to the development of citizenship are briefly outlined. Aspects of British and colonial experienced are then explored. The particular cases studied are: attempts to develop enhanced citize…
Adult education and learning
At the outset of the world economic crisis in 2009 the representatives of 144 UNESCO Member States met at the Sixth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VI) held in Brazil, and adopted the Belém Framework for Action (BFA) to guide them ‘in harnessing the power and potential of adult learning and education for a viable future for all’ (art. 6). Moreover, they called upon UNESCO and its satellite structures to review and update th…
A year of Covid-19 pandemic
March 2021 marked one year since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous editorials reflected on social inequality, a longstanding problem in lifelong education, in light of the pandemic (Waller et al., 2020), and on the role of learning cities and regions to make education systems resilient to the pandemic (Webb et al., 2020). Writing when a third wave of COVID-19 is being experienced in several countries, it is wo…
Global policy agencies and visions for twenty-first century lifelong education
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has recently published a vision for education for the twenty-first century Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Commo
Lifelong education international
With this issue, the International Journal of Lifelong Education enters its fortieth year of publication. It was launched, under the editorship of Peter Jarvis and J.E. (Teddy) Thomas, in a different era. We are now embarking on a two-year project to mark the completion of this anniversary, and to launch us into our fifth decade. The project involves looking back and peering forward. It comprises two main elements, the outcomes of which will, we …
Adult education, mental health and mental wellbeing
Engaging or continuing to engage with formal education in adulthood has long been seen as being beneficial to learners in a number of ways (Field, 2009; Schuller, Preston, Hammond, BassettGrundy, & Bynner, 2004). These include the obvious social ones – classes are good ways to meet others with similar interests – and economic benefits including enhanced knowledge, skills general employability are often cited as being important too – the encourage…
Lifelong learning for quality education
The sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the leaders of the United Nations member states at the 70th session of the UN General assembly in September 2015, set out an agenda for global transformation. These SDGs, known as global goals, build on the strategy set by the millennium development goals (MDGs) to end all forms of poverty and focus even further on inequalities and climate change. In contrast to the MDGs, SDGs have been designed…
Adult and lifelong education
The contributions published in this special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education draw from an international conference “Trans-nationalization of Educational Policy Making: Implications for Adult and Lifelong Learning”, held in Nottingham on 10-12 February 2012. The conference was organised by the Research Network on Policy Studies on Adult Education, established under the auspices of the European Society for the Research on the Educati…
Lifelong learning and higher education in Europe 1995–2011
This introductory paper sets out the central themes and main argument of papers within this special issue, which focuses on the contribution of higher education to the European Union’s agenda on lifelong learning. The focus on lifelong learning in Europe coincided with the resurgence of capitalism in post-socialist European states in eastern and central Europe and the rapid enlargement of the EU in the mid-1990s. This period of European expansion…
The Mooc phenomenon
Aligning skills and lifelong learning for human-centred sustainable development
Educational research in authoritarian times
Across the world, political winds are filling authoritarian sails. From China to Hungary, Brazil to Poland, Turkey to Egypt, Russia to the USA, ‘strong leaders’ hold the helm. Democratic institutions creak or crack. Elections are ‘managed’, postponed, abolished; voters are suborned by ‘fake news’; opposition is harassed, banned, branded treasonous or terroristic. Checks and balances on executive power are ignored or derided; leaders’ terms of off…
An inseparable aspect of citizenship”
This year we mark a major adult education centenary: the publication, in November 1919, of the Final Report of the British Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee. This was a landmark in our field – probably the first major official report on adult education in any country to be based on serious empirical research. More important, perhaps, it set out a strong political case for a broad – lifelong and lifewide – adult education curr…
Economic theory, neoliberalism and the interests of educators
Critical commentary on education policy frequently resorts to the term ‘neoliberal’ to describe the influence of economic theory on the way we understand, measure and reform practices and institutions. This influence reaches a wide range of activities funded by governments such as health care, welfare, and public services in general. The appeal of economic theory to policymakers can be readily appreciated. As Edwards (2007) explains, governments …
Local and global in the formation of a learning theorist
Peter Jarvis is a towering figure in the study of adult and lifelong education and a leading and original theorist of learning. This paper sets out his intellectual and professional biography, maps the main contours of his work and introduces fourteen papers by leading scholars devoted to his work. Five broad phases in Jarvis’ life are identified: (a) youth, self-education, Methodist ministry and early teaching and research; (b) founding of the I…
Societal sustainability
Neo-liberalism and the shifting discourse of ‘educational fairness’
The lost honour of the Social Dimension
In important respects, European ideas of the university have spread across the world. The principal ‘philosophical’ statements on which this idea of the university is based (Humboldt and Newman) assumed the people inhabiting universities—as students—would come from the youth of a social elite. The outward-facing elements of the Bologna Process, and the European Higher Education Area, aiming mainly at promoting higher education as an export busine…
Why do adults learn? Developing a motivational typology across 12 European countries
Participation in adult education is today generally considered an individual responsibility. However, participation is the result of a complex bounded agency between individuals, educational institutions and regulating governments. This paper explores the motives of 12,000 European adult learners in formal adult education in 12 European countries. Analysis shows consistent patterns comparable to welfare state typologies. Further exploration demon…
Mass education and community development in the British colonies, 1940‐1960
(1988). Mass education and community development in the British colonies, 1940‐1960: A study in the politics of community education. International Journal of Lifelong Education: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 163-183
Conflict and Class. Scottish Workers 1700-1838
Reshaping Labour
The role of lifelong learning in building citizenship
This article considers European Union measures to strengthen ‘citizenship’ through the use of lifelong learning in the light of two twentieth‐century British initiatives. European citizenship is discussed, and current EU initiatives to harness lifelong learning to the development of citizenship are briefly outlined. Aspects of British and colonial experienced are then explored. The particular cases studied are: attempts to develop enhanced citize…
Perspectives on the field
Effectiveness, inequality and ethos in three English schools
Purpose This paper aims to explore the nature of effective schools serving socially disadvantaged communities, and to point to an overlooked feature in the literature on school effectiveness in relation to social inclusion. Design/methodology/approach As part of a trans‐European project, three English schools are investigated. A qualitative case study approach is utilised. The schools selected have high proportions of ethnic minority students wit…
Peter Jarvis and 30 years of the International Journal of Lifelong Education
As we near the end of the International Journal of Lifelong Education’s thirtieth volume, we offer an unusual editorial. We—two of the journal’s present editors—wish to recognise the contribution m
Why do adults learn? Developing a motivational typology across 12 European countries
Participation in adult education is today generally considered an individual responsibility. However, participation is the result of a complex bounded agency between individuals, educational institutions and regulating governments. This paper explores the motives of 12,000 European adult learners in formal adult education in 12 European countries. Analysis shows consistent patterns comparable to welfare state typologies. Further exploration demon…
Europeanizing Education
by Martin Lawn and Sotiria Grek (Symposium Books, Didcot, UK, 2012), 173 pp., £24.00/US$48.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-873927-61-8. This is a small but important book. The study of education policy at the
Exploration, discovery, learning
We were upon a Coast where every step was to be considered, where no information was to be had from Maps, either modern or ancient; confiding too much in the former we were frequently misled to our
A History of the University of Hong Kong
Adult Education Policy and the European Union
The European Union is now a key player in making lifelong learning and adult education policy: this is the first book to explore a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives researchers can use to investigate its role. Readership: Educational Researchers and their students
Skills assessment, Piaac and the adult literacy agenda
Adult and lifelong education
The contributions published in this special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education draw from an international conference “Trans-nationalization of Educational Policy Making: Implications for Adult and Lifelong Learning”, held in Nottingham on 10-12 February 2012. The conference was organised by the Research Network on Policy Studies on Adult Education, established under the auspices of the European Society for the Research on the Educati…
Adult and lifelong education
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn HolfordJohn Holford is Robert Peers professor of Adult Education at the University of Nottingham, UK.Marcella MilanaMarcella Milana is associate professor at Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and president of the Nordic Comparative and International Education Society.Vida Mohorčič ŠpolarVida Mohorčič Špolar is adjunct professor…
The great university gamble
In this book, Andrew McGettigan makes a powerful and well-informed contribution to understanding what is happening to higher education in England. For many readers of this journal, this may seem a
Lifelong learning and higher education in Europe 1995–2011
This introductory paper sets out the central themes and main argument of papers within this special issue, which focuses on the contribution of higher education to the European Union’s agenda on lifelong learning. The focus on lifelong learning in Europe coincided with the resurgence of capitalism in post-socialist European states in eastern and central Europe and the rapid enlargement of the EU in the mid-1990s. This period of European expansion…
Lifelong education and transnational migration
Lifelong learning has failed to integrate cultural difference and diversity into educational environments. Rather than facilitating immigrant adaptation, lifelong learning has been a vehicle for as
The Mooc phenomenon
The lost honour of the Social Dimension
In important respects, European ideas of the university have spread across the world. The principal ‘philosophical’ statements on which this idea of the university is based (Humboldt and Newman) assumed the people inhabiting universities—as students—would come from the youth of a social elite. The outward-facing elements of the Bologna Process, and the European Higher Education Area, aiming mainly at promoting higher education as an export busine…
Widening participation, social mobility and the role of universities in a globalized world
A university education has long been seen as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds in countries the world over, and a well-educated working pop
Adult Education and Lifelong Learning in Postcommunist Countries
I've changed this because the phase
Journal listing and rating
Do we know enough about learning? Can we learn without knowing it
Many years ago Polanyi (1967) claimed that ‘I know more than I can tell’. Of course he was right, but the question remains: How do we learn those things that we cannot tell? Even, does the fact tha
Global policy agencies and visions for twenty-first century lifelong education
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has recently published a vision for education for the twenty-first century Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Commo
Sociology (61 works) · Political science (47 works) · Pedagogy (45 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (37 works) · Adult education (32 works) · Lifelong learning (29 works) · Law (19 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Economic growth (16 works)