We all learn throughout our lives. We learn in schools, colleges and universities. But we also learn from everyday experience – watching others, asking questions, seeking knowledge, solving problems, experiencing failures as well as successes.

Humans learn in order to accomplish purposes that are important to us. We learn whether we intend to or not, and we do not always recognise that we are learning. Socialisation into communities and groups is learning, though often unconscious.

And we can all learn from our experiences, whatever our educational achievements or learning disabilities. And wherever those experiences might be, in the home or in education, in paid or voluntary work, in hospital or in prison, in pastimes and in facing life’s challenges: all has value.

Learning from experience is more than just the experience. We work to make sense of experience, to interpret and extract its meaning, to increase our understanding, knowledge and skills.

When we started we were up against that great principle of the academic establishment, ‘what can not be examined is of no account’… We had to help people to think through just what they had learnt, to put it in some sort of order, to identify the gaps which needed to be filled, and to find ways of telling other people about it in a convincing way”. Sir Charles Carter in ‘We live and learn: the work of the Learning from Experience Trust, 1999’