ABSTRACT

Flexibility and lifelong learning are extensively represented as necessary truths – as necessary features of post-compulsory education systems and societies within contemporary policy rationales. They are constituted within policy, in part, through their resonance within broader societal discourses. Those who might be identified as post-compulsory education policy analysts, education policy sociologists, and post-compulsory education analysts and practitioners, variously take an interest in the themes of lifelong learning and flexibility and explore and produce multiple discourses and meanings of them. Their broad focus is to produce knowledge – further or alternative truths – which can either inform policies or practices of education, or describe or critique these.