The Learning and Skills Development Agency (LSDA) was a publicly funded body in the United Kingdom that supported further education in England. At the end of March 2006 its functions were divided into the Quality Improvement Agency (QIA) and the Learning and Skills Network (LSN) and its trading subsidiary, Inspire Learning, better known by its brand name the Centre for Excellence in Leadership was spun-out. Inspire Leadership and QIA were re-absorbed into the same corporate entity, the Learning and Skills Improvement Service on 1 October 2008.
Before November 2000 it was known as the Further Education Development Agency (FEDA). FEDA was established in 1995 to support the further education community in England, as a result of a merger between the Further Education Unit and the Staff College.
The role of the LSDA was to support post-16 education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (but not in Scotland, where there is a different organisational framework for education).
In Wales the organisation was known as Dysg. It was absorbed into the Welsh Assembly Government. LSDA Northern Ireland continues as a subsidiary company of LSN.
Famous quotes containing the words learning and, learning, skills, development and/or agency:
“Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behaviour, attire, grace, learning and all their words aimeth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“It is possible that the telephone has been responsible for more business inefficiency than any other agency except laudanum.... In the old days when you wanted to get in touch with a man you wrote a note, sprinkled it with sand, and gave it to a man on horseback. It probably was delivered within half an hour, depending on how big a lunch the horse had had. But in these busy days of rush-rush-rush, it is sometimes a week before you can catch your man on the telephone.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)