ABSTRACT
Until 1996 I was the founding Director of the Council for Industry and Higher Education. The Council is a body of some forty leaders of large companies, universities and colleges. Its job has been to mark out common ground between academic and business people, and be a joint ‘strategic’ voice to government, education and employers. Although, as its name implies it was originally grounded in higher education, as it has systematically considered the interrelationships between education and employment, it has come to realize that it had defined itself too narrowly (Smithers and Robinson, 1993). Accordingly, while retaining its established acronym, it has widened and strengthened its membership to include, among others, further education college principals. Choosing carefully from the education lexicon, it now takes as its remit ‘post-18 education’.
