Does the UK meet the priorities set out by the EU Agenda for Adult Learning?
Written by John Field, a professor in the School of Education at the University of Stirling with a research focus on social, policy and historical aspects of adult learning.
Europe has become an important player in education and training, and a conference hosted by NIACE later this month provokes us to understand our local and national practices in a wider context. The European Agenda for Adult Learning, adopted by Council Resolution in November 2011, stresses the contribution of adult educators towards Europe 2020, the broad strategy of economic growth and social cohesion. The Agenda sets out five priorities:
- Making lifelong learning and mobility a reality.
- Improving the quality and efficiency of education and training.
- Promoting equity, social cohesion and active citizenship through adult learning.
- Enhancing the creativity and innovation of adults and their learning environments.
- Improving the knowledge base on adult learning and monitoring the adult learning sector.
The UK appears to have a strong track record on the first of these goals. Participation rates are high in comparison with most of Europe and this suggests to me that there must be a degree of efficiency in the lifelong learning system. Learner mobility, on the other hand, is heavily slanted towards youth – but that is true for all European countries and is something that can only be addressed at European level. And in recent years, some types of participation have collapsed.
What is less clear is whether we have a high quality system, judged by the extent to which it produces the high level capacities and qualifications that our lives now demand. High overall participation rates are partly a product, for example, of a system that has prioritised short episodes of learning. So the question of quality remains very much an open one.
Our system seems rather patchy when it comes to equality and cohesion. There are some clear gender effects and a very marked degree of age inequality, with participation rates tumbling among the retired. There is a strong tendency for participation to be closely linked with prior education. And on the basis of the available evidence, the distribution of skills across the adult population is marked by extreme inequalities. We clearly have much to learn still about equity from some other countries.
Creativity and innovative learning environments certainly ought to be a strength. Government has invested heavily in recent years in estates and training, and there has been a huge growth in online and blended learning. What this has added to the sum total of creativity is less clear, not least because some programmes still fail to use interactivity.
Finally, the UK system – and England particularly – has generated an extensive knowledge base on participation and its effects. NIACE and BIS have commissioned rigorous large scale surveys of participation, and BIS publishes regular reports on participation in its funded programmes. Tom Schuller and others have analysed the cohort surveys to great effect. It is a huge shame that the Scottish Government has decided not to support similar studies, which would allow UK-wide comparisons to be made.
Although these studies have greatly enriched our understanding, the new OECD survey of adult skills will tell us a great deal more, and its findings will allow us to compare the UK with other nations. The findings are likely to be controversial, and not just in the UK.
