The International Council for Adult Education and Adult Learning Policy: Addressing the Gap between Rhetoric and Practice

The first decade of the twenty-first century began with high hopes for improved opportunities for adult learners. In 1996 a UNESCO committee produced Learning: The Treasure Within (Delors, 1996), and in the same year the finance ministers of OECD countries agreed to give new impetus to lifelong learning policies since human capital was of central importance to the prosperity of industrialized economies (OECD, 1996; Rubenson, 2009; Schuller, 2009). These initiatives were followed by two key global events at which governments signed agreements to improve opportunities for the education of adults. CONFINTEA V, which was held in Hamburg in 1997, had established a broad developmental agenda for adult education (Nesbit and Welton, 2013) which recognized its distinctive role, both as a key part of the structured educational system and as a catalyst in achieving improvements to health and wellbeing, in industrial development, and in securing vibrant democracies through their active and engaged citizens (UNESCO, 1997). In 2000 the education agenda that had been agreed a decade earlier at Jomtien, Thailand, was reviewed and strengthened at the World Education Forum (UNESCO, 2000), which was held in Dakar, Senegal. Six global goals were agreed upon, including halving the rate of illiteracy by 2015; securing gender equality in access to education for girls and women; and, more vaguely, meeting the learning needs of all young people and adults through equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programmes (UNESCO, 2000)