Aligning skills and lifelong learning for human-centred sustainable development

In response to changing forms of work, and to a world impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of national and intergovernmental policy papers have focused on skills and lifelong learning. The International Labour Organisation Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work (International Labour Organisation [ILO], 2019) and global call to action for a human-centred recovery from the COVID-19 crisis (ILO, 2021a) have highlighted the renewed importance of skills development and lifelong learning as the key enablers of human development to ensure full, productive and freely chosen employment and decent work, productive employment and sustainable development.

Why has a skills agenda once again become conjoined with lifelong learning policy making? Technological changes, demographic shifts, globalisation of production and consumption, environmental and climate change are all impacting and disrupting the world of work. Increasing unemployment, underemployment and skill mismatches are resulting in labour market gaps and inequalities. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these disruptions in many places, and driven the need for new ways of working.

This time, however, the links between skills and lifelong learning are being conceived through the lens of ‘human-centredness’. The UNESCO report ‘Reimagining Our Futures Together, a new social contract for education’ (UNESCO, 2021) conceptualises the alignment of skills and lifelong learning in ways that challenge previous instrumental notions of education for the economy. It suggests that the right to education needs to be broadened to encompass lifelong learning and the right to information, culture, science and connectivity. In this way, the report acknowledges that whilst education cannot solve structural problems in economies and the proliferation of poor insecure and precarious jobs, a human-centred approach to learning that is lifelong, inclusive and emancipatory will ensure that people can be creative and innovate to improve their lives in these uncertain times.

But what would a human-centred approach to skills and lifelong learning be, and how might this develop? Although the UNESCO and the ILO call for human-centred approaches to skills and learning ‘which puts workers’ rights and the needs, aspirations and rights of all people at the heart of economic, social and environmental policies’ (ILO, 2019, p. 3), their policy statements are notable for the absence of any definition of such forms of pedagogy. Instead, the ILO makes claims about the outcomes expected from such learning:

Education, training, lifelong learning and guidance enable individuals to acquire skills, capabilities and qualifications to become active members of labour markets and society, including those skills as identified in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 4.7. They drive inclusive social and economic growth, enable technological advancement for sustainable enterprises and enhance the abilities of workers and their capacity to make use of the opportunities available for jobs and decent work. They facilitate successful and equitable labour market transitions and contribute to reducing skills mismatches, including skills gaps and shortages. (ILO.109/record No. 10A paragraph 4 page 3)This quote is from ILO 2021b please amend reference

Similarly, rather than stating what human-centred learning comprises, UNESCO’s Futures of Learning report explains that there is a problem with the existing expansion of education systems framed by transactional notions of education that regard the purpose solely as increasing economic benefits. Such an approach, the report contends, ‘has created opportunities for many’, but ‘vast numbers have been left with low quality learning.’ (UNESCO, 2021, p. 8). Clearly, whilst participation in schooling and university higher education has risen in many countries, educational inequalities have also increased. McLean’s (2022) recent article in this journal shows that while access to education expanded globally over the period 1950–2020, so did inequalities. McLean (2022) draws attention to the present challenge of access to tertiary education for those adults who do not continue in education beyond secondary school. While university numbers have risen, participation in vocational education and training remains low, especially in low-income countries; ILO data has reported that 1 in 5 young people (aged 16–24) are not in education, training or employment and two-thirds of these are women (UNESCO, 2021).

Funding for the skills and adult lifelong learning sector has been neglected with flow-on effects on participation by adults in higher technical or professional education, whether provided by universities or colleges of further education. This neglect has been particularly acute in Anglophone countries. For example, in England, since the introduction of 9,000 GBP fees in 2012, participation in higher education by those over the age of 25 years and those wishing to study part-time to change occupational fields and improve their access to worthwhile and decent jobs has declined significantly (Office for Students, 2019). In relation to total spending on further education and skills, Bathmaker and Orr (2022) show that since 2010 there have been year-on-year reductions in spending on all further education and skills provision in England and these reductions have disproportionately affected higher vocational education (higher education provided through further education colleges). Similarly in Australia, Burke’s (2022) analysis of spending on post-school education and training shows a reduction in funding and participation in the non-higher education parts of the tertiary system over the last decade – a reduction, in other words that particularly affects adults.

So why do we need to humanise skills and lifelong learning? Buckingham Shum et al. (2019, p. 2) claim that ‘human-centredness is a characteristic of systems that have been carefully designed by identifying the critical stakeholders, their relationships, and the contexts in which those systems will function’. Human-centredness has been notably absent from many educational systems in recent years. In reviewing post-18 education and its funding in England, for instance, the Augar (2019) report highlighted the parlous state of the adult and further education sector. The report noted that this sector experiences complex funding rules that encourage a focus on short-term horizons offering low-value, easy-to-fill courses often unrelated to the needs of local labour markets or any long-term career planning for students. It also spotlighted how easy it is for students to access funding (through loans) for university courses, irrespective of the value of their outcomes. The report made a number of recommendations relevant to lifelong education: more part-time and later life learning; a stronger higher technical and vocational education sector; increases in funding for further education; more linkages between further and higher education; curricular development to reduce the proliferation of low value degrees; more support for disadvantaged students. The jury is still out on how effective the government’s response to this report will prove (Sibieta et al., 2021).

Anglophone countries, in particular, have been marked by ‘tweaking’ of skills policies to solve the perceived mismatch between education and the skills demands of employers. This misrepresents the problem of how unregulated labour markets, especially, construct poor jobs (Keep & James, 2012). In these countries, getting good jobs often relates more to the brand and marketability of the qualification and the graduate’s readiness for employment in a particular occupational area, than to skills acquired through learning (Brown & Lauder, 2016; Brown & Souto-Otero, 2020). Wheelahan et al. (2022, p. 9) put it another way: when skill formation is separated from occupations and the social relations in which these arise, other socio-political factors affect who has access to decent jobs.

However, there are countries that have paid more attention to the connections between skill formation and access to occupations. Collectively organised systems, such as the dual system of education and training characteristic of countries, such as Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and Austria, encourage employers, employee organisations, educational providers and state sponsors of education and training to cooperate in skill formation (Clarke & Winch, 2006). Arguably, in attending to the interests of different stakeholders, these collectively organised systems exhibit some features of a human-centred approach. However, they are also under threat as globalisation has disrupted labour markets and led to disputes between different stakeholders in the co-design of qualifications for changing occupational pathways and working patterns (Clarke et al., 2021). In response, new and distinctive forms of higher vocational education, combining established vocational pathways with more academised higher education curricula have grown (Ertl, 2020). These new work-related dual study programmes have been able to flourish because they are located in universities of applied sciences, which are institutions occupying a grey area between the influence of employers, trade unions and the university sector (Graf, 2018). Dual study programmes also reduce the cost of higher education to the individual and the public purse and shift responsibility for paying for new skill formation onto employers who employ students during their studies (Graf & Powell, 2022). Consequently, the dual system increasingly has the effect of expanding access to higher education for those that have not followed the school to university academic pathway and for those older learners needing to adapt to changing work structures (Backes-Gellner & Geel, 2014; Maurer, 2022).

This expansion of higher education outside the traditional academic (university) sector is evolving in response to two key policy concerns: an emphasis on high skills as a means of achieving competitiveness on the one hand, and the concern with opening up opportunities for those who have often been excluded from the benefits of the expansion of university higher education (Webb, 2022). A recent book (Knight et al., 2022) explores the range and diversity of higher education in vocational settings in countries and jurisdictions as varied as Chile, South Africa, Germany, the USA, Australia, Canada, and the UK (Scotland and England). The contributors’ assessment of the effectiveness of these approaches in reducing educational inequalities for adults presents a mixed picture. In Anglophone countries, with steep hierarchical distinctions between further and higher education, Wheelahan (2022) opines that she would have expected more higher vocational education to develop, opening up higher education opportunities in liberal market economies for people at different stages of life and position – as has happened in the more collectively organised systems. In England, Australia, and some Canadian provinces, the promise of a broadened skills and lifelong learning tertiary system has been rather underwhelming (Wheelahan, 2022). In Australia, for example, the persistence of a two-tier student funding system (creating divisions between further-vocational and university higher education) has enabled expansion of participation in university bachelor degrees whilst the numbers of students choosing to study industry-related bachelor degree programmes offered by vocational education and training colleges have stalled (Hodge et al., 2022).

Yet there is growing evidence that when policy and funding support the expansion of higher education aligned to occupational and vocational areas and build on people’s prior skills or work-based learning or qualifications, learning has been opened up to people who are older, those who often would not have considered university education when younger, and those who wish to study part-time and undertake career changes to prepare for futures of change (Knight et al., 2022). In these ways, the expansion of more diverse forms of tertiary education appears to be widening opportunities for adults and overcoming some of the inequalities associated with education systems that reproduce inequalities. But are these forms of expansion human-centred, or simply another form of instrumental skill provision offered to a wider range of people across their lifecourse?

Interestingly, the term human-centred learning is most likely to be found in fields of education other than adult education. There is a discernible growth in its use in the field of learning analytics and artificial intelligence to develop critical awareness of the need for pedagogies that are personally relevant to learners and encourage their active learning and engagement (Buckingham Shum et al., 2019). In other words, the term has often emerged in discussions of modalities of learning that have focused on technical non-human matters. A human-centred turn is also discernible within compulsory education. Where previously neo-liberal measures to compare school (and student) achievements have dominated the school quality and choice debates, pedagogies that value care, positive relationships and well-being to prepare young people to live meaningful lives are emerging, providing a human-centred antidote to discourses of the competitive market (Scherto & Garrett, 2017). Arguably, to readers, practitioners and researchers in adult education and learning, conceptualising learning for adults as something that may transform lives, emancipate people and groups that are oppressed and exploited, and be a practice that is engaging, experiential and set within the parameters and motivations of learners and the goals they aspire to, is not new.

Such emancipatory thinking about learning and teaching is also found within the field of vocational education, training and skills. Critiques of the dominance of a skills approach premised on self-interested utilitarian exchanges informed by human capital theory appear to invoke a human-centred approach – albeit without naming it (Wheelahan et al., 2022). For example, drawing on Bernstein’s ideas, Wheelahan (2007) questions whether competency-based skill models for learning enable vocational learners to access the powerful knowledge needed to transform their lives and navigate changing occupational landscapes. Moodie et al. (2018) go further, drawing on the capability framework to argue that productive capabilities, rather than competency skills, are necessary to follow occupational pathways and live a good life. Similarly, in an analysis of the recent English white paper on ‘Skills for jobs: lifelong learning for opportunity and growth’, Beighton (2021) draws on Foucault to argue that this policy focus on those (more than half the population) deemed to be in need of learning to ensure a post COVID-19 recovery is an example of biopolitics whereby a government furthers its interests by exploiting an already vulnerable population. The white paper, Beighton suggests, reflects the dark side of human-centred learning:

We need to understand what this concern represents and implies: an acceleration of the normalisation, medicalisation and management of human potential seen as a threat to be governed, controlled and exploited. The 2021 Paper’s vitalism signals the emergence of a biopolitics which seeks to exploit life forces within the population; a desire to speed up the processes of production by the latter; and a tendency to see the operation of governmentality on belligerent terms with society’s forces in conflict with its own constituents. Thus, with biopower, life itself enters history, and biology enters politics ‘at the level of life itself’ (Foucault, 1976, p. 188). (Beighton, 2021)

Clearly there is a danger that the human-centred turn in skills and lifelong learning policies might lead to further exploitation. Yet there is also hope that, as the UNESCO (2021) report Reimagine Our Futures Together states, if the skills agenda can be connected to the emancipatory traditions of adult education, increasing access to education and knowledge globally will enable collaboration and better futures for all.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).