ABSTRACT
It is not easy to think of another decade in the twentieth century which has been so crammed with initiatives about education and training. Not even in the nineteenth century when education reform ran through the progressive establishment of a national education system to revisions and reform at university level with all the accompanying tensions between religious and secular provision, has there been such frantic activity. For further education there was the removal from local government control of a large slice of funding which was transferred to TEED and used on a contract basis to try and force the speed of change in further education to meet the increasingly felt needs for sharply focused ways of improving the skills of the workforce. During the decade as the Manpower Services Commission became first the Training Commission, then the Training Agency and then the Training Enterprise and Education Directorate of the Department of Employment.
