Where does Europe stand on adult education?

The Commission publishes an evaluation report on the implementation of the Council Recommendation on adult learning.

In december 2016, the Council Recommendation on Upskilling Pathways: New Opportunities for Adults has been adopted. Its aim is to ensure that adults, specifically those with low or insufficient skills, have opportunities for up-skilling and re-skilling. These opportunities are particularly important in the context of the green and digital transformations, where the labour market is evolving rapidly and it is becoming almost impossible to make do with skills acquired in standard education throughout life without further skills development during working life.  

The Council Recommendation proposes 3 main steps for Member States in providing personalized support to lower-skilled adults - the possibility to assess skills (including the identification of possible skills gaps), the provision of a personalized and flexible offer of further development and the recognition of the newly acquired skills. The Member States were also recommended to identify priority target groups, ensure effective cooperation between all relevant organizations and stakeholders and ensure awareness of these opportunities. Also in light of the ongoing European Year of Skills, the European Commission has now issued an evaluation report on how Member States are progressing in implementing this recommendation. The evaluation report is accompanied by a Staff working document which specifies further details.  

What are the main findings?

The evaluation report focuses on whether the implementation of the recommendation is effective, coherent, relevant to current needs and whether it provides added value at the European level, while taking into account that it is only a recommendation and thus not legally binding. Overall, the report shows that the effectiveness of the recommendations is moderate, mainly due to the uneven approach across Member States and the lack of coordination within Member States. Only 14 countries have shown improvements in the implementation of all three steps mentioned above, the Czech Republic being one of them.  

The report identifies the four biggest challenges that still need to be addressed as the uneven level of implementation of the recommendations across Member States (including large inequalities in the available professional development opportunities), the ineffective scope and reach of the services provided, the over-reliance on project funding from EU programmes (which is linked to the lack of funding at the national level) and, last but not least, the lack of integration of all three identified steps into one comprehensive offer. 

The European Commission sees the future of the implementation of the recommendations as, for example, strengthening strategic cooperation at the national level, better identifying and informing relevant target groups, or linking activities and opportunities for adults to the implementation of two other recently adopted related recommendations, namely the recommendation on individual learning accounts and the recommendation on a European approach to micro-credentials.  

For more information, please visit the European Commission website, where the full report and the accompanying "working document" are also available for download.