Behaviours that pose challenges to adult educators can impact on a learner’s capacity to engage. Developing relationships that lead to positive outcomes, can form the basis for helping adults learn how to learn. In order for adult educators to create safe learning environments, it is necessary to understand what motivates these challenging behaviours. If we understand these causes, we can better meet the needs of all students.

For practitioners and researchers in the field of adult education in the UK it seems we are operating in the ruins of a once well recognised and funded terrain. Over the past two decades, the closure of Centres of Lifelong Learning in universities predominately across England and Wales; the eradication of funding and adult education programmes in FE; and the closure of local government provision has resulted in what feels like the extinction of adult education.