Education, Education, Education! The vision of lifelong learning in the Kennedy, Dearing and Fryer reports

ABSTRACT The year 1997 witnessed the publication of three major policy reports related to the development of lifelong learning in the UK: the Kennedy, Dearing and Fryer reports on further, higher and continuing education, respectively. These reports produced responses from government, and underlay the consultative paper published early in 1998. This article examines these documents, not so much for the policies they propose, but for the conceptualisations of lifelong learning they contain. It concludes that, in this context, while the promotion of lifelong learning is to be welcomed, the documents suffer from three failings: they accord too much priority to vocational education and training; they betray a tendency to blame non‐participants, while placing responsibility on them for changing their behaviour; and they threaten economic and social exclusion for those who do not participate in the future.