ABSTRACT
In a formal education context, success has traditionally been taken to mean the satisfactory completion of a course of study or the passing of an exam or test. Course completion rates and pass rates have provided simple and easily understood measures of providers’ success in retaining and in educating or training students to a specific standard. Students and trainees, having been given the opportunity to show that they could reach the standards set for them, either measured up to those standards by passing the appropriate exams, or by serving the appropriate period of training, or they were classified as having failed. The very limiting effects of this view of success in relation to the training and education of adults were for many years unrecognised. For a variety of reasons, this situation is now changing. The economic and political contexts within which formal education and training operate have been radically altered. At the same time, our knowledge and understanding of the participation of adults in learning have altered dramatically.
