Governing education policy: the European Union and Australia

This paper considers the changing modes of governance of education policy in the European Union (EU) and Australia through a lens of ‘soft governance’. It considers the increased use of ‘policy instruments’ such as benchmarking, targets, monitoring, data-generation in policy-making in recent decades. It considers the roles these policy instruments play in coordinating education policy in the EU and Australia as well as their intended and unintended consequences. It shows that in the EU, these instruments played a role in strengthening the coordination through the links between individuals and programs, and networking, which is seen as resulting in enhanced creativity in policy solutions, development of new norms and new means for achieving policy goals. While in Australia it seems that the role of these instruments is focused on consolidating the role of the Commonwealth’s oversight and control over what constitutionally is a responsibility of States which adds to several policy tensions already existing in the federal coordination of education

Governing Adult Learning Through Influencing Public Debate: How the Media Use PIAAC Data in Denmark, Italy and the United Kingdom

This open access book challenges international policy ‘groupthink’ about lifelong learning. Adult learning – too long a servant of business competitiveness – should be reimagined as central to democratic society. Young adults, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, engage more in education and training, and learn more day-to-day at work, if provision is democratically organised and based on enduring and inclusive institutional networks, and when jobs encourage and reward the acquisition of skills. Using innovative qualitative and quantitative methods, the contributors develop a critical perspective on dominant policies, investigating – across the European Union and Australia – how ‘vulnerable’ young adults experience programmes designed to improve their ‘employability’, and how ‘skills for jobs’ policies squeeze out wider – and wiser – ideas of what education and training should do. Chapters show why some provision works for those with poor educational backgrounds, why labour market and educational institutions matter so much, how adult education can empower and expand people’s agency, and the challenges of using artificial intelligence in lifelong learning policy-making. Several investigate the pivotal role of workplace learning in organisational life, and in learning during ‘emerging adulthood’. Important comparative studies of workplace learning in the metals, retail and adult education sectors show the role of management, trade unions and social movements in young adults’ learning