Workshop D - Session 3

Title: Securing a Policy Framework - Providers' Perspectives Chair: Ekkard Nuissi Von Rein, German Institute for Adult Education Cees Doets, Centre for Innovation in Education and Training, Netherlands

Cees Doets works in the Netherlands. He co-ordinated the Year of Lifelong Learning in 1996 for the Netherlands.

I will speak now about an initial programme which was published at the beginning of this year by our government.

In the Netherlands, we have at this moment about 50 regional training centres in which vocational training and adult education are combined. I think they are a good example of the possibilities of giving form and content to lifelong learning.

The topic of this working group is Policy Framework, but I think we do not have a very good framework at the moment. We have little projects, we have solutions, but we also have a lot of questions. I think before starting to develop a framework you must ask the right questions, and after that you can try to solve them, and then you can develop the framework. What we do in the Netherlands is give some content to lifelong learning.

First of all I will say something about the background of the national programme. I think it is a very global framework for the next few years in the Netherlands, for how we will give form to lifelong learning. There are some ideas in it that are very important. Also there is a financial framework. The government intends to spend in 2002, just in 3 or 4 years, a minimum of six thousand million guilders for lifelong learning and a maximum of eleven hundred million guilders.

The second important thing in our programme is that the Prime Minister is responsible for the programme of lifelong learning. He took the responsibility for it and most ministries are involved in it. The 3 most important ministries are, first, the Ministry of Education and Science Education; second, the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Labour Market; and third, the least important, the Ministry of Economic Affairs. I think that it is very important that at least there is a broad consensus about lifelong learning. I think there is more consensus than a couple of years ago, or even 30 years ago about recurrent education.

Three Clusters

There are 3 main clusters of measures mentioned in the programme. First of all, employability is a very important topic in the programme and the government says that employers will be needing employability for workers and for the unemployed. The employability for workers is first of all the primary responsibility of employers and employees and their organisations. The state, the government wants only to create good conditions for employability within the companies and they will encourage learning.

The second topic for employability is that the state will give special attention to people who are, for instance, contract workers, older workers and so on. There will be special measures for those groups. And the third topic within employability is that they will give specific attention to unemployment, to the people who are unemployed. So first of all the responsibility is on employers in the companies, and the state will create conditions to keep them going. So they will try to stimulate the awareness, the importance of employability, for instance by training employability consultants.

Another idea is that they will stimulate job rotation, between employed and unemployed people. And another idea is that they want to create assessment centres with, amongst other things, recognition of acquired skills in formal working life. There will be a recognition of not only the skills you learn at school, but also the skills you learn during your working life.

Co-operation

A last message - I think it is an important one - is that I want to stimulate the co-operation between the regional training centres, in which vocational training and adult education are organised, and initial schools, because they both can learn from each other. Then there are some measures about employability. First of all they want to give specific attention to initial education, primary schools, to teach people to learn during their lives, to stimulate learning skills and also to stimulate the basic skills, information skills and so on. They will pay attention to the early and pre-school period for instance.

We have a lot of immigrants in the Netherlands and one of the problems is the speaking of the Dutch language. They will stimulate this also in the early school period, so that everyone has a good basic knowledge of Dutch.

The second measure is to prevent drop out from our vocational systems. We have rather a high rate of drop out, about 30-40%.

The third one is about training teachers in employability and also in thinking about new learning systems within schools. For instance a new combination of working and learning, a new combination of figures in practice, new roles for teachers and so on.

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