National and European policies for lifelong learning : an assessment of developments within the context of the European Employment Strategy

Abstract

It is uncontroversial to note that employability and lifelong learning now constitute key areas for development and debate within national and European policy circles. Significant points of commonality can be traced across national states and within the broader community and, at a rhetorical level at least, it appears that the ‘hymn sheet’ is relatively well established. For example, the ‘building blocks’ for coherent and comprehensive lifelong learning strategies and the ‘priorities for action’ identified by the European Commission (2001a) in its Communication document Making a European Area of Lifelong learning a Reality all resonate with key policy pronouncements, and in some areas practice, at the level of the national state. This is not to say, however, that it is possible to delineate a common European model or system coherence in the area of lifelong learning and employability in national practice. At the level of the nation state the ‘hymn sheet’ will be interpreted and shaped by historical legacies of education and training, the nature of industrialisation and the broader institutional make-up of the political economy (see, for example, Ashton and Green, 1996; Crouch et al., 1999). The experiences of the ‘learning citizen’ will, as a result, vary across Europe. Against this backdrop, this chapter examines recent developments in lifelong learning discourse and practice at the European and national levels. The chapter is split into three broad sections. The first section examines the recent EU review of lifelong learning (European Commission, 2000, 2001a), the debate that took place over defining lifelong learning and the proposed monitoring process for advancing the lifelong learning agenda (which follows the Open Method of Co-ordination). Building on this, the second section considers explicitly, with reference to the European reporting mechanism, the extent to which comprehensive and co-ordinated systems of lifelong learning are developing at the national and European levels. The third section focuses on the points of tension between the rhetoric and practice of lifelong. It pays specific attention to the level of engagement by the social partners with regard to lifelong learning. In the final section we draw out some of the potential tensions that may exist with regard to the furtherance of employability and lifelong learning within the European model.