ABSTRACT
This chapter turns the focus on to contemporary policy discourses of lifelong learning in the UK, and examines constructions of the lifelong learner in this context. Lifelong learning has been a key theme for the new Labour government since its election in 1997, but a commitment to adult, and lifelong, education has a much longer history. In 1919, the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction insisted that:
Adult education must not be regarded as a luxury for a few exceptional persons here and there, nor as a thing which concerns only a short span of early adulthood, but it is a permanent national necessity, an inseparable aspect of citizenship, and therefore should be both universal and lifelong.
