15 years after the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal the education community is meeting to take stock and look at achievements and failures of what has happened on EFA (Education for All) during this period. A huge amount of reports and studies on global, regional and national have been made available, especially from UNESCO.

Recent contributions to the literature have postulated the very different significations of the policy narratives of ‘lifelong education’ in the Faure Report for UNESCO in 1972 and OECD’s 1973 report on ‘recurrent education’. It has also been argued that the Faure Report incorporated the policy narrative of the ‘de-schooling’ of society.