The Welsh Government’s new Programme for Government promises a tertiary education system that helps people of all ages move between learning, training and work throughout their lives. I welcome that ambition. The test is whether an adult who needs to start again, change direction or build on existing skills can find a way in.

The opportunity is substantial. The Learning and Work Institute’s survey of adults in Wales found that 59% of full-time employees had taken part in learning during the previous three years, compared with 28% of economically inactive adults. That includes informal and self-directed learning. Even on this broad measure, access is far from equal.

Wales now has a chance to change that. The Government plans a Skills Strategy informed by a national skills audit, with a Future Skills Summit to help shape reform. It is right to ask what skills employers will need. We must ask another question alongside it: who will have the opportunity to develop them?

At Adult Learning Wales, we see why both questions matter. We are Wales’s national further education provider of adult learning and skills. We work with communities, employers, trade unions and other organisations, reaching people where they live and work, as well as online. Some learners are returning after years away from education. Others are developing at work, preparing for a new role or working towards a qualification.

An audit can identify a skills gap. It may tell us less about the person who could fill it but cannot travel to a course, arrange childcare or fit learning around a shift. It may miss someone outside paid work who needs a welcoming first step before a qualification feels possible. Learners, tutors, community organisations and trade unions have evidence to contribute. Their voices belong in the conversation about future skills.

Our tutors and support staff, working with trusted partners, help people recognise what they can already do and build towards what comes next. That might mean greater independence today, and further study or a change in work later. Skills journeys do not always follow a straight line.

If Wales is serious about its economic ambitions, it must develop the talent it is currently overlooking. Adult learning providers are essential to that work. The new strategy must connect its picture of future jobs with practical routes into learning for adults at every stage of life.

Tertiary should mean tertiary for all.

Kathryn Robson, Chief Executive