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This article reports on research carried out under the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC's) Learning Society Programme. The program comprised 14 projects involving research into the learning society and the ways in which it can contribute to the development of knowledge and skills for employment and in other areas of adult life. The article is one of a series of comparative studies which explore notions of lifelong learning, learning organisation and learning society in Europe and, in some cases, reflect on the use of comparative research in the social sciences. Education systems in the United Kingdom (UK) are developing strategies for 'unifying', or at least linking, academic and vocational learning. The Unified Learning Project (ULP) compares these developments in postcompulsory education and training in Scotland with those in England and Wales. This research is complemented by a European study across eight countries of strategies to promote parity of esteem between vocational and academic learning in post-16 education (the Post-16 Strategies project funded under the European Commission's Leonardo da Vinci program). The article focuses on the ULP with references to the European project. It begins with a brief discussion of the purposes of comparison in the ULP and then describes the main conceptual frameworks that have been developed as the basis for comparison. The final section of the article offers a provisional assessment of the role of comparison in the ULP in relation to the purposes discussed earlier.