Speech by Minister og Education and Research Øystein Djupedal at the International Adult Learners Week 2005: “Education for all in an ERA OF increasing mobility: The implications for adult learning” i regi av Utdannings- og forskningsdepartementet i samarbeid med UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) i Hamburg, Den norske UNESCO-kommisjonen og Voksenopplæringsforbundet, Oslo 24.10.2005. Gjengitt med forbehold om endringer under framføringen.

 

Dear distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen

 

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to Norway and to this conference about the lifelong dimension of Education for All. I believe that giving people the opportunity to participate in formal and informal learning throughout life, is one of the greatest gifts we can give them.

 

As I entered upon my task as Minister of Education and Research last week, I was therefore pleased to find out that this conference would be my first official occasion to meet with an important part of the international education community, including of course UNESCO.

 

The theme chosen for this event is very timely: “ Education for All in an Era of Increasing Mobility: The Implications for Adult Learning”. People move more than ever. We move across borders and within countries, and we have the aspect of social mobility. Most move because they want to. Some because they have to. Particularly for migrants, new knowledge and new skills are necessary for them to become integrated in their new communities. Both to find new employment and to better understand their new neighbors. Our ambition for the next three days is to provide a forum for exchange and policy dialogue of the importance of adult and lifelong learning in the context of mobility and migration.

 

In addition to being an important arena for discussing crucial issues related to the EFA-agenda, this conference is also an event which aims to strengthen the international movement of learning festivals. These learning festivals are advocacy instruments for learning and participation. Together with policy-makers and education stakeholders, learners - as the center of learning festivals - will present, discuss and analyze experiences related to Education For All and adult learning.

 

The global call for Education for All, which is also echoed in two of the Millennium Development Goals, is – as you all know – by no means new. We can at least trace it back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. But it was in the World Declaration on Education for All, adopted in 1990 in Jomtien, Thailand, that the world community adopted an expanded vision of basic education.

 

This calls for a learning environment in which everyone will have a chance to acquire the basic elements which serve as a foundation for further learning and enable full participation in society. This vision implied both access to education for everybody, and meeting the diverse learning needs of children, youth and adults.

 

Unfortunately, by the time of the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000, the goals were still not met. The world community then set a date for 2015 to reach six quite specific goals. We have 10 years to do the job. The new Norwegian Government’s political declaration shares the expanded vision of basic education. We see combating poverty, encouraging participation, increasing economic support for education, and acknowledging the role of NGOs as important elements to strengthen social cohesion in society.

 

In a world marked by globalization, it is not only unacceptable, it is dangerous to allow a situation of educational 'haves' and 'have-nots' to persist.

 

The Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen widened our concept of poverty when he showed that poverty is more than an economic condition in which the basic necessities of life are lacking. For poverty must also be measured as terms of the absence of the capacity or opportunity to change this situation.

 

The goal of EFA is to provide every individual with the opportunity to do something with a life situation experienced as “unfree”. The capacity to make changes can be mobilized and secured only through lifelong learning. In this respect developing and developed countries share a common challenge: One should realize lifelong learning for all so as to expand the real freedom that people enjoy and thus prepare the ground for development for individuals and societies.

 

Since Education for All is a tool for empowerment, I welcome UNESCO’s programme – Literacy Initiative for Empowerment - which was launched earlier this month. This initiative targets the countries with the highest rates of illiteracy.

 

I would like to return for a minute to the topic of mobility. While acknowledging the many opportunities associated with increased mobility, geographically and socially, I am concerned that increased mobility constitutes a challenge to EFA. Marginalised groups, such as immigrants, the unemployed, illiterate and so on, need special attention in order to be able to take advantage of the new opportunities. The challenges and opportunities tied to migration and mobility are common to developed and developing countries, although to different degrees. To meet these challenges and make the most of the opportunities, education is an essential instrument.

 

The Norwegian government would like to see UNESCO encourage the international community to increase its focus on EFA as related to the migrant community. UNESCO should consider whether the time is right for developing an international framework for the recognition of formal and non-formal education, skills and competencies across borders. There is, as I see, definitely a need for cross national systems. This could be seen as a natural extension of the Guidelines on “Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education” adopted at UNESCO’s General Conference last week. We are not only concerned about cross-border higher education, but cross-border adult education, employment and democratic participation.

 

Next month the Global Monitoring Report on Education for All will be launched. According to previews of findings in the report, there are positive trends of sustained economic growth in the South and increases in promised aid, but at the same time the inequality is worsening. It also shows that there is a direct relationship, especially in developing countries, between public spending on education and literacy rates.

 

This indicates that literacy and adult learning must be moved up on our agenda. While governments cannot necessarily be the main provider of adult learning, it must provide sound frameworks.

 

I would like to use this opportunity just to say a few words about the Norwegian lifelong learning policy, and hope that our experiences may be of some interest to you even though the starting point in your country may be very different. Since 1999 we have implemented a national Competence Reform, aiming to improve the opportunities for adult and lifelong learning in Norway. The main goal of the reform has been to provide individuals, as well as enterprises and society, with the competence needed in the new knowledge society. The reform was targeted at all adults, but most measures were directed towards the employed. In particular, the reform was meant to provide poorly qualified adults with a second chance to get an education.

 

The main approach was to introduce a set of statutory rights for learning for adults, the development of a national system for validation of non-formal and informal learning and to further improve the learning environment at the workplace. Particular efforts have been directed towards immigrants and refugees. They often lack school-certificates and other types of documentation of their competencies. Also, they often lack the language skills necessary to benefit from the ordinary procedures used to validate prior learning. In order to facilitate validation of prior learning for these groups, a method called vocational testing (yrkesprøving) has been developed, aiming to assess prior learning in a workplace setting.

 

Where do we stand today, five years after we started to implement the reform? I think that we have made important progress with validation of prior and informal learning.

 

Students seeking an education both at the secondary and tertiary levels now have easier access to schools and institutions. They can also complete their degrees in a shorter period of time due to recognition of previous learning. The methods developed to reach immigrants and refugees have, however, not been used widely, and there is still a lot to do in terms of more efficient procedures to recognise education as well as informally acquired skills for immigrants and refugees. We must also admit that poorly qualified adults have not queued up, the way we thought they would do, to use their new rights to education. A recent OECD review of lifelong learning in Norway praises many sides of the Norwegian education system, but also tells us clearly that we have an unfinished agenda in terms of reaching out to poorly qualified adults.

 

In order to take advantage of the increased mobility, it is essential for governments and international organisations to put in place a better framework for educational initiatives. I think it is crucial to work more closely with NGO's, social partners and private enterprises in order to reach marginalised groups and to make education for all a reality. In Norway, NGO's and the social partners were essential in setting up and implementing the reform.

 

The Norwegian government will cooperate more closely with the social partners and NGO's in order to make the goals of the Competence Reform a reality. We will take measures to make it possible for employees to take part in continuing and further education. We will look more deeply into developing systems for financing participation in such activities for employees. We will also work more actively to inform the groups that need it most about their right to adult education. We will strengthen the right to validation of non-formal and informal learning and increase the public support to adult education. And most important, we will do our best to secure basic skills to everybody, meaning both young and adults.

 

Let me conclude by saying that we are proud that Norway is hosting the International Adult Learners Week 2005. The first international week for adult learners took place in Brazil in 2002 and the next in South Africa in 2004. I think now we can say that the International Adult Learners’ Week has become a tradition.

 

I hope you will agree that it is an advantage that the event takes place at the same time as the national Adult Learners Week in Norway. And that you will enjoy the Norwegian celebration of adult learners and providers tomorrow evening. I hope this conference will contribute to the further development of adult education both in your countries and in Norway and I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavours to find innovative ways forward.

 

Thank you.