Workshop D - Session 1

Title: Securing a Policy Framework that Promotes Lifelong Learning Chair: Talvi Marja, The State Assembly, Estonia Dr Barry Hake, University of Leiden, Netherlands

Barry Hake is from the University of Leiden in Netherlands. He is British but has worked in the Netherlands for 28 years and is especially involved in the research of adult education and networking the network.

I would like to look very briefly at the contents of 'Lifelong Learning: the Dutch Initiative' and then pose some questions about the way in which it came into existence. The tenure of the document is very clear. In the first paragraph it refers to the competitiveness of the Dutch economy. The second paragraph refers to employability and the rest is formulated in those contexts.

I would like to give you a couple of quotations on the section 'The future is in your own hands'. People must feel the need to continue learning. This implies that everyone must be in a position to acquire quickly new knowledge and skills on their own. I think we have heard that many places before in those documents which you refer to as important. Ultimately, lifelong learning revolves around a continued employment in the labour process, which is contained in the phrase 'employability for everyone'. Lifelong learning is a method which makes everyone employable.

Those who do not take part will be reminded of their responsibilities and I think that is extremely interesting. We used to talk about outreach and community education empowerment; now you will be reminded, and I think one way in which the Dutch are planning to do this is to create a new generation of employability advisers. Whether they would work in the community or employment exchanges or in the workplace is not yet clear. The actual measures I think are extremely interesting, when we are talking about lifelong learning and many people's still traditional views of education and learning.

Employability

There are three categories of measures in the Dutch report. The first refers to employability for the employed and the unemployed. This is where the report refers to adults. The measures to be taken in this area will be fiscal measures, which means that employers will get tax deductions for the amount of money they put into education and training in the workplace. Secondly, a very interesting category in the Dutch report is the employability of teachers. It actually is in the amount of money the Dutch government is prepared to put into lifelong learning. We are talking here about the retraining of the existing teaching force. The third category is the prevention of education disadvantage. I think this is a category which we would clearly recognise which includes reducing the compulsory pre-school attendance to four years of age, introducing much more effort into Dutch as a second language for minorities, a great deal of attention for adolescent drop-outs, school curriculum reform and introducing combinations of work and learning. Maybe that is a new form of recurrent education in the primary and secondary schools, vocational schools and universities. Interestingly enough universities are only indirectly referred to in this report.

How this report came into existence is an example of how not to create a framework. Instead of participating to a great extent in the European Year of Lifelong Learning in '96, the Dutch had their own national knowledge debate which was not a real debate. The Ministers asked what will we need to know in the year 2015? Nobody could really find the answers. No debate really got off the ground, but in the final report they found lifelong learning. Immediately a cabinet committee on lifelong learning was formed with the Prime Minister as the Chairman and the Ministries most directly involved, talking about co-ordination between Ministries. Three Ministries were brought into the committee, representatives of the trade unions and the employers, one person each, but no representatives of adult education organisations or workers in the field or users or providers.

Manipulated Consensus

Within three months a report was produced with the proposals that I have just mentioned and a body of money in the region of £200 million in the first round. What we actually see here, I think, is a case of what I would call manipulated consensus around lifelong learning. The Minister of Education knew exactly what he wanted, coming after the recent election. He wanted £200 million to do things he was intending to do anyway, retraining teachers and improving the quality of primary and secondary education and dealing with the problem of ethnic minorities.

What we actually had here was old wine in the new bottle of lifelong learning. The problem is because the report was produced in this closed civil servant and political world, we are already seeing problems in the implementation of these measures. In the field, resistance is already emerging amongst teachers to the idea of retraining, although they have many other problems which they are facing.

So I think this is an example of how not to do it. I think the Dutch are going to have an enforcement problem with lifelong learning, when it is produced in this way without real consensus from below. This is a topdown approach and I think this is not the way to do it.

I think that what we are missing in much of the material that is coming out in these excellent lists of documents, is a consensual rhetoric. I think it needs to be brought back to where the agencies and the people and the potential users of lifelong learning really are and that is not what is in this kind of document.

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