from social and community life by virtue of their disadvantage and urged increased collaboration between adult educators and health, welfare, housing and social services in meeting the learning needs of all adults disadvantaged by ‘personal capacity’ or social or educational ‘disadvantage’, whether through general programmes or separate and special provision.


Although adult education remained marginal to government policymaking, and would be so for some years to come, providers and adult educators responded to the Russell Committee’s challenge to provide a service which met the needs of the whole community by taking account of difference. The report gave a boost to the work of social purpose adult educators, while its stress on the needs of specific groups of disadvantaged adults was developed in different, often unanticipated, ways through the work of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education (ACACE), the Unit for the Development of Adult Continuing Education (UDACE) and REPLAN, a programme to develop educational opportunities for unemployed adults.


ACACE was set up by Labour Secretary of State Shirley Williams, somewhat belatedly on the recommendation of the Russell Committee, in 1977. With an annual budget of £50,000, it shared the National Institute of Adult Education’s offices in Leicester, an arrangement which enabled the development of close relationships between the Institute and the Council and the joint use of information resources. Under the chairmanship of Richard Hoggart – and with a large membership including representatives from the CBI and the TUC, adult educators, learners, elected councillors and four NIAE council members, among them Peter Clyne – the Council produced 36 reports and inquiries by the time it was closed down in 1983, including six annual reports to the Secretary of State, all, Hoggart recalls, ‘uncompromising’. The Council’s objective, according to Peter Clyne, was to ‘provide evidence as a basis for policy development’. It conducted inquiries into policy and organisation and curriculum and programme development, and undertook surveys of adult participation in learning and student fees, the latter in association with the NIAE. It was directly commissioned by government to report on adult basic education and education for unemployed adults, two central themes of the Russell Committee which were becoming more urgent as fees increased, public spending was reduced and economic conditions deteriorated in the early eighties.


In 1982, the Council published Continuing Education: From Policies to Practice, a ‘milestone’ report, backed by extensive research and a detailed statistical survey, which called for a comprehensive, integrated system of continuing education, with no barriers between vocational and general adult education and a focus on support for the disadvantaged. The following year it published a number of papers on the theme of Political Education for Adults, prompting a junior minister to suggest that ‘political education’ was no more than a ‘euphemism for left-wing indoctrination’. The work was nevertheless in tune with much of the pioneering outreach and community work being carried out in the period, particularly in London, where the Inner London Education Authority appointed a team of community education workers to reach out to working-class communities and local estates, and adult education institutes adopted strategies to recruit the most excluded groups.




UDACE and REPLAN
 After two three-year terms, ACACE was disbanded by the Department for Education and Science in 1983. Richard Hoggart wrote to Secretary of State Keith Joseph in October of that year:


"It is a sad paradox that ACACE has spent most of its six-year life, in which it has proved beyond doubt the need for great increases in continuing education support by a national Development Body, during the term of a government which has proved unwilling to be so persuaded.


It is not too much to assert that the eighties should see the full start of a process, which will eventually dissolve the ‘end-on’ view of education in favour of a view of education as a process continuously available and, by very many people used, for varied purposes throughout life.


… We have a national habit of arguing against a plainly good thing until the last minute then, once we have grasped the case, of doing a volt-face and going further, faster, than anyone would have predicted. This should be such a moment."


The Council was succeeded, in 1984, by two new units, UDACE and REPLAN, both overseen and administrated by NIACE. The NIAE, under the tough-minded, forward- looking directorship of Arthur K. Stock, had become the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education in 1983, a name change motivated as much by changing preconditions for funding as by adult education’s fast-changing remit. The Unit for the Development of Adult Continuing Education (UDACE) reflected both the new terminology of NIACE and the language of the Russell Committee which, in its final report, had urged a national development council for adult education. However, UDACE’s remit, and funding, fell some way short of the hopes of the Committee, and of ACACE, which had proposed a development body with a budget of £6 million, rather than the £50,000 annual budget awarded to the new unit. ACACE members, and many within NIACE, advised against the proposal, but the Institute took the pragmatic view that this was the best deal on offer. UDACE’s activities were to focus on three main areas: the collection and dissemination of information regarding effective, efficient and innovative practice; the examination of specific policies and practices with a view to recommending to government ways in which adult learning might be developed or improved; and participation in research and development initiatives to the benefit of adult learning.


The projects taken forward by UDACE, under the leadership of Head of Unit Stephen McNair, were proposed by government ministers or agreed by the DES after the recommendation of the DES-appointed UDACE steering group. It had its own budget and, while its staff were NIACE employees,





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