was able to take its own position on the priorities and strategies it pursued. It opted to work on a small number of topics, taking on about three at a time and tackling each over two or three years. The main themes addressed during eight years of activity included educational guidance for adults; access courses; open colleges; accreditation; performance and quality; and partnership- working between institutions – activity complemented by regular briefings on policy development. UDACE’s work on educational guidance, and its 1986 report, The Challenge of Change: Developing Educational Guidance for Adults, were particularly influential. The report recommended the creation of a national agency for guidance (resulting in the National Educational Guidance Initiative, which was managed as a unit within UDACE) and provided a breakdown of seven activities of guidance, still used to analyse and evaluate practice in the field. It had a lasting impact on adult guidance and has been used to analyse guidance in settings other than for adults.

Unemployed adults

 REPLAN was set up by the DES, under the auspices of NIACE, with a remit to improve, increase and extend educational opportunities for unemployed and un- waged adults in England and Wales. The department used some of the funds it had cut from local authority and responsible body adult education budgets to support an initial three-year programme of research and development. A team of regional field officers, managed by NIACE, invited proposals and supported and supervised a series of local development projects, working closely with the Further Education Unit (FEU), the DES, local education authorities and other project fund-holders. Tony Uden, who managed the project from its inception, recalls that, as the work developed, two principles emerged: first, that the programme was about ‘change’ and should be judged according to the extent to which it made the adult education system ‘more able and more willing to serve the needs of adult unemployed students’; and, second, that the ideas and working practices adopted by REPLAN should be accepted as relevant to meeting the needs of ‘the much wider constituency of adult working class students’, whether unemployed or not. The regional officers took on national roles, for staff development, rural areas, women and the black and minority ethnic unemployed, as well as supporting a range of development projects which helped take NIACE’s work into the further education college sector. The initiative also had several strands independent of NIACE, including a large programme of education support grants for local educ- ation authorities and a raft of curriculum development managed by the FEU.

At the beginning of 1991, the government decided it would not extend the life of REPLAN beyond October 1991. Tim Eggar, Minister of State at the DES, wrote to senior personnel at NIACE and REPLAN informing them of the decision: ‘I believe REPLAN has provided a solid basis on which LEAs, education institutions and voluntary organisations can now build in continuing to improve education and training provision for the adult unemployed.’ There would be no successor initiative with an explicit brief ‘to promote educational opportunities for unemployed adults’. Instead, future funding would ‘be targeted at unemployed people and those in work who cannot progress without improved basic skills’. This, Peter Clyne notes, marked a ‘fundamental move away’ from the recommendations of ACACE and the Russell Report, both of which had stressed the desirability of ensuring that work with and for unemployed adults was broad-based and national in coverage. Paul Fordham, Chair of the NIACE/REPLAN Management Committee, wrote to Tim Eggar welcoming the creation of Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) and an initiative to launch a number of basic skills projects developed by LEAs and TECs, but warning that a key lesson of the REPLAN experience had been ‘how important it is for individual motivation and readiness to learn to match the training programmes which both Government and employers see as necessary’. REPLAN’s great strength, he said, lay ‘in understanding that successful training must meet both the needs of employers and also develop the aspirations and skills of individual learners from the point where they can begin to realise their own potential’.

Perceptible shift

 There had been a perceptible shift from job-related training towards skills for employment, particularly ‘basic’ skills of numeracy and literacy, and ‘adult basic education’ was becoming an increasingly important part of the Institute’s activity. The DES-supported, British Association of Settlements-led Right to Read campaign of the mid-1970s – in which NIACE’s current Chief Executive Alan Tuckett played a leading role – sought to galvanise public opinion and action on the question of adult literacy, and was followed, in 1975, by On the Move, a prime-time BBC television series aimed at adults with literacy problems, which had considerable impact. The campaigning prompted the government to make funding available for adult literacy. A £1 million government grant was made to the Institute in 1975-76 to establish an Adult Literacy Research Agency (ALRA). Its purpose was to support and promote an expansion of adult literacy teaching. It funded special development projects, published resource material and developed staff training. The grant was renewed for another two years and in 1978 ALRA was succeeded by the Adult Literacy Unit. The unit, which was still a part of NIACE though it remained in London when the Institute moved to Leicester, was reformed in 1980 to become the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (ALBSU). The change in name recognised that adults’ basic educational needs were broader than just literacy. The unit’s remit gradually broadened to include basic reading and writing, numeracy, oral communication and, from 1985, English for speakers of other languages. The unit became independent of NIACE in 1989, and changed its name to the Basic Skills Agency in 1995, dropping the ‘adult literacy’ label and extending its remit to 14-16-year-olds. Adult basic education had by this time become part of mainstream educational practice, subject to regular government review and redirection, though, for some, its emergence came at too high a price, as basic skills became subsumed within the rising tide of vocationalism in adult education.

Adult education more generally enjoyed a greater prominence in public policymaking as the seventies and eighties progressed, shaped increasingly by government actions and policies, as well as by a progressive decline in public expenditure on education. As a non-statutory provision, adult education was particularly vulnerable to cuts in public spending. Providing bodies found