A district that looks fine on paper
South Kesteven looks, at first glance, like a district that has education sorted. It ranks second-best in Lincolnshire for skills and training deprivation, sits comfortably in the top 30% least deprived districts in England by that measure, and can point to a working-age population where more than four in five adults hold at least a Level 2 qualification. The headline figures suggest a place getting on with things.
Look a little further and a different picture emerges. By 2024, 27.9% of South Kesteven residents aged 16 to 64 were economically inactive — a rate above the national average, representing an estimated 22,400 people. Long-term ill health is the dominant reason. Higher-level qualifications, meanwhile, have historically been described as 'poor' in the district's own economic strategy documents, a quiet admission that aggregate scores can mask a long-standing deficit. Skilled workers who do reach graduate level tend to out-commute toward Peterborough or Nottinghamshire rather than find work locally, which means the district trains people it then loses. Across a largely rural 365 square miles, the question of who actually gets to keep learning after school — and how — is less straightforward than the rankings imply. So what does exist for people in South Kesteven who want, or need, to carry on?
The three strands of adult learning
Three distinct strands make up what currently exists for adults wanting to learn in South Kesteven. The first is the further education colleges: Grantham College and Stamford College, both part of the Inspire Education Group, offer full and part-time vocational courses, adult education programmes, Access to Higher Education diplomas, and routes to Level 4 and above. For anyone seeking a structured qualification, these are the main destinations.
The second strand is the 2aspire Lincolnshire Adult Skills and Family Learning Service, which takes a deliberately different approach. Rather than requiring learners to travel to a campus, 2aspire delivers community-based courses through schools, children's centres, and community halls spread across the county. In a district where the nearest college may be many miles away and public transport is unreliable, that kind of distributed delivery is not a logistical nicety — it is what makes participation possible for many residents. The network also runs Skills Bootcamps of at least 60 hours, aligned to employer needs, alongside ESOL classes and careers guidance drop-ins run in partnership with Lincolnshire County Council.
The third strand is the library network: 15 core staffed sites and 34 community hub libraries, operated by GLL (also known as Better), plus mobile services reaching rural villages, care homes, and housebound residents. Libraries rarely feature in discussions of adult skills policy, yet across a predominantly rural district their geographic reach makes them an infrastructure asset in their own right.
What libraries actually do for adult learners
The threshold for walking into a library is about as low as any public institution gets: no application form, no prior qualification, no enrolment interview. That structural openness is worth naming, because it is not something a college can replicate by adjusting its marketing.
In practical terms, Lincolnshire's libraries offer several distinct learning functions. Digital skills drop-ins and 'IT Buddies' peer-support sessions help residents who lack confidence online — the kind of one-to-one, unhurried help that a workshop format rarely delivers. The 'Learn My Way' digital literacy programme runs alongside these, providing a structured but self-paced route for people building basic digital competence from scratch. English conversation groups serve residents for whom English is an additional language, while careers guidance drop-ins — run in partnership with 2aspire — mean libraries become a point of connection to the wider skills system rather than an isolated resource.
Beyond digital access, the Books on Prescription scheme allows health professionals to refer patients with anxiety, depression, or eating disorders to self-help reading, linking the library network to mental health support pathways. Mobile routes reach villages and rural communities; the community mobile library delivers directly to care homes and sheltered housing; and a volunteer-run home delivery service means housebound residents are not simply written off.
District-level participation figures for library learning in South Kesteven are not published, so it is not possible to say how many residents use these routes or how outcomes compare to college-based provision. What the evidence does support is the observation: for people who would not, or cannot, walk into a college, the library may be the only open door.
Who actually gets the training
There is a well-documented pattern in how further training is distributed: the people most likely to receive it are those who already have it. Employer-funded learning tends to flow to workers who already hold qualifications, are in stable employment, and are — not incidentally — the easiest for HR departments to put forward. Public sector workers access workplace learning at higher rates than their private sector counterparts. And the funded routes that might theoretically reach anyone — Skills Bootcamps, for instance — require a level of confidence with applications, eligibility rules, and online enrolment that already-qualified adults navigate far more comfortably than those with no formal learning since school.
The Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority's own Adult Skills Fund strategic plan states its purpose plainly: to support residents with no qualifications or low qualifications. That framing is significant. It is not the language of a system working well and seeking to do more — it is an implicit admission that existing provision flows have not reached the people who most need them.
The brain drain compounds this. When publicly subsidised training does succeed in raising someone's skills to graduate level, there is a reasonable chance those skills depart the district entirely. Grantham's economy — concentrated in manufacturing, retail, and health — offers limited graduate-level employment, so the public investment in upskilling effectively subsidises the workforce of Peterborough or Nottinghamshire. The local tax base and skills ecosystem see little return.
The people the system doesn't reach
Long-term ill health is the dominant reason people of working age in South Kesteven are not in work — and it is the factor formal adult skills provision is least equipped to address. Skills Bootcamps, vocational qualifications, and employer-negotiated funded places all assume an employment pathway: a job to move toward, or an employer willing to co-invest. A person managing a chronic condition fits none of those frameworks. The district's roughly 22,400 economically inactive residents are not a monolith, but this subset is largely absent from the skills data that drives provision planning, with no obvious route in.
Geography compounds the exclusion for those outside Grantham's main centres. The barriers are worth naming individually rather than collapsing into 'disadvantage': poor public transport across a 365-square-mile district; weak broadband in dispersed villages; device poverty; absent local childcare; and the opportunity cost of unpaid learning hours that cannot be spent on a second job or caring responsibilities. Free tuition does not remove that last barrier.
Concentration matters within the district too. Earlesfield and Harrowby — specific wards in Grantham — show higher deprivation, lower qualifications, and higher inactivity than the district average, pointing to a localised urban problem that aggregate statistics smooth away.
The national trajectory tightens the picture. Participation in regulated essential skills qualifications fell 11.9% between 2021/22 and 2024/25, contracting precisely the provision people with the lowest qualifications would rely on. It is into this compressed landscape that the devolved Greater Lincolnshire Adult Skills Fund arrives — carrying, at least on paper, an explicit mandate to redirect investment toward those least served.
What devolution changes — and what it doesn't
Devolution of the Adult Skills Fund to the Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority — supplemented by an additional £2.2m announced in February 2025 — does represent a genuine structural shift. Local control over priorities means, in principle, that what gets funded can be aligned more deliberately with what the local evidence shows: the populations least served, the geographies hardest to reach, the qualification levels most in need of investment. The fund's stated aim of targeting those with no or low qualifications is exactly the right direction of travel.
But stated intent and programme outcomes are different things, and the evidence on whether this reorientation is working will not be available for some time. Tracking progress is made harder still by a structural discontinuity introduced in 2024/25: Community Learning was reclassified as 'tailored learning', creating a break in the data series that makes before-and-after comparison genuinely difficult. Anyone trying to assess whether the new fund reaches different people than the old system did will be working with incompatible figures. That is worth naming plainly, not as a criticism of the reclassification, but because it means honest uncertainty is the only responsible position at this stage.
Funding reform also leaves the most stubborn barriers untouched. Transport gaps, weak rural broadband, device poverty, and absent childcare sit entirely outside the Adult Skills Fund's scope. No course allocation resolves those. This is where the library and community venue network matters most: it is already in place, already accessible without an enrolment process, and already embedded in the neighbourhoods where the need is concentrated. Sustaining those venues — their staffing, their opening hours, their digital infrastructure — is not a course-funding question. It is a resourcing question of a different kind, and the answer to it will shape whether the most accessible routes to learning remain open.
- [1] South Kesteven. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=426477 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=426477