Singing superstar Adele caused a flurry of interest recently when she admitted she has dreams of studying for a distance-learning degree in English Literature when her Las Vegas residency show ends.
Her comments fell in the run up to Lifelong Learning Week, which runs from today, 7 November, and is designed to celebrate and champion adult learners and adult learning providers.
If Adele took part in studying at the OU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) she would add to the current 36 per cent of students in the same age bracket of between 25-34 years old – the biggest age group on the student roll.
The OU has a total of more than 205,000 students. Latest figures put the total number of students within FASS at almost 67,000, studying 38 different qualifications over a variety of subjects in three areas Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences and Global Studies and Psychology and Counselling.
Sir Lenny Henry, comedian, actor… and former OU student
One well-known Open University adult learner is Sir Lenny Henry, an English Literature OU alumn, who started his OU degree in 2009 and caught the learning bug.
It led him onto a Masters degree in screenwriting. When the OU celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019 he admitted his degree “still wasn’t enough” so he wrote a PhD thesis and said:
“If anyone had told me ‘you are going to be doing a PhD in your late fifties’ I’d have said ‘get lost’ because I didn’t have the educational infrastructure. It’s no exaggeration to say the OU changed my life.”
His stage acting debut playing Othello followed and he said:
“I would never have done it if I hadn’t done my degree.”
He added:
“I don’t do stand-up anymore, I do more acting now and I think that’s one of the things The Open University did, it made me engage with text more, read more plays, think more about drama and working with other people, rather than being on my own all the time.”
Message to Adele
Dr Richard Marsden, faculty lead at the Open College of the Arts at the OU, said:
“We had over a thousand students graduating on our single and joint honours English lit qualifications this year. Adele would be a very welcome addition should she choose to join us.
“The beauty of distance learning is that you can learn wherever you are in the world – and for Adele that could mean on a tour bus or while she waits outside the school gates to pick up her son.
“The majority of our students won’t have her fame but the flexible, supported learning that the OU offers to students is ideal for parents, carers and those that are already in a job.”
Since the OU was created in 1969, 2.2 million people have studied with us and we are a global organisation with students abroad now numbering almost 9,000.
- For anyone who would like to access free courses visit our OpenLearn platform and discover more about how free learning has helped others with their lifelong learning with our OpenLearn learner stories.
- See the OU’s Business School’s dedicated page of resources for Lifelong Learning Week, and inspirational stories like those of Celia Morris. She is an OU MBA graduate who says her studies changed her life. She was from a low-income, working-class background and by 30, was homeless, a single parent, unemployed, and suffering from depression. At 41, she joined the OU to study.
- From teenagers to pensioners, see Marnie and Martin’s stories for more inspiration within the Faculty for Arts and Social Sciences.
Picture credit: Fred Duval for Shutterstock
