ABSTRACT
When this book was first written there was considerable concern and interest in getting adult educators trained and I discussed this within the framework of the professionalization of an occupation. However, there has been a vast change in adult education in the UK since then, as has become apparent from the way that the second edition of this book has had to be radically revised, and it is quite significant to note that the last paper on the training of adult educators to appear in Studies in the Education of Adults was that by Harrop and Woodcock in 1992 – which is only one year after we (Jarvis and Chadwick, 1991) conducted our study of the training of adult educators in Western Europe. Currently, however, there is a pan-European Grundtvig project seeking to establish an andragogy curriculum for adult educators, with a UK partner, but in many ways events in the UK have moved beyond this with the introduction of lifelong learning and yet, as the Dearing Report (1997) and the White Paper The Future of Higher Education (DfES, 2003) demonstrate, the issue of the professionalization of educators has not disappeared, and we shall return to it in the third section of this chapter.
