Educationalisation of youth unemployment through lifelong learning policies in Europe

Oscar Valiente,Jan Peter G De Otero,Queralt Capsada-Munsech

doi:10.1177/1474904120908751

Oscar Valiente, Jan Peter G De Otero + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904120908751

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Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, European authorities reinforced the economic objectives of European lifelong learning policy, promoting employability solutions to address youth unemployment, and increasing their political influence on the implementation of national lifelong learning reforms. This article investigates to what extent these supranational policy orientations have been translated into concrete national lifelong learning initiatives. Although European countries were not equally affected in terms of time and intensity by the rise in youth unemployment rates, the political responses from their governments shared a central focus on employability solutions to youth unemployment in lifelong learning policy reforms. Our comparative analysis shows how different lifelong learning policy initiatives managed to ‘educationalise’ a structural economic problem (i.e. youth unemployment) into an individual educational concern (i.e. lack of education and skills). We argue that the ‘educationalisation’ of youth unemployment through lifelong learning policies is a crisis management strategy, which has allowed governments to focus on the individual symptoms of the problem while avoiding offering solutions to the underlying structural causes of young people’s poor labour market prospects.

Highlights

The impact of economic crises on education policy is becoming an area of growing interest in comparative education research (Peters et al, 2015)
While European Union (EU) Lifelong learning (LLL) policy trends following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) have been increasingly documented and critically analysed within the comparative education literature (Milana and Holford, 2014; Zarifis and Gravani, 2014), much less is known about to what extent these supranational policy orientations have been adopted by national governments and how they have been translated into concrete LLL policy initiatives (Saar et al, 2013), in relation to young people
The main research question of the study is: ‘To what extent have LLL policy orientations promoted by the EU been adopted by national governments and translated into concrete LLL policy initiatives for young people?’ We are interested in investigating how LLL policies have tried to ‘educationalise’ the youth unemployment problem under the employability agenda, and how the economic and educational dimensions of the problem and its solutions are incorporated in the design of LLL policies

Summary

Introduction

The impact of economic crises on education policy is becoming an area of growing interest in comparative education research (Peters et al, 2015). The main research question of the study is: ‘To what extent have LLL policy orientations promoted by the EU been adopted by national governments and translated into concrete LLL policy initiatives for young people?’ We are interested in investigating how LLL policies have tried to ‘educationalise’ the youth unemployment problem under the employability agenda, and how the economic and educational dimensions of the problem and its solutions are incorporated in the design of LLL policies. Personal development is the main objective of many LLL policies in Austria (four out of six), Finland (four out of six) and Germany (three out of six) In these cases, access to LLL opportunities among early leavers from education and training is presented as a strategy to prevent future employment and social inclusion problems among young people (Parreira do Amaral and Zelinka, 2019), which is aligned with EU policy orientations (European Council, 2011). While the problem to be addressed is recognised as economic, the

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