Increasing Adult Learning Participation
Learning from Successful Reforms
Countries need to urgently scale-up and upgrade their adult learning systems to help
people adapt to the future world of work. Today, only two in five adults across the
EU and OECD participate in education and training in any given year, according to
the OECD Survey of Adults Skills. Participation is even lower among disadvantaged
adults, such as those with low skill levels or in jobs at high risk of automation.
For adult learning systems to be future-ready, governments must increase their efforts
to engage more adults in continuous learning throughout their lives.
While much has been written about the need for progress, it is less clear how adult
learning participation can be increased in practice. Many good ideas struggle to translate
into real change on the ground, as they get stuck in the reality of policy implementation.
This report aims to understand the factors that make adult learning reforms succeed.
It identifies lessons from six countries that have significantly increased participation
over the past decades: Austria, Estonia, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and Singapore.
To shed light on how these countries achieved this objective, this study looks at
the details of reform design, implementation and evaluation.
Published on March 13, 2020
In series:Getting Skills Rightview more titles