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.