WEA Scotland organises its education provision and seeks to identify its impacts through four key themes. These are Employability, Health and Well Being [including mental health], Community Engagement [including volunteering] and History Culture and the Arts. These themes are all equally important and represent some of the fundamental needs of people living in Britain’s diverse communities.

Each theme provides a context in which the WEA offers its varied and wide curriculum. In practice, each WEA course will use one theme as a primary context but may also have a secondary theme where contexts overlap. These WEA themes are quite deliberately not one dimensional. Instead they provide a context for adult learning in a range of contexts and where the learning will take place in a variety of different ways according to the needs of the learner.

The Statement of Ambition for Adult Learning says that adult learning should be informed by three core principles. It should be life long, it should be life wide and it should be learner centred built “ around the interests and motives of the learner and seek to fulfil the purposes of goals he or she sees as relevant and important” This may mean that the same WEA course will be shaped quite differently between one learner group and another and as a result, WEA provision may cross more than one WEA theme

The WEA Strategy 2025: Empowering People Through Learning, outlines how the use of our WEA themes and our approach to adult learning means we make an impact across and for the people of Scotland. At the individual level, we take learning into communities and provide learning opportunities that enable learners to achieve their personal and professional ambitions. At the community level, we address skills gaps and shortages, improve health and wellbeing and develop better more confident resilient citizens and communities. At the societal level we address gaps in education, develop skills for the workforce, reduce inequalities, improve life chances and in doing so, enable communities to flourish.

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