“Lifelong Learning” has been a defining goal for education and training policies for many years, emphasising the need for organised learning to take place over the whole lifespan and across the different main spheres that make up our lives (“life-wide”). OECD data confirm how extensive educational “careers” have become. There have been discrete studies which shed light on the nature of the challenge: the need to question the continued “front-end” expansion of education systems if lifelong learning is to be achieved; the room for considerable improvement in guidance systems; the importance of financing and qualification systems. Despite acknowledgement of its importance, holistic analyses of lifelong learning have been less a feature of OECD work in recent years and the relatively dated evidence base comparing countries in their implementation of this broad aim similarly underlines that implementation in countries is patchy and often disappointing.