Introduction
The Learning from Experience Trust has a vision of a society where all learning is recognised, valued and credited, irrespective of when, where, how or why it is acquired. The Trust pursues this by:

• Developing the concept of experiential learning and its assessment through research and development activities;
  
• Encouraging its recognition and use in education, training, industry, commerce and the voluntary, community and public sectors by disseminating good practice.

The Trust is especially regarded for its work in the areas of:

• Assessing and crediting prior learning (APL) and learning from experience (APEL);
  
• Increasing access to, and widening participation in, formal education;
  
• Meeting the learning needs of non-traditional learners and those who are, and feel, excluded from society;
  
• Helping people with disabilities to make the most of their abilities
  
• Developing institutional policies to increase participation in, and access to, education and work
  
• Creating inclusive learning environments and structuring learning experiences
  
• Using learning centres and ICT to facilitate remote learning and rural access
  
• Structuring and gaining credit from work-based learning
  
• Structuring and gaining credit from community involvement

The Trust’s approach is essentially practical, with a focus on problem solving and the dissemination of new ideas and good practice. It has a reputation for developing innovative approaches to the design of learning environments and removing the policy and organisational barriers to the recognition and crediting of all learning. Its story is one of widening horizons.

Before 1986
The Learning from Experience Trust grew out of collaboration from 1980 to 1986 between the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) and three other bodies: the Further Education Unit (FEU); the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) and the American Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL). PSI was the base. CAEL was the inspiration. The FEU and CNAA were the academic and financial conduits for action.

Policy Studies Institute
It all began in the UK in the autumn of 1979. Charles Carter agreed to hold a lunch time seminar at PSI when Richard Hoggart, then Warden of Goldsmiths College, and Morris Keeton, president of CAEL who came specially from the US, talked about adult learning, with Morris introducing the concept of the assessment of prior experiential learning.

Norman Evans, who joined PSI as a Senior Fellow, later becoming the Trust’s first Director and continuing as a Trustee, had recognised that there were valid and reliable ways of assessing adults’ non-formal learning and that, provided the knowledge and skills they had acquired met the necessary academic requirements, they ought to count towards qualifications. At CAEL this was called Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) but in the UK it came to be known as the Assessment of Prior and Experiential Learning (APEL).

In the early 1980s hardly anyone in the UK had heard of any such thing. There was no practice of it anywhere. Most academic were dismissive of it. Two reports, however, from the CNAA and the FEU established the basis for subsequent development of APEL.

Further Education Unit
Jack Mansell, the Chief Officer of the FEU, realised that APEL had potential for the changes in further education he was promoting. He commissioned Curriculum Opportunity, which was a survey of entry qualification for courses in further education, to investigate the possibilities for APEL. It was distributed to all further and higher education institutions and went through two editions.

Council for National Academic Awards
Edwin Kerr, Chief Executive of the CNAA and now a LET Trustee, had established the Development Unit within CNAA. It commissioned Access to higher education: non standard entry to CNAA first degree and DipHE courses, a survey of entry qualifications to CNAA awards.

CNAA’s Development Services then commissioned what became The Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning. This was a report of doing APEL for real in ten CNAA associated institutions covering most of the curriculum (Mathematics and Science were attempted later, but with less success). The report was, in effect, a handbook on how to conduct APEL.

Both publications went to all higher education institutions

The Wates Foundation funded the first formal course for APEL run jointly through Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and the then Thames Polytechnic (now Greenwich University) in 1982. It was called Making Experience Count and in time served as a reference point for others’ initiatives.

1986 to 1994– the first years of the Trust
After six years, it was clear that the exploration stage at PSI needed to be followed by a development programme. That was the purpose of the Learning from Experience Trust. Launching it in 1986 Sir Charles Carter, its first Chairman, said “we intend to be subversive, respectably subversive of course”.

At the same time, the CNAA’s Credit Accumulation and Transfer Registry (CATS) was established to enable students to transfer easily from one institution to another as well as providing stopping off points for those who wished to interrupt their studies. Its regulations stipulated the number of credits that were required for a degree. And taking a revolutionary step, it authorised the award of academic credit for APEL at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Through CNAA’s national academic standing, the Trust was able to establish that APEL was a valid and reliable academic procedure in higher education.

1994 to the present day
1993-1994 was Norman Evans’ last year as Director and since then there have been four Directors: Samantha Guise 1994-1998; Juliet Merrifield 1998-2000, and Malcolm Barry acting as Honorary Director until Michael Field took over in July 2001. Each has given their own different emphasis to the work of the Trust and its direction. In 1998, Peter Hobbs succeeded Sir Charles as Chairman.

The Trust has had a number of homes including Regents College, Buckingham Gate and, from 1994, the Anglia Polytechnic University: in 1998 it moved to Goldsmiths College, with offices in the former Deptford Town Hall. The Trust and the College set out to support the mission and aims of the other, and this arrangement has proved highly satisfactory to the Trust (and, we hope, to the College). A former Warden of the College, the late Professor Andrew Rutherford was a Trustee, Currently, Malcolm Barry, the College’s former Head of Professional and Community Education and Professor Nirmala Rao, Pro-Warden (Academic) at Goldsmiths are Trustees. Professor Sally Tomlinson, formerly of Goldsmiths, was also a Trustee.

A brief account of the Trust’s Activities to 1993 was published as a tribute to Sir Charles Carter on completion of seven years as the Trust’s first Chairman. Sadly in 2003 he died. As Chairman and Trustee he established the Trust’s vision and principles, and the Trust has attempted to abide by them. It seems fitting that this account of the Trust’s 20 years can stand as a memorial to him. He was a powerful promoter of the concept of APEL and had a central role in the life of the Trust. He made a unique contribution to the twenty four year story of attempts at both at the Policy Studies Institute and the Trust to deploy, evermore widely, the theory and practice of the assessment of prior and experiential learning. Recent involvement with Europe would delight him.

Current Activites
The Trust is one of the UK’s leading authorities on experiential learning and on informal and work-based learning. Over 20 years it has developed a range of techniques by which

• People and groups can reflect on, and learn from, life’s experiences and by which past learning can be recognised and awarded credit, and
  
• which help and enable individuals to identify their learning needs, to pursue their learning plans and to gain the confidence needed to change their lives through formal and informal education.

The Trust’s approach is essentially practical, with a focus on answering the different needs of individuals, in individual ways. It is also concerned with the dissemination of new ideas and good practice, having a reputation for developing innovative approaches to the design of learning environments and on ways of removing the policy and organisational barriers to the recognition and crediting of all learners.

The Trust has continued to develop new lines of enquiry whilst building on its previous work. As well as encouraging the use of APL and APEL in a wide range of circumstances it is working to capitalise on a number of its most successful projects. It is pressing for its work on helping people with disabilities to secure employment (Making Your Experience Count) to be seen as crucial in the drive to help people off disability benefits; its work on the training and accreditation of experiential learning of police officers and community officers can play a significant part in the fight against crime and disorder; and its involvement in the development of volunteers in trustee/governor roles is becoming even more relevant.

The Trust is developing five particular areas of expertise:

Employability Programmes

A programme has been devised to increase the job prospects of marginalised people (the rural unemployed, young people not in education, employment or training, over 50s needing to retrain or prolong their working life, etc), addressing their particular problems. Its equal opportunities approach develops self confidence and opens up realistic prospects of employment. The programme is based on individual learning plans tailored to the needs of people from all cultural groups, including those with disabilities. It accommodates different entry points, teaching styles and study modes, and pace and progression is governed by personal levels of initial motivation, ability and confidence.

The Experience Counts Process

This process has been developed by the Learning from Experience Trust to introduce a cost-effective and structured way to identify and demonstrate the learning that individuals have acquired through their experiences. The process is used to award credit against such criteria as a:

• specified framework of competence/standards
  
• study programme or syllabus and associated learning outcomes
  
• detailed job specification

This process can be used in a number of situations. It enables assessment of the abilities of people whose qualification is largely, or wholly, gained through experience: this is useful in enabling people to reflect on and understand what they have learned, to:

• enable them to secure recognition in their employment and to seek promotion
  
• gain professional status and institute membership appropriate to their position
  
• devise, with support, individual learning plans to augment and supplement that which they have gained through their experiences
  
• gain entry to further and higher education

Realising potential

The Bridge into Learning is a process in which the Trust can integrate the work of specialist agencies with its own expertise, in particular in the area of helping ex-offenders. The process will help people to turn away from crime by preparing them to pursue a rewarding life through study. It complements the drive for improved essential skills in prisons and amongst ex-offenders and those most at risk of offending by working with that smaller, but still significant, constituency of people who have the potential to benefit from further and higher education and advanced training. This builds on Action Learning in the Community (ALIC), a Trust project which concluded in 2003, and its successor, the Open Book project at Goldsmiths College.

The process is suitable for any group of people who have not been able to achieve their full educational potential.

The Arts

The trust has identified the arts as an area where its expertise can be applied to great effect by working with young people who have a commitment to the arts but who have become disenchanted with the educational system. By working with specialist non-for-profit arts groups, the Trust can develop capacity in helping people to recognise what they have learned, gain credit for that learning and appreciate the value of formal and informal learning in pursuing their passion for the arts.

Europe

The Trust is deploying its expertise in professional staff development for APEL in two ways in the European Union to encourage a systematic, strategic approach to developing APEL. A pilot version of the Scholar Exchange/Study Tour programme will test its viability as an instrument to promote staff and institutional development. The Trust helped to develop a proposal for a book to put APEL in the public academic domaine of the EU. Norman Evans, the Trust’s first Director and currently a Trustee, co-edited Recognising Experiential Learning: practices in European Countries, for which Malcolm Barry (Trustee) and he wrote chapters