This paper reviews several surveys of educational participation by adults in Aotearoa New Zealand between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s. Selected methodological and substantive issues are addressed. It concludes, among other things, by pointing to: the continuities and discontinuities within a variety of ‘divides’ over the period including those of class, gender, cultural background and age; and the radical differences between surveys of the 1970s & 1980s which emphasised social and educational imperatives and were driven by national agendas, and those of the 1990s which emphasised economic and workplace imperatives and were driven by supranational agendas.