Please find attached PIMA Bulletin No 16. It continues the bimonthly number-run postings of the PIMA Newsletter. The name-change represents a rationalisation of what the PASCAL member association adds to the Website without duplicating mainstream entries.

Announcements of other bodies’ activities, upcoming events and reports are left to the weekly news update for topicality and the ability to respond at once. PIMA members’ in-house and business news is left to a member Newssheet as need arises. Here we only introduce new members so that they can be known across the whole PASCAL family.

What you will see is a number of short papers, some of one-off or free-standing interest on topics important to PASCAL, some to do with Special Interest subjects like Thomas Kuan’s item on Later Life Learning, others loosely connected in a thematic sense across several issues.

This issue features very different contributions. Two are to do with local community learning, from Yahui Fang in Taiwan and Heribert Hinzen, the personification of Germany’s DVV International. There follow two Australian contributions. One by Francesca Beddie returns us to the chronic problem of a ‘tertiary system’ of ‘higher and other’ post-secondary education (Further Education, the College sector, TAFE etc.), neglected through lack of serious middle class support in a number of countries.

Brendan O’Dwyer extends our run on the treatment of indigenous communities under ‘post-colonialism’ from Canada and New Zealand into Australia. Other country experiences will follow. This indigenous strand, triggered by Hans Schuetze, spins out from the series of studies of the Crisis of (Western) Democracy, asking what does or might ‘lifelong learning’ do about it. We continue to refer to this deepening crisis of global concern with Daniela Bavcandzi and Balazs Nemeth writing from Macedonia and Hungary.

Finally, readers will delight in Alan Tuckett’s characteristically self-deprecating and insightful reflections, On awards and public recognition, on receiving a knighthood for services to adult education.