Workshop D - Session 1

Title: Securing a Policy Framework that Promotes Lifelong Learning Chair: Talvi Marja, The State Assembly, Estonia Jarl Bengtsson, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Netherlands

Jarl Bengtsson is a Director of the OECD Research Centre for Education and Policy and has been involved in lifelong learning and recurrent education since 1964.

I would just like to make a few reflections on the policy framework, past, present and future.

Many of you here will remember that some 25-30 years ago, lifelong learning was a key political priority in a number of OECD countries and at that time there was a specific policy framework or strategy that was developed to implement it. It was called recurrent education. It was the main strategy instrument implementing lifelong learning. It was adopted by the Ministers of Education in 1975. It was dead in 1979.

There were many reasons. One was the oil shock holding back public expenditure. There was an idea that it would cost more than the traditional education system and it was basically backed up only by Ministers of Education.

Not a Strong Strategy

Today we are there again. Everybody wants lifelong learning, everybody supports it, driven by economic and social concerns, but we do not have a very strong strategy, like we had in the '70s. We have a strategy which could be called the extended policy framework, that is to say you try to get as many Ministers as possible to sign up to it.

OECD have been rather successful with that, Ministers of Education have signed up to it, Ministers of Labour have signed up to it, Ministers of Finance twice now at the OECD meetings have subscribed to the principle of lifelong learning, but will it be enough for the future? Personally, I doubt it. I think there are some very hard choices ahead. Let me just mention three.

The first one is about priorities. Priority must go to those who have less education and lower literacy skills. There are many in our countries. There are hard choices for government here and those choices do not come easily.

Secondly, lifelong learning has to be based on partnership and that has to be taken much more seriously, by the public and the private sector together, not least in the financing of lifelong learning.

Thirdly, we must get the people with us. People have not yet understood what lifelong learning is about. Families still send their children to school with a traditional notion of education. The parents themselves have some sort of bad understanding of what lifelong learning means for their own employability. There is an enormous challenge in getting people to understand it. If we manage that I think we can approach the learning age.

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