Adult learning has lately been gaining some centrality as a focus topic in the EU education policies due to its key role in the tackling of several ongoing demographic, societal, technological, digital, environmental and economic challenges. This article Adult Education and Training: Statistics Overview from Cedefop, one of the EU’s decentralised agencies, aims at monitoring the current situation of adult education and training through the available statistics from two different sources of information: the Adult Education Survey and the European Labour Force Survey. Recent year’s participation rates are checked and contrasted with existing EU quantitative targets when possible, providing a full picture of ongoing trends and some relevant variables of interest.
First, a brief social and policy context on adult education and training in the EU is outlined. Then, the differences around the two data sources and the reasons behind them are made explicit, so that the participation rate targets can be adequately contrasted with the existing data in the following section. After that, other variables of interest are introduced to further qualify the analysis of participation rates, as well as pointing out the main reasons for non participation. Finally, the article is ended with a section wrapping up the key findings and pointing to some possible conclusions.
