Adult learning communities : researching registered providers of adult and community education in Australia

![CDATA[Australian education and training has undergone massive reform in the past decade and a half. As part of this reform, there has been a significant increase in private training providers. They have become a diverse and important component in the Australian education and training landscape. Yet relatively little research has been undertaken on the nature of their contribution. Unwin (2003) refers to UK private providers as ‘the unseen world’, where there is ‘little professional development’, a ‘raw deal’, ‘no corporate voice’, and ‘their clients are even more invisible’. In Australia, this sector is similarly a training ‘black box’, where private providers are, so far, not included in official statistics except in the case of those in receipt of government funds. Adult and community education (ACE) providers, as one component of this sector, have also suffered from this lack of research attention. This paper grapples with this gap in knowledge. It focuses on the 2003 training activties of 84 ACE providers that participated in a national study of 330 private registered training organisations. Based on key findings from this study, it analyses the role of ACE providers as learning communities and some of the challenges they face currently and into the future.]]