ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the major publications of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education (ACACE) in the light of alternative social policy models. The functional integration of adult education provision in a context of economic and social development links the ACACE idea of continuing education directly to the origins of all modern thinking about adult education in the social and political ideas of the nineteenth century. Some of the earliest publications of ACACE therefore dealt with the theme of integrating or assimilating adult learning to the education system and with elucidating the concept of continuing education, which continues to express the ideological dominance of the integration theme. ACACE advocated a distinction rather between 'initial' and 'post-initial' education as more fundamental than the administrative categories of 'compulsory' and 'non-compulsory' education, since after schooling much other 'initial' education takes place in a variety of forms.
