  We present a general scheme for sharing quantum secrets, and an extension to
sharing classical secrets, which contain all known quantum secret sharing
schemes. In this framework we show the equivalence of existence of both
schemes, that is, the existence of a scheme sharing a quantum secret implies
the extended classical secret sharing scheme works, and vice versa. As a
consequence of this we find new schemes sharing classical secrets for arbitrary
access structures. We then clarify the relationship to quantum error correction
and observe several restrictions thereby imposed, which for example indicates
that for pure state threshold schemes the share size $q$ must scale with the
number of players $n$ as $q\geq \sqrt{n}$. These results also provide a new way
of searching for quantum error correcting codes.
