The main actors in the National Action Plans on Employment - who can bring forward the education and training dimension of the NAPS?

Abstract

The European Employment Strategy (ESS), agreed at the Luxembourg Summit in 1997, aims to improve the Union’s record on combating unemployment. Besides committing the Commission to produce an annual employment package for submission to the European Council, the Strategy also required member states to develop a National Action Plan (NAP) for Employment as a means of monitoring progress towards targets laid down in the ESS.1 From the outset the guidelines set for the NAPs have asked member states, working in conjunction with the social partners, to develop policies on lifelong learning. This chapter draws on an overview of lifelong learning (LLL) activity and its linkages to the National Action Plans (NAPs) for Employment in a sample of five EU states—England, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and Italy. England rather than the UK was chosen as the unit for analysis here because although responsibility for the NAP and other employment issues remains a UK government responsibility, education and training is a now devolved issue, i.e. it is the responsibility of the four national administrations in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The overall aim of the chapter is to examine the tensions between the idealised model for the NAPs and their actual design and implementation, the different national structures for developing the LLL elements of the NAPs, and the interactions between the different actors who shape the plans within these systems. It also identifies a number of issues facing the future evolution of LLL activity within the context of the NAPs. By way of introduction, a number of issues that will emerge in what follows need to be highlighted. The first is that many debates concerning European policy founder because people make the assumption that as the same word or phrase is being used by all participants a commonly agreed concept is being discussed. This is often not the case. As van de Kamp and Hake (2002, p.13) note: ‘Despite the strong degree of interest in lifelong learning expressed by politicians, employers, trade unions and the educational community, it is still not evident that there is any universal agreement on what the term ‘lifelong learning’ actually refers to…’ Thus, when an English policy maker refers to lifelong learning, what they have in mind may be very different from what a Finn or a Swede would think the concept pertained to. To paraphrase Churchill, in many areas of its work, the EU is a group of nations divided by a common terminology. This chapter stresses the need to guard against assumptions of commonality of meaning, and to underline just how varied are the national paradigms currently being attached to the concept of LLL. A second theme of much of what follows is the way in which LLL is a site of contestation (sometimes overt, more usually covert) between divergent visions of what LLL is for and what a national LLL strategy could or should be concerned with. Some approaches are very narrow and utilitarian, and view LLL as little more than workforce development writ large. Others are much broader, and afford greater priority to non-economic elements (such as cultural and citizenship issues). Insofar as the NAPs act as a focus for discussion about LLL and employment, they provide a forum in which these tensions may become manifest. The third theme is the issue of who should be driving LLL strategies, particularly as they relate to employment issues. Again, it will become apparent that the relative weight accorded to different actors varies enormously from nation to nation. Another aspect of the context set by the NAPs that deserves note is that the NAPs are primarily about employment and employability. As such, they tend to concentrate attention on those aspects of LLL that have as their main focus employment and work, and, as a consequence, on those preparing to enter or those already in the labour market. Thus, if LLL is a cradle to grave concept, the NAPs are only concerned with that portion of the population who will become or already are of working age. This facet of LLL may be in tension with other, wider aspects of what LLL might be about, and this may be of concern to some of the actors involved in the process of formulating the NAPs in some EU states. A final point is that European policy on LLL, as on a number of other fronts, is handicapped by the lack of direct policy competence of the EU. The Commission can exhort and ‘co-ordinate’, and seek to demand information and reporting on targets agreed at ministerial level in inter-governmental meetings, but it has no direct levers to control or directly fund (outside a limited number of cases such as the European Social Fund and Leonardo da Vinci programmes) LLL activity in the member states (Field, 1997). The NAPs, along with other devices such as the EC’s Memorandum on LLL, are a means of getting a Commission foot in the nation state’s policy door.