4th Global Report on Adult Learning and Education

Abstract

Leave no one behind. That was the resounding message of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It enjoined Member States to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ through SDG 4, and stressed the interconnected nature of the goals. The SDGs must, in other words, be addressed in a sensitively holistic way if they are to fulfil their potential to transform the lives of the most vulnerable and excluded people on the planet. Adult learning and education (ALE) has a crucial role to play in this, supporting the achievement of not only SDG 4 but also a range of other goals, including those on climate change, poverty, health and well-being, gender equality, decent work and economic growth, and sustainable cities and communities. The message of this report is that, while this potential is widely recognized, adult learning and education remains low on the agenda of most Member States— participation is patchy, progress inadequate and investment insufficient. Unless we change direction, we will, quite simply, not meet the stretching targets of SDG 4. And if we do not achieve the goal on education, the other SDGs will be placed in jeopardy. Achieving SDG 4, and realizing its cross cutting contribution to the other 16 goals, demands a much more integrated and comprehensive approach to education, with adult learning and education at its heart. The third Global Report on Adult Learning and Education (GRALE 3) showed that adult learning and education produces significant benefits across a range of policy areas. Countries reported a positive impact on health and well-being, employment and the labour market, and social, civic and community life. Adult learning and education led to improved health behaviours and attitudes, higher life expectancy and a reduction in lifestyle diseases, with a commensurate reduction in health care costs, the report found. It also highlighted the significant benefits of investment in adult education for individuals in the labour market, for employers and for the economy more generally. Last, but not least, it showed how adult learning and education increases social cohesion, integration and inclusion, boosts social capital and improves participation in social, civic and community activities. These benefits are significant but, as this report shows, they are unevenly distributed. Giving everyone a fair chance The focus of this report—the fourth Global Report on Adult Learning and Education— therefore, is equity. It is obvious that not everyone has the same opportunity to access and benefit from adult learning and education. Not everyone has the same chance to get a decent job, develop their competences and capabilities, improve their lives or contribute to the communities in which they live and work. If things continue as they are—and without a significant sea change in political outlook there is every chance they will—the benefits of adult learning will continue to coalesce around the better off and most advantaged in society, reinforcing and even intensifying existing inequalities, rather than helping the least advantaged individuals and communities. Who takes part, and who does not, has consequences. The ability to learn new skills, refresh our knowledge, and sustain the ‘grey capital’ of our brains has growing resonance in the twenty-first century. As the International Labour Organization (ILO) made clear in its recent report on the future of work, the way in which we make our livings is changing dramatically, to the extent that in many countries people now speak of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’, characterized by automation, digitization, the growth of platform employment and the application of artificial intelligence (ILO, 2019). These developments render old skills obsolete while creating demand for new and different skills, and ALE can play a central role—as the ILO report acknowledges—in ensuring that all are able to seize the opportunities that arise. In some countries, demographic change is another key imperative, obliging adults already in the workforce to fill a larger proportion of the jobs of the future, and requiring them to learn new skills and update existing ones. Increased mobility, population displacement and changing patterns of consumption and production are also factors. It is more and more accepted that such shifts, and the growing complexity and uncertainty of modern life and work, demand a population that is adaptable, resilient and, perhaps above all, sensitized to learning, and a system of lifelong learning that both fosters and embodies these qualities by providing opportunities for adults to learn throughout life.