ABSTRACT
Summary: Far-reaching post-war changes in industry and commerce and employment generally under the impact of science and technology, together with changes favouring a more egalitarian society, have engendered changes in education and training, and sharpened demands for increasing educational opportunities. A proposal for a ‘University of the Air’ in 1966 led the government to establish in 1967 a Planning Committee ‘to work out a comprehensive plan for an Open University’. A Royal Charter was granted in 1969 which laid down several objectives. The first was ‘to provide education of university standard through the advancement and dissemination of learning and knowledge by teaching and research by a diversity of means …’, and this was successfully under way by 1974. The remaining objectives included ‘the provision of education to professional standards, and the promotion of the educational well-being of the community generally: and these too by a diversity of means including broadcasting, correspondence tuition, residential courses and seminars’. Initial difficulties with establishing professional post-experience courses pointed strongly to the consideration of new developments in a much wider context and, in 1974, the Open University established a Committee on Continuing Education, which published its report in December 1976. In the national context new developments included the government-financed Adult Literacy Resource Agency (ALRA), and the BBC's programmes ‘On the Move’. The OU report emphasized the necessity of a greatly increased scale of co-operation between established institutions and agencies. This article discusses the report and its main recommendations, records steps forward taken since the report and considers some aspects of future developments.
