more successful than girls in attaining three or more "A" levels, but the g..p had narrowed in recent years. 42. The Government also had priorities in further and higher education that should be beneficial to women, particularly mature students with domestic responsibilities. Those included improving the provision of guidance and information about educational opportunities; encouraging more flexible forms of education, such as open learning schemes, that tried to meet the needs and circumstances of individual students; and increasing the participation rate among women and others who were underrepresented. Women accounted for nearly 75 per cent of enrolments at local authority adult education centres. 43. Turning to the country's social security scheme, she said that it had originally been designed to provide basic maintenance benefits tailored to the presumed circumstances of the individual, according to sex, age and marital status. It had therefore overtly treated women and men differently and had included a special set of provisions for married women. The past 20 years had seen extensive changes in the scheme, which had moved away from a system of protection for married women based largely on rights derived from their husbands' contributions to one where women were increasingly building up their own rights to contributory benefits and had gained access to non-contributory benefits on the /.. . same terms as men. In so far as differences remained, they favoured women in that they recognized the needs of the many older women who had not contributed in the past and who relied on their husbands' contribution records for protection in old age, and the needs of those who had planned their lives around the current female pension age. Those differences would probably become redundant in the longer term, but the Government had made it clear that total and immediate implementation of a 
**Analysis**
The text discusses the government's priorities in education and social security, highlighting the efforts to promote women's participation and rights. The language used is formal and policy-oriented, suggesting a focus on social and economic policies rather than natural resources, agriculture, or humanitarian aid.

**Category**
Education, Employment