It is now over six years since the publication by the then Department for Education and Employment of the consultative document, The learning age: A renaissance for a new Britain. David Blunkett's Foreword to this document was memorable not only for the quality of its prose; in addition, it outlined in a lyrical, enlightened vision the seminal features of a culture of learning suited to 21st-century Britain. Writing in 2004, it is difficult to find compelling evidence that there has been in England a significant and sustained move toward the creation of a coherent, engaging, accessible culture of lifelong learning.

Wordsworth's famous lines lament the loss of intimations of immortality in early childhood, but it does not require an unreasonable exercise of artistic licence to suggest that, for many, they express with equal sadness the fading of those intimations of lifelong learning articulated by David Blunkett.

Why has the ‘dream’ proved so difficult to transform into reality? Over the past five years I have been offered many answers to this question, ranging in content and style from the relatively restrained observation that:

through expressions of concern about the number of ‘initiatives’ being introduced into schools and classrooms, to the more forthright, although not always substantiated, critique of Whitehall's perhaps outdated approach to the challenge of developing a coherent lifelong learning strategy.