Gábor Halász
Education Policy Reform in the
European Union
(Education policy for growth, employment and
social cohesion)
Manuscript of the published version. To be quoted as follows:
Halász, Gábor (2013). European Union: The Strive
for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth in: Yan Wang (ed.): Education
Policy Reform Trends in G20 Members. Springer. pp.
267-288
Content
Education sector reform policies of
the EU
Policy reforms and strategic goals
in the education sector
Policies related with particular subsystems
Lifelong learning as a general policy
framework
The content of community LLL policy
A central element: reforming
qualification systems
The higher education modernisation
agenda of the community
The implementation of community education
policies
Governance and policy instruments
The future of education reform policies
of the EU
Abstract
This article aims at presenting the key
features of the education policy of the EU as part of its overall reform
agenda. It exposes the specific strategic community priorities related with the
various subsystems of education (vocational training, higher education, school
education and adult learning), and also the horizontal goals that overarch the
subsystems. The main components of the lifelong learning paradigm, as a general
policy framework, are presented, with a special focus on the EU’s higher
education modernisation agenda. A detailed picture of various policy
instruments the community uses to support policy implementation is also
presented. The final section of the article analyses the possible future developments
of education reform policy in the EU.
---
Policy reform in the case of the European Union
has a different meaning than for all the other G20 members. The EU, in contrast
with the other G20 countries, is not a state. Although it shares many features
with “normal” nation states, it is a unique political construct that cannot be
described as a “real state”. Even though it has its citizens, its parliament,
its government and its policies, and it does operate specific mechanisms of
governance these are different from those characterising “real states”. The EU
is more than an intergovernmental
international organisation (for example, in certain policy areas it has
full regulatory power) but less than a federal
state (like the United States, Canada or Germany) because its constituents
are not “provinces” with limited jurisdictions but powerful sovereign nations.
This unique political construct has, however, highly elaborated policies even
in those sectors where its regulatory power is missing or is very limited –
such as education, for example – and it has a highly developed repertoire of
implementation instruments that are put into operation even in these sectors.
It can and, in fact, it does initiate policy reforms and it does have the
capacity to implement them.
The aim of this
article is to present the key features of the current education policy of the
EU as part of its overall reform agenda. The article intends to show that the
EU has been pursuing marked reform and modernisation policies in the education
sector which are strongly embedded into and determined by its overall policy of
social and economic modernisation. A special focus is given to the question of
how reform policies, which had been defined at community level, are implemented
in the member states. This focus is justified by the fact that implementing
reform policies in the EU context is particularly challenging since the EU
consists of sovereign members states which have almost full control of
governing their education systems. The article does not have the intention to
present specific policy reforms within specific EU member countries: it deals
only with community level goals and actions.
Education
sector reform policies of the EU
In the field of education the EU has a
well-focussed reform policy which aims at enhancing modernisation processes in
its member states. This reform policy is directly connected with its broader
policy for “smart, sustainable and inclusive
growth” as formulated in the so called EU2020
strategy proposed by the European Commission[1] and adopted by the main
decision-making and law-making body of the Union: the Council of the ministers.[2] “Smart” refers to the goal of founding growth on the most advanced
technologies, “sustainable” refers to
both environment friendly and efficient growth and “inclusive” refers to the goal of enhancing the maintenance of
social cohesion.
The direct antecedent of the EU2020 strategy is
the so called Lisbon strategy,
adopted by heads of states of the European Union one decade earlier, in March
2000. The latter set goals for social and economic development to be reached by
the end of the last decade. The EU2020 strategy is, in fact, the continuation
or the prolongation of the Lisbon Strategy in an enriched and updated form.
They both have been urging major reforms in the “European economic and social
model” in order to improve the competitiveness of Europe while reinforcing
social cohesion and protecting the environment. They both have been translated
into specific sectoral strategies, including one for the education sector.
During the last decade this was the “Education and Training 2010” strategy, and
its prolongation, currently in force, is called “Education and Training 2020”.
Policy reforms
and strategic goals in the education sector
The current “Education and Training 2020”
strategy, proposed by the European Commission, was adopted by the ministers of
education in 2009,[3] that is, prior to the overall “big”
growth strategy. This is an important fact because it shows that the education
sector is not simply implementing the “big” strategy but it also plays a kind
of forerunner role. The prominent role of the education sector in the Europe
2020 growth strategy is shown even better by the fact that from the 8
measurable key policy targets (“headline targets”) approved by the heads of
states in summer 2010[4] two are directly related with
education (early school leaving and tertiary graduation) and three others
(employment rate, R&D and poverty reduction) are strongly, although
indirectly linked with the performance of the education sector (see 1. Table)
1. Table
Europe 2020 targets[5]
|
Targets |
Estimated
starting value in 2010 |
Target value by
2020 |
|
1.Employment rate
(in %) |
73.70-74% |
75% |
|
2.R&D in % of
GDP |
2.65-2.72% |
3% |
|
3.CO2 emission
reduction targets2 |
-20% (compared
to 1990 levels) |
-20% (compared
to 1990 levels) |
|
4.Renewable energy |
20% |
20% |
|
5.Energy
efficiency – reduction of energy consumption in Mtoe |
206.9 Mtoe |
20% increase in energy
efficiency equalling 368 Mtoe |
|
6.Early school
leaving in % |
10.30-10.50% |
10% |
|
7.Tertiary
education in % |
37.50-38.0% |
40% |
|
8.Reduction of
population at risk of poverty or social exclusion in number of persons |
Cannot be calculated
because of differences in national methodologies |
20,000,000 |
According to the text adopted at the highest
political level the goal of the community is “improving
education levels, in particular by aiming to reduce school drop-out rates to
less than 10% and by increasing the share of 30-34 years old having completed
tertiary or equivalent education to at least 40%”.[6] This has sent a very clear message to the member countries: in the context
of the current financial crisis they should restore the balance of their
national budgets so that spending on education and training remains a priority.
The specific education sector strategy adopted
in 2009 defined four major objectives: (1) “making lifelong learning and
mobility a reality”, (2) “improving the quality and efficiency of education and
training”, (3) “promoting equity, social cohesion and active citizenship” and
(4) “enhancing creativity and innovation, including entrepreneurship, at all
levels of education and training”. Three of these four objectives are not new:
they have been present in the sectoral strategy since the beginning of the
previous decade. The fourth one (creativity and entrepreneurship) has also been
supported by the community for a longer time, even if it did not figure among the
big sectoral objectives set in the previous main strategy document. Under each
of the four priority areas a number of specific key policy initiatives have
been launched.
The policy initiative that might have the
strongest and the deepest influence on the development of the education systems
in the member states is the reform of national qualifications systems
triggered by the adoption of the European Qualifications Framework (EQF).[7] This is a so-called “meta-framework”
which aims at orientating national qualifications reforms within the member
countries. The latter have committed themselves to establish their own national
qualifications frameworks following the EQF principles, that is, linking the
level of each national qualification to the European standards and describing
specific qualifications in terms of learning outcomes defined as knowledge,
skills and competences. The new national frameworks are to mediate towards the
national education systems a common way of thinking about learning and about
the formal recognition of outcomes of learning. Although this is a fully
voluntary process, based on the autonomous decisions of each member country, it
would be difficult for any of them to keep away from this harmonisation of
national qualifications systems. In fact, the progress of this process shows
that voluntary cooperation might often be a stronger unifying force than
compelling regulations.
This is also demonstrated by the much better
known Bologna process by which
European countries are creating a European Area of Higher Education which also means harmonising
higher education systems. It is important to stress that this is an
intergovernmental process, launched outside the European Union by countries among
which several have never been and will never be members of the EU. While
harmonising the structure of educational system of its member countries is
formally excluded by the EU Treaty, this is something that can be done and is
being done on a voluntary basis. The European Commission supports the Bologna
process by its implementation capacities but it is not the “master” of it. The
commission has its own higher education policy priorities that actually go
beyond the scope of the Bologna process as they include reform goals related
with funding and governance which are not part of the latter and
they stress particularly strongly the mission of higher education in enhancing economic
growth and competitiveness.
Policies
related with the particular subsystems of
education
Traditionally vocational training has been the strongest component of community
education and training policy because this was the only education-related field
in which the original Treaty of Rome has
endowed the Community with formal competences. This was extended to general
education only in more than three decades later with the Maastrich Treaty. Vocational training is still a central component of the
policies of the Union but today it is strongly embedded into a more general
policy of skills and human resource development. This policy area has always
been strongly connected with employment policy, and for more than one decade
with the policy of lifelong learning which became part of the employment
strategy of the Union developed after the conclusion of the Amsterdam Teaty
in 1997. A key element of vocational training policy has been the efforts to
make vocational qualifications mutually recognised and transparent in order to
enhance the free movement of labour. The Union has significantly contributed to
promoting the value and social recognition of vocational training in the member
states.
Since the eighties higher education has also become a key policy area. Originally the
related policies and measures were focusing on mobility, inter-university
cooperation and strengthening linkages between higher education and industry
but since the first part of the last decade the Union has been promoting a
general modernisation strategy that goes well beyond the original focus. Linked
with the Lisbon strategy, its departure point is a rather gloomy picture of the
state of higher education in Europe, or, as the Commission has put it
diplomatically in its most recent communication: “the potential of European higher education institutions to fulfil their
role in society and contribute to Europe's prosperity remains underexploited”
(European Commission, 2011a; 2). It has proposed reforms or improvements in
three specific areas: curricula, funding and governance. The curriculum reform
component aims at making teaching better connected to the needs of the world of
work and make European universities more attractive globally. Funding reform
aims at enlarging and diversifying the funding basis of higher education, and making
it less dependent on direct state funding. The aim of governance reform is to
make universities more autonomous, more accountable and more entrepreneurial.
School policy is a relatively recent component of community
education policies. The strongest element of this is the decision taken by the
Council and the European Parliament in 2006 to support the development of eight
key competences in the school systems
of the member countries. Based on a strong mandate, given by
the heads of states in Lisbon in 2000, and after years of difficult
professional debates and negotiations the Commission proposed eight key
competences that all European citizens should possess (see box).
Although the recommendation of the Council and the European Parliament is about
key competences “for lifelong learning”,
that is, formally they are not linked to any specific sub-systems of the
education system, and the legal text does not mention the word curriculum, it
is clear that this has a major impact on the conception of school education and
school curricula. This has been made clear when the commission launched, in
2008, a public debate on the question of “What should our schools be like in
the 21st century?” and the theme of key competences was in the centre of this
debate. The policy proposal of the Commission emerging from this debate was
entitled “Improving competences for the 21st Century: An Agenda for European
Cooperation on Schools” (European Commission, 2008), and it placed the
implementation of the key competence recommendation into the focus its proposed
school policy. The recommendation, although unevenly, has had a significant
impact on school policies in most member countries, often supporting ongoing
domestic reforms targeted at standards, teaching practices and assessment (Gordon et al., 2009).
The European Key Competences[8]
ð Communication in the mother tongue;
ð Communication in the mother tongue
ð Communication in foreign languages
ð Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology
ð Digital competence
ð Learning to learn
ð Social and civic competences
ð Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship
ð Cultural awareness and expression
Besides the definition of key
competences the professional development of teachers has become a cornerstone
of community school policy. In the second half of the last decade education
ministers meeting in the Council have adopted several decisions on this theme,[9] recognizing the
strategic role of the quality of the teacher labor force in educational
development. The theme of teachers was also the first among the thirteen action
areas defined on the basis of the Lisbon mandate in the “Education and Training
2010” program which guided the education policy related activities of the
community during the last decade.
A fourth area seen as a subsystem of education is adult learning. In 2007, after a
Europe-wide consultation process the Commission proposed a separate policy
package on adult learning which was backed, later on by the Council and the
Parliament.[10] This was a kind of
renewal of the recognition of “adult learning as a key component of lifelong
learning” which has already been well reflected in the fact that participation
in lifelong learning of adults is one of the major sectoral benchmarks in education.
According to this benchmark, set originally in 2003, by 2020 15% of adults aged
25-64 should participate in adult learning as measured by the European Labour
Force Survey which „asks about participation in formal and
non-formal learning in the 4 weeks prior to the survey” (European Commission, 2011b; 34).
Horizontal policies
There are several horizontal
EU policies and priorities in the education field that are not necessarily
linked with any particular subsystems of the education system although in some
cases they are connected stronger with one than with another area. Perhaps the
most important of them is supporting equity
which has been present in education-related community policies since the
beginning of cooperation in this sector in various forms, such as fighting
against school failure, facilitating transition from school to work, promoting
“second chance schools”, supporting the integration of children with special
needs and that of immigrants and ethnic minorities. As referred to earlier (see 1. Table) reducing the
proportion of early school leavers is currently a major policy goal
supported by one of the community benchmarks.
The promotion of information
technology in education has been a similar horizontal priority. The
importance of this was recognised at community level earlier than in most
members states and a number of specific programs have been launched or
supported by the European Commission.[11] Quality assurance and development is a
further policy priority that is relevant for all subsystems. The European
approach to quality has had a major impact on national approaches, especially
regarding such principles as the balance of internal and external evaluation,
the involvement of stakeholders in quality processes and the use of quality
management for strategic improvement.[12] Finally the
promotion of cooperation between education
and business has also been a permanent priority of community policies in
education.[13]
Recently the theme of education/business nexus has been
strongly connected with the issue of the contribution of education to innovation. Strengthening the innovation
capacity of the Union has been a central component of community policies having
a strong impact on education sectoral policy. Ministers declared 2009 the “European
Year of Creativity and Innovation” in order to “raise awareness of the importance of
creativity and innovation for personal, social and economic development; to
disseminate good practices; to stimulate education and research, and to promote
policy debate on related issues“[14] and now one of the “flagship” action programs of the Union in the
framework of the EU2020 strategy is about innovation.[15]
Lifelong learning as the general policy framework
Since the beginning of the last decade all education sector
reform policies of the European Union have been ranged under the umbrella of
lifelong learning (LLL). The notion of LLL covers all subsystems of education,
including informal and non-formal learning outside the formal education system
and it is now seen as a kind of new paradigm of thinking about the world of
education and education policies.
The content of community LLL policy
The idea to put lifelong learning into the very center of
community education policy goes back to the seventies when
the first major proposal for a community policy in education was formulated (Janne, 1973) but this became a central commitment of the
European Commission only following the creation of legal bases for community
actions in the education sector in the 1992 Maastrich
Treaty (European
Commission, 1993). The first detailed
and coherent policy for LLL was proposed by the European Commission at the very
beginning of the last decade following a one year long, active public debate in
the member countries (European Commission, 2001). It is important to stress that this has been
initiated as a “shared policy” of the employment and the education sectors.
Making LLL policy highly operationalised and explicitly formulated became
inevitable by the
launching of the policy coordination process in employment policy following the
Amsterdam Treaty in 2007.
As we saw, “making lifelong learning and mobility a
reality” is the first of the four priorities of the education sector strategy
adopted in 2009 for the current decade. Since its inception the LLL
policy of the community has been confirmed, extended and deepened by a number
of important decisions of the Council and the Parliament[16] but the main lines of
this policy are more or less the same as they were set at the beginning. The so
called “building blocks” of this policy (see box below) together have created a
new paradigm that seems gradually to gain ground in the member countries partly
due to the use of the community policy instruments (to be presented in more
details below) supporting implementation. Since every member state is supposed
to devise and implement a national LLL strategy, and both the strategy and its
implementation are regularly evaluated by the community, there is a high
probability that the European strategy has a significant influence on the
content of the national documents and its building blocks do appear in the
latter.
The key components of the LLL policy of the European Union[17]
ð “Valuing learning” (recognising competences acquired in informal and non formal learning; learning outcomes based qualifications reform)
ð “Information, guidance and counselling” (the development of lifelong guidance systems and European policy cooperation in this area)
ð “Investing time and money in learning” (promoting regulatory policies that support individual and company investment into learning)
ð “Bringing together learners and learning opportunities” (promoting flexibility in employment and education regulations so that they make it adult learning easier)
ð “Basic skills” (defining new standard frameworks for key competences and re-directing teaching to develop these competences)
ð “Innovative pedagogy” (enhancing innovation in education, especially in classroom level teaching/learning so that learning environments become more favourable for lifelong learning)
Since it has become the basic framework of community
education policy more than one decade ago the paradigm of lifelong learning has
gone through some evolution but, as mentioned, its basic pillars have remained
broadly the same. Lifelong learning has always been understood in a very broad
sense in the EU, encompassing all forms of learning from early childhood
education (which has recently become a major priority area) to the workplace
learning of adults. A key feature of this paradigm is to put the learner (the
demand side) into the centre of education and training policies instead of
providers (that is, the supply side), which has far-reaching implications for
all policy aspects including legal regulation, funding or pedagogy. Opening the
education sector towards the “outside world”, that is,
strengthening its connections with the word of work and giving business a
greater role has ever been a major priority in community education policy. This
orientation has sometimes been criticized by those who think the education
policy pursued by the EU is too “instrumental” or too much oriented by
“neo-liberal values”(e.g. Field, 1998, Borg–Mayo, 2007; Lee–Thayer–Madyun, 2008).
A central element: reforming national qualification
systems
From an EU perspective the most important component of national LLL strategies and reform policies is, as already referred to earlier, the development of national qualifications frameworks (NQF) in accordance with the common European meta-framework (EQF). According to a recent official EU report by October of 2012 29 member or candidate member countries were developing or have already designed a comprehensive NQF covering all types and levels of qualifications. NQFs have been “formally adopted” in 21 countries: four of them have „fully implemented” their NQFs and seven of them were “entering an early operational stage” (CEDEFOP, 2012).
A particularly interesting element of this
implementation process is the so called “referencing”
which aims at checking whether national categories match correctly the
corresponding European levels (Coles, 2011). This is the condition for national
awarding institutions to issue national diplomas or other qualifications
containing an indication of their “European level”. Since this is in the
interest of the citizens who have obtained these qualifications there is a
pressure on national governments to perform the referencing process even if
they are not legally bound to do so. And, since the European framework is based
on defining learning outcomes, national frameworks have also to follow the same
logic.
One of the most important outcomes of the progression of
LLL policies, including the implementation of EQF, is the blurring of
borderlines between the various sub-systems of education, on the one hand, and
between sectoral policies affecting the development of education, on the other.
It is now difficult to draw a sharp distinction between policy areas such as
education, employment, social care, regional development or innovation policy.
The LLL approach has created a kind of common policy space in which measures
taken in the various policy areas reinforce each other and create synergies.
The advancement of LLL policies in the member countries has now reached a stage that we could perhaps describe as a new policy generation often called skills policy. (European Commission, 2010b; OECD, 2012). Skills policies tend to put a strong stress on the demand side (as opposed to the supply side), they put more stress on workplace or work-based learning (as opposed to learning in schools), they see skills utilisation as important as skills production, and they shift the attention from matching demand towards creating skills equilibrium (OECD, 2012; Campbell, 2012). A new skills policy for the European Union was proposed by the European Commission in 2008 and this became the object of one of the 7 flagship action programs supporting the implementation of the EU2020 strategy.[18]
The
higher education modernisation agenda of the community
The lifelong learning paradigm has given a new direction to community policies
related with all subsystems of education. There is one sub-sector policy that
deserves being treated in more detail because of its key contribution to the
Lisbon agenda and the EU2020 strategy: this is higher education. The European
Commission has continuously supported efforts to make higher education part of
the broader lifelong learning system, although European academic circles have
been reacting rather ambiguously to these efforts:. We can observe both
extremely positive and very reluctant reactions. The former can be symbolized,
for example, by the emergence of professional networks supporting “University Lifelong Learning”,[19] or by the adoption of the “European
Universities’ Charter on Lifelong Learning” by the European University
Association in 2008 (EUA, 2008). The latter can be symbolized by the high
number of “critical” analyses of both the higher education policy of the
community and the Bologna process.[20]
The higher education modernisation agenda of
the Union interacts in an interesting way with the intergovernmental Bologna
process, the latter aiming at the creation of a European Higher Education Area.
This is a typical pattern of European education policy making which often
transfers issues of contention either to other sectors, where the policy
environment is friendlier or outside the Union into policy spaces with a more
favourable dynamics (Corbett, 2011). This is also one of the examples of
member country governments using the community to legitimate policies that are
difficult to get through within their domestic policy-making machinery. In fact
a large proportion of the academic community in the member countries seem to be
reluctant to accept the higher education modernisation agenda of the EU. As
formulated in a recent publication: “there
is (…) concern, particularly voiced in some European university systems, that
by increasing university dependence on non-state resources and deepening their
engagement with industry and commerce, universities will lose their freedom to
act in their traditional role as critics of society” (Shattock,
2008; 14).
In fact, there are leading
European academics who think that the EU is going too far in subordinating
higher education policy to the needs of economic growth, competitiveness and
employment and they are not happy with the proposal of the Commission to “involving employers and labour market
institutions in the design and delivery of programmes, supporting staff
exchanges and including practical experience in courses can help attune
curricula to current and emerging labour market needs and foster employability
and entrepreneurship.” (European Commission, 2011; 5).
Some observers describe the higher education
policy of the EU as efforts to reformulate the existing tacit contract between
higher education, the society and the state. This is a difficult process
supported half-heartedly by a large part of the European academic community
which has been often accusing the EU of being too “instrumental” in its
thinking about the goals of higher education. This was expressed recently in
the following way in the keynote speech of a leading European higher education
researcher at an EU conference during the Polish presidency: “European higher education systems will have
to find a fair balance in expected transformations so that the academic
profession is not deprived of its traditional voice in university management
and governance; so that the European professoriate still unmistakably belongs
to the middle classes; and so that universities are still substantially
different in their operations from the business sector, being somehow, although
not necessarily in a traditional manner, ‘unique’ or ‘specific’ organizations”( Kwiek,
2012; 9).
The higher education policy
of the European Union is strongly influenced by its innovation (or research and
technology) policy. The latter has ever been a key element of community
policies but it was given a new impetus within both the Lisbon agenda and – as
mentioned above – in the EU2020 strategy. A related study rightly stated a few
years ago that “higher education and research are interpreted as sub-systems of
a larger overall European innovation policy” (van Vught,
2009; 18). The innovation policy of the European Union is very strongly
connected with industrial policy. As one of the relevant
websites of the European Commission puts it: “Innovation policy is about
helping companies to perform better and contributing to wider social objectives
such as growth, jobs and sustainability”.[21] Most university leaders as well as decision
makers in higher education policy share the idea that universities should play
a stronger role in making European enterprises more competitive through
boosting innovation. This has been recently manifested by the creation of a
platform entitled “Empower European Universities” by “eminent thinkers and practitioners of
higher education” with the aim of putting more pressure on national governments
to shape national higher education policies so that they serve better the goals
of European competitiveness and innovation.[22] These “thinkers and practitioners”
– led by the Dutch ex-minister and former vice-president of the World Bank Jo
Ritzen, who is one of those politicians who made,
during many years, perhaps the most for advancing European cooperation in the education sector
– share the idea that universities can “save Europe from its current economic
problems” and “universities can contribute to recreating hope and optimism
through more innovation in the economy”.[23]
The implementation of community education policies
The responsibility for the
implementation of community policies is shared between the member states and
the European Commission. The common discourse describes the European Commission
as the “government” of the Union. It has, in fact, at its disposal a wide range
of policy implementation instruments, similarly to national governments,
excluding one: legislation.
Governance and policy instruments
Law making in the European
Union is the prerogative of the Council of ministers and the European Parliament
which adopt the policy proposals of the Commission and translate them into
legal actions. The Commission is not, however, without power and effective
competence. The “indirect” or “soft” competences of the Commission are
particularly important in the education sector where the law-making competence
of the Union is very limited: it is, according to the EU Treaty, supposed to supplement and support and not to replace the actions of national governments. The
European Union, unlike its member states, does not have direct responsibility
to provide educational services. Its main function is to promote development
and modernisation, and the instruments it uses are the product of a several
decade policy evolution. Today it commands sophisticated institutional mechanisms
that one can describe as consisting of the following key elements: (1)
structural and cohesion policy, (2) cross-sectoral instruments, (3) educational
programs, (4) policy coordination, (5) knowledge and information management.
Structural
and cohesion policy is probably the most
important as it is served by two major funds: the European Social Fund
and the European Regional Development Fund. The Commission uses them to
support structural adjustment in the member states and the reduction of development
disparities between them. The former is under the supervision of Directorate of
Employment and Social Affairs Directorate, the latter is managed by its
Directorate of Regional Development. Since the beginning of the last decade
supporting the modernisation of national education systems figures among the
goals of structural and cohesion policy and money from these funds can be used
for this purpose. Education sector development programs are planned as part of
the multi-annual national development programs of the member states, typically
as a component of multi-sectoral human resource development or regional
development programs. They have to be in accordance with the general
regulations of the structural funds which specify the eligibility criteria for
community co-funding. Only educational development programs supporting growth,
employability and social cohesion can get community support, in accordance with
the strategies mentioned in the first part on this article.
Cross-sectoral
instruments or policy instruments of other sectors than
education are particularly important in the European Union for influencing
developments in the education sector. The “travelling” of policies from one
sector to another has always been an important element of the implementation
strategy of the European Commission (Halász, 2003). Sectoral policies are
nowhere isolated from each other and this is particularly true in the Union.
Lifelong learning and skills development are key components of employment
policy. Education is seen a one of the most important instruments of community
policies aiming at fighting against poverty and exclusion. As we referred to in
the previous paragraph, human resource development is a major component of
structural and cohesion policies as well as regional development policies. The
policy of common market and competition covers all areas of cross-border flow
of products and services, including the products and services of what we call
the “learning industry” (e.g. educational publishing, the educational use of
information technology or private provision of educational services).
Transferring policy issues from one sector to another is very common in the
Union: there have been many examples when policy initiatives were launched in
the sector where member states were the most receptive for them.
Those within the education
sector tend to see the so called educational
programs as the most important sectoral policy instrument, although the
resources available here are much lower than those
spent directly or indirectly on educational development through the structural
or the employment/social policy (Moschonas,
1998).
Education programs are, nevertheless, increasingly important as illustrated by
the continuous growth of their budget since the first of them was launched in
1986 (see 1.
Figure). Originally
there were separated programs for each subsystem of education – the names of
the original programs, connected to the four big subsystems (that is, Comenius
for schools, Erasmus for higher education, Leonardo for vocational training and
Grundtvig for adult education), are still in use – but today they are
integrated into the so called Lifelong Learning Program (LLP).[24] They fund a wide
range of actions such as student and teacher mobility, pedagogical innovations,
inter-institutional cooperation, various networking or policy development
projects. Funding from the educational programs is typically project-based:
proposals submitted by institutions or individuals are selected either by the
national LLP agencies of by a central agency in Brussels. Proposals have to be
in accordance with eligibility criteria defined by the Council decision[25] about the new generations
of programs and the selection is based typically on competitive open tenders.
1. Figure
The total budget of educational
programs 1986–2013
(million euro, current prices)
Source: European Commission (2006):
Policy-coordination
Since the decision on the
Lisbon strategy a new policy coordination mechanism has been developed
and applied also in the education sector. The so called Open Method of
Coordination (OMC) is an innovative method of governance in the European
Union tested first in the employment and social policy area following the
Amsterdam Treaty (1997). In 2000 the decision of the Lisbon European Council[26] opened the way
to apply it also in the education sector. Normally the OMC consists of four
components: (1) the setting of common policy goals, (2) the definition of
measurable indicators and benchmarks linked with these goals, (3) member states
translating the common goals into national action plans and reporting on
progress, and (4) community evaluation of national performance including the
formulation of country specific policy recommendations. In fact, OMC is applied
to education sector in two different, parallel channels. On the one hand, the education
sector has developed its own OMC mechanism in the “Education and Training 2010”
strategy framework and, later on, this was prolonged under the name of
“Education and Training 2020” strategy. [27] On the other
hand, education and training related elements appear also in the “big” growth
and employment strategy of the EU (the Lisbon strategy and, later, the Europe
2020 strategy), that is sectoral policy coordination takes place also in the
overall framework of coordination.
The OMC applied in the
education sector is a kind of “lightened” version: member countries are not
obliged to elaborate specific sectoral national action plans (although, as
mentioned, the education and training sector, together with others, appears in
the overarching national action plans for growth and employment). Countries
have been, however, obliged – since 2004 – to submit biannual education sector
progress reports to the Council and the Commission and the latter has performed
a regular evaluation of their policy achievements. This is
done for each individual country; and also for the community as a whole (see
the summarized results of the last such evaluation in 2. Figure). The figure
shows time series of values for five key targets: growth of studying
maths/science/technology, participation in adult lifelong learning, the
proportion of early school leavers, the proportion of those acquiring upper
secondary qualifications and the proportion of low achievers in reading. The
dotted line symbolises the target values, the five other lines the actual
achieved values of the five target areas.
2. Figure
The average value of
education sector benchmark indicators between 2000 and 2010 compared to planed
progression
Source: European Commission,
2011b
Policy coordination in every
sector, but particularly in education, is achieved partly through symbolic
instruments such as giving feedback and enhancing policy learning. The
community has devoted significant resources to develop activities that made it
possible for national authorities to take part in working groups and clusters
aiming at developing common frameworks and standards (such as the European key
competence framework mentioned earlier) and learning from the experiences of
those member states which have performed better than others in certain areas.[28] This leads us to
the fifth community policy instrument knowledge and information management.
In fact, the European Commission, having no direct regulatory power in
education uses knowledge and information spreading as one of the most important
tools to achieve its policy goals in this sector. The Commission is an advanced
knowledge broker in a perfect position as it sees developments at the same time
in 27 different systems. In the eyes of the Commission the 27 national systems
behave as living laboratories: trying out permanently various policy solutions.
Some of these solutions fail, but others survive and prove to be successful.
The Commission invests much into gathering, analysing and spreading information
about these processes. Given the fact that, contrary to national governments,
it does not have local executive branches, it is obliged to gather information
through various surveys and quasi-scientific analyses, which make it more
knowledgeable than most national governments having no similar knowledge
management facilities.[29]
The
future of education reform policies of the EU
The future of education reform policies of the
EU seem to depend on two main factors: the relationship between the community
and its members and the capacity of the community to influence the behaviour of
its members, on the one hand, and the relationship between policies in the
education sector and other sectors, on the other. During the past decades we
could witness two key trends. One was the continuously growing role of the EU
in education policy and its increasing capacity to influence educational developments
in its member states. The other was the permeability of borderlines between
education policies and other policy areas and the continuous possibility for
other sectors to influence the development of education. The key question is
whether these two trends will continue in the future.
If the answer to the second question is
affirmative we anticipate the continuation of the trend of education being seen
as a key factor in social and economic development, that is, in supporting
Europe to become more competitive in the emerging global knowledge economy
while preserving the values of equity, inclusion and sustainability. If the
first question is also answered positively, we can predict that the EU as a
community, instead of being an abstract entity above the concrete reality of
the member states, will remain a real common space for educational policy
development on the European continent.
As for the second question, the probability of
the affirmative answer is very high. Given the fact that the EU does not have
direct responsibility for the daily operation of systems of educational
provision, the vested interests of social actors whose fate depends on the
specific institutional arrangements of given sectors and of the different
subsystems of education do not play a dominant role in determining the content
of education policy. Thus, community education policy will remain future- and
reform-oriented, and it will not lose its openness to the variety of sectoral
agendas and approaches particularly in employment, social affairs, regional
development and innovation. The EU will probably continue to play a leading
role in fostering modernisation and educational reforms in Europe.
The first question – the potential impact of EU
on the member states – is less easy to answer. We see in several members states
the growth of “euro-scepticism”: it becomes more and more frequent that
political groups opposing the transfer of power from the nations to the
supranational entity gain power in national elections. There are strong actors
in each national education system that are not welcoming the modernisation
agendas – be they national or supranational – and therefore are not susceptible
to the current orientation of EU policies. They are, therefore, typically
opposed to EU interference into national affairs in the education sector even
if they have, in general pro-European attitudes.
There are perhaps three factors that
might increase the probability of the influence of the EU growing further. The
first is related with the current fiscal, monetary and economic crisis. The
crisis has been forcing member states, particularly those using the Euro as
their currency, to tighten monetary coordination and budget control. For
instance, the so called “European semester”, which is also described as “new
architecture for the new EU Economic governance”[30] mechanism, adopted by the member
states in September 2010 is now making possible the ex-ante coordination of
national budgetary and economic policies. The education sector cannot, naturally,
remain unaffected by this, even if the jurisdiction of the EU continues to be
very restricted in this policy area, since this process affects all budget
areas, without exception. The second factor is related with our second
question: the increasingly cross-sectoral nature of education policy. If the
opponents of the EU modernisation agenda get strength in national education
systems and make the dynamics of national education policy shift towards and
“anti-European” line, this will not prevent the penetration of education and
training related EU policies into the national systems through doors opened by
other sectors.
The third factor is connected with the internal
dynamic of the development of policy instruments within the EU. Some of them –
such as the instruments of structural policy and those embedded into the
education programs – are developed and redeployed in a cyclical way through
medium term re-planning. The rules of the use of the structural funds as well
as those of the education programs are re-formulated every seventh year based
on the experiences gained during implementation. As evaluations often criticise
the existence of parallelisms and the fragmented character of programs and the
lack of strategic coherence the re-formulating exercise typically results in
streamlining and in the reinforcement of strategic orientations. One can expect
this to happen also in the current revision period. Streamlining and
strengthening strategic lines always imply stronger community control and less
exposure to the specific fragmented interests of the member states. This would
mean, in the case of structural policy that member states will have to
subordinate their national development goals even more to common strategic
priorities, that is, they will have to devise, for example, education
development programs that will be even more linked with the overall
modernisation agenda of the Union. In the case of education programs
institutions and individuals in the member states will have to make even more
efforts, if they want to win community support, to demonstrate that their
proposals are in line with the EU priorities.
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The author
Dr. Gábor Halász is professor of education at the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology of the University Eötvös Loránd (ELTE) in Budapest where he is leading a Centre for Higher Educational Management. He teaches, among others, education policy, education and European integration, global trends in education and sociology of higher education. He is the former Director-General of the National Institute for Public Education in Budapest (now Institute for Educational Research and Development) where he is now scientific advisor. His major research fields are education policy and governance, comparative and international education, skills formation policies and theory of education systems. He has worked as an expert consultant for a number of international organizations, particularly the OECD, the European Commission, the World Bank, and the Council of Europe. Since 1996 he has been representing Hungary in the Governing Board of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation of OECD (between 2004 and 2007 he was president, and between 2011 and 2012 acting president of this Board). For more information see Gábor Halász’ personal homepage: (http://halaszg.ofi.hu/English_index.html).
