ABSTRACT
During 1997 and early 1998 the United Kingdom government received three commissioned advisory reports which are relevant to university continuing education and published a response to each. These were the Kennedy Report, Learning Works: Widening Participation in Further Education (Kennedy 1997), and its response Further Education for the New Millennium (Department for Education and Employment 1998a); the Dearing Report, Higher Education in the Learning Society (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education 1997), and its response Higher Education for the 21st Century (Department for Education and Employment 1998b); and the Report of the Fryer Committee, Learning for the Twenty-First Century (Fryer 1997), and its response in the form of a Green Paper, The Learning Age: A Renaissance for a New Britain (Department for Education and Employment 1998c). These six documents obviously contain a large amount of detail relevant here; space allows only a brief review.
