Professor John Field, expert scholar, lifelong educator, advocate, internationalist and policy adviser, died 25^th March 2024

John Field, the charismatic and distinguished scholar, policy adviser and internationalist born on 6 July 1949, died suddenly aged 74 on 25 April 2024. At the time of his death, he was, ten years after retirement, active as Emeritus Professor at Stirling University, Honorary Professor at Warwick University, Visiting Professor at Birkbeck and Wolverhampton Universities, Education adviser to UNESCO’s Institute of Lifelong Learning, and to the Deutsches Institut fur Erwachsenenbildung. He was, too, a valued editorial adviser to the International Journal of Lifelong Learning. John was recognised widely as one of the outstanding contributors to the development of adult learning and education of his generation, and he combined serious intellectual rigour with great personal warmth, curiosity and a capacity to make complex ideas accessible.

John Field’s sudden and untimely death is a major loss to the adult learning movement and, for me, the loss of a dear

colleague and friend. John was a distinguished academic and adult educator who made a very significant contribution to scholarship through his own writing and collaborations and through tireless work in supporting the development of the field, inside and outside universities. John had a significant impact on policy advocacy to government in the UK and internationally. As a teacher, mentor, supervisor, examiner, or evaluator, he consistently brought the happy combination of serious intellectual rigour alongside the ability to give confidence and agency to others. John was fired by a strong sense of social justice, and a commitment to international solidarity. He brought warmth, generosity, and curiosity to his dealings with everyone – sometimes playing the contrarian when worried that too easy a consensus risked ignoring important, if inconvenient evidence – but always looking for ways to take things forward constructively. As the flood of tributes on social media following his death testify, John was widely loved and respected by adult education academics and practitioners in the countries of the UK and across the world.

I first met John at the time of the Miners’ Strike in Britain in 1984 as we sought strategies to re-energise the role of adult education in making a practical difference in the lives of working-class men and women and others marginalised by our education system. I was lucky to collaborate with him for the next forty years. When we first met, he worked as a tutor at Northern College, which was created in the 1970s as a Ruskin College of the North offering short- and long-term residential learning opportunities for adults. His teaching drew on his initial degree in history and his doctoral studies in economic and social history, but also on the creativity of the History Workshop movement, with its focus on the voices and experiences of people excluded from conventional mainstream history.

In 1985, John moved from Northern College to Warwick University, and from further to higher education, to join the newly created Department of Continuing Education with Chris Duke and Tom Schuller. His commitment to further and, in particular, residential education continued throughout his career, including time at the governing body of Newbattle Abbey in Scotland, reviewing the work of short term and largely independent residential colleges, and advising the Residential Colleges Association of long-term colleges.

John’s career progressed impressively. He left Warwick for Bradford where he was appointed Director of Continuing Education. In 1994, he became a Professor of Continuing Education at Ulster University, and in 1998, he was the first person to be appointed Professor of Lifelong Learning in the UK on his return to Warwick. John’s final move was to the University of Stirling in 2002, where, in addition to being a Professor of Lifelong Learning, he served six years as Deputy Principal (Research and Knowledge Transfer).

My collaborative work with John began in earnest when I joined the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) in 1988 and continued until his untimely death. John had the skill to make complex ideas accessible, and the motivation to ensure that practitioners had access to the cutting edge of academic research on adult learning. To that end, he played a very active role in the work of NIACE, writing regularly for its key journal Adults Learning, evaluating its major government-funded REPLAN programme for unemployed adults, advising on strategy, and chairing the policy study group that produced Learning for the future: adult education and the environment (Field, 1993). Long before the Sustainable Development Goals, John recognised the life-wide dimensions of adult learning.

John’s twin-track approach to his work – producing an impressive range of research across the lifelong learning policy landscape, as well as ensuring the effective dissemination of his own work and that of his peers, was by no means limited to his links with NIACE. In the voluntary sector, he chaired Scotland’s Learning Partnership for much of the last decade. In the wider work of higher education, he took office with the Universities Association for Adult Continuing Education, was a founding member of the European Society for Research and Scholarship in the Education of Adults (ESREA), led the Continuing Education Sub-Panel, as well as being a member of the full Education Panel of the 2003 UK Research Assessment Exercise, and was deputy chair of the 2008 Panel. He shared this experience internationally advising universities in Finland, Hong Kong, Botswana, and Australia on research quality in lifelong learning.

John also contributed actively to shaping national and international policies. Notably, he served as a member of the Fryer committee advising the UK Labour government on its lifelong learning policy 1997–2001. Ten years later, John was a key member of the independent National Commission of Inquiry into Lifelong Learning. In 2007–8, he was seconded to the UK Government Office of Science Foresight Project on Mental Capital and Well-Being and again advised the 2016–17 Foresight Project in Lifelong Learning and Skills in the UK. John undertook work internationally for the EU and the OECD and was one of the key authors of UNESCO’s Fourth Global Report on Adult Learning and Education, as well as acting as a critical friend on other editions.

John’s internationalism was not limited to his advice to international agencies. He worked actively after the fall of the Berlin Wall to strengthen dialogue with scholars working in the former Soviet Bloc countries. He had a strong continuing relationship as a visiting professorial fellow at the University of Köln. He partnered with colleagues across Europe, examined doctorates across the English-speaking world, and served on the editorial advisory boards of international journals, including this one. He wrote and published in German, was fluent in French, and read Italian and Spanish competently.

However, the heart of John’s international reputation as a scholar came from his impressive research and publications record. Apart from the 17 books he authored or edited, there were around a hundred refereed journal articles, and another hundred chapters in books. But on top of that, John was responsible for a myriad of pamphlets, reports and articles aimed at practitioners outside the academy, evaluations of major research programmes and university departments. After he formally retired his entertaining and incisive blog, the learning professor, roamed across a wide range of lifelong learning concerns.

John’s research interests encompassed the breadth of social and economic contexts of adult learning, policy in lifelong learning, and the history of adult education and training. To them, he brought the analytical skills of a historian and social scientist, scrupulous in testing evidence, and the fresh perspective of an innovative thinker. John’s first book, Learning through Labour: training, unemployment and the state, 1890–1939, looked at training and unemployment policy and practice in the UK in the period from 1890 to the outbreak of the Second World War (Field, 1992).

Lifelong learning and the new educational order (Field, 2000) had a significant impact and was very widely cited. It sets lifelong learning in the rapidly changing policy context across industrialised countries and the growing recognition among policymakers of the importance of investing in human capital. John cast a valuable, searching, and sceptical eye on the likely success of existing strategies in achieving governments’ ambitious goals to upskill large swathes of their population.

John worked on social capital over several years, and in Social Capital (Field, 2003), provided the standard text, explaining the theoretical underpinning of the debates, deriving from the work of Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam, on how best to capture the intangible resources in shared values, trust and a sense of community, and the empirical work done to explore its operation. Three revised editions were produced, and the book was translated into Turkish and Italian. John went on to write and co-write two further books on social capital and lifelong learning.

His later publications were shaped in part by the major collaborative, funded projects on mental capital and well-being; work, ageing and society; and on an exploration of how adults do or might use learning opportunities at different stages of the life course. In 2013, John returned to an earlier concern with unemployment and public policy with Working men’s bodies: work camps in Britain 1880–1939 (Field, 2013).

John’s work on informal learning drew on the range of his curiosity. I remember a presentation he made in the early 1990s on the learning happening in The Lincolnshire Bat Observation Society. He was an early advocate for the work of Men’s Sheds, and of many of the local community initiatives developed despite the paucity of public support. John looked beyond the boundaries of structured learning to see what motivated and inspired adults to invent their own strategies to learn effectively. It was an approach that made his blog such an entertaining and illuminating read. More than that, it was what made the time spent with John so richly rewarding.

Overall, John Field’s contribution to adult learning and education has been immense both in the quality of the research and the generosity of spirit with which it was done. This contribution was recognised in 2006, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University, and again when he was inducted into the International Hall of Fame of Adult and Continuing Education in 2014. To the end of his life, he was an Emeritus Professor at Stirling and visiting professor at Köln, Warwick, Birkbeck and Wolverhampton. He leaves behind a rich range of sholarship and will be widely missed by all who pursue the cause of social justice through adult learning and education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).