The aim of this article is to examine how EU lifelong learning policies are trying to reach the vulnerable by looking at what measures against social exclusion they offer and how equitable these measures are. It is a qualitative study that focuses on policy documents that form the European Union's legal and political frameworks of reference in the lifelong learning area since 1992. The document analysis has been complemented by semi-structured interviews with EU lifelong learning experts. The findings show that early school leavers and migrants are the main target groups in the policies, leaving many other groups at risk of being excluded from learning opportunities. There is not enough attention to measures addressing wider social phenomena. There is also an overemphasis on basic skills which are understood in a very narrow way as literacy and numeracy when referring to the vulnerable. We argue that a greater variety of measures as well as better targeted measures are needed to address the multiple and complex needs of the vulnerable. Such measures would allow a broader understanding of lifelong learning where those that are hardest to reach are offered learning opportunities independent of their personal and social circumstances
The aim of the article is to analyse the concept of social exclusion in EU lifelong learning policies: how the concept has evolved from the 1990s in terms of meaning, definitions and closely connected concepts, what are the implications of this evolution, and whether there is coherence between the conceptual evolution and lifelong learning policy. Using a qualitative methodology, this article focuses on policy documents that form the European Union's legal and political framework of reference in the lifelong learning area in the last two and a half decades. A total of 59 documents issued between 1992 and 2017 have been analysed using content analysis. The analysis of the documents has been complemented by 6 semi-structured interviews with EU lifelong learning experts. The results show that the concept is narrowly defined in terms of specific groups at risk of being socially excluded and in terms of employability, thus individualising the problem of exclusion and distracting attention from structural factors.
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