Mapping and comparing mobilisation strategies throughout Europe: Towards making lifelong learning a reality

Making lifelong learning a reality has been a recurring theme within European policy making. Increasing participation of adults can help overcome various Europe-wide challenges, amongst others, skills redundancy, the high number of low-skilled workers in Europe, the high level of early school leaving, and literacy and numeracy difficulties. In order to surmount these challenges governments need to take action to improve their adult learning systems. Throughout Europe a wide variety of mobilisation instruments is deployed aiming at increasing and widening participation of adults (and specific target groups) in learning. However, less is known about which instrument is most effective in addressing specific target groups and learning barriers. The key question to be answered in this article is what kind of practices work for what kind of adults and under which conditions. Subsequently, this article addresses the various mobilisation strategies and how they relate to different work domains in the adult learning sector and identifies the stimulating conditions for implementing adult learning measures to increase and widen participation. This contextualising of practices could help policy makers, project developers, evaluators and researchers to better structure the intervention logic of policy measures. This article is based on a Europe-wide study of the European Commission examining the impact of ongoing reforms in the adult learning sector in Europe.