The University of Catania will be hosting a conference of the Italian University Network for Continuing Education on 10/11 May 2024, and is pleased to announce that amongst the keynote speakers will be Professor Michael Osborne, Director of CR&DALL. His presentation is entitled, The many souls of university continuing education in the UK.

There are currently exceptional pressures on local authority budgets in the UK, and it can seem almost inevitable that adult and lifelong learning provision is likely to suffer. At the same time, post-compulsory education rarely gets much attention in the UK press, and within that broad category adult and lifelong learning probably gets the least. There may thus be a risk that adult education and lifelong learning in the UK might pass away quietly, without anybody much noticing.

A new book "Adult Education and Social Justice: International Perspectives" was published just before Xmas 2023 in honour of the adult educator par excellence, Professor Lalage Bown, who died just over two years ago. Edited by Maria Slowey, Heribert Hinzen, Michael Omolewa and myself, it contains contributions from many esteemed adult educators, many from the core CR&DALL team and others beyond, particularly those with connections to Africa.

It is with great sadness that we report of the death of one of the leading lights of adult education of the 20th and 21st century, Professor Chris Duke. Chris, amongst many other positions was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, and made extensive practical and conceptual contributions to CR&DALL in the past two decades.