Education and the European Union: towards
a common education policy in Europe?
Roger Dale
University of Bristol
Outline of the argument
• ‘European Education policy’ should really be an oxymoron, but it isn’t
• It is fundamentally shaped by:
• changing conceptions of ‘Europe’ and the role and scope of the EU—
broadly, from mutual security (through) a ‘common market’ and
developing Europe’s cultural heritage, to Europe as an ‘economy’,
with ‘needs and expectations different from the sum of its Member
States’ economies—and the roles of ‘education’ in these
• Since 2000 (Lisbon agenda) education has be seen as having a crucial
role in supporting Europe’s competitiveness, knowledge base and
social cohesion
• Relatively independent of this, education’s role in building ‘Europe’ as
a political and cultural entity
• And, very importantly, by the EU’s limited discretion in matters of
education, where the means of ‘getting around’ this problem
themselves strongly shape the possible policy interventions
Key points to note/anticipated
conclusions
• It is less helpful in trying to determine the nature and effect of
European education policy to expect to find those effects exclusively
in changes to domestic education policies; ‘Building Europe’ is a key
end in itself, to which education is to make a key contribution
• The ‘EU’ in this context is far from homogeneous or monolithic.
There are differences between the Council (politicians) and
Commission (civil service), with the latter more prominent in building
Europe, and between different Directorates (‘Ministries’), with the
financial and economic directorates much more powerful than
Education, for instance
• It is misleading to see the EU/MS relationship in education in zero
sum terms
• Examining this relationship involves rethinking a number of
categories that we tend to take for granted for instance, the
education sector; European education policy is not a ‘scaled up’
version of national education policies, but something quite different
(Meta-)theoretical Approach: Distinction
between ‘Problem-Solving’ and ‘Critical’
theory (Cox)
• Most work on EU education policy tends to be problemsolving rather than critical
• "The general aim of PS is to make [social and power]
relationships and institutions [into which they are
organized] work smoothly by dealing effectively with
particular sources of trouble..
• (CT) ‘calls these relationships into question by concerning
itself with their origins and how and whether they might
be in the process of changing..(it addresses) the very
framework for action . . . which problem-solving theory
accepts as its parameters" (Cox, 1996:88-9).
‘Effects on…’
A typical approach is to ask what are the ‘effects of’ EU
policy on national/domestic policies--which assumes the
kinds of things that CT requires to be problematised:
• a level of correspondence/equivalence between regional
and national education policies
• a homogenisation of the roles, scope and place of
education policy
• a hierarchical relationship between EU and national levels
• methodological nationalist and statist assumptions
• more specifically, that the Lisbon agenda and the OMC
both have relatively fixed meanings and that they jointly
constitute and comprise the agenda of European
Education Policy
• That the relationship is confined to ‘effects on’
The Contexts of European Education
Policy (from Dale 2007)
• changes in the wider political economic context (‘neoliberal globalisation’);
• Associated changes in the governance of education—
New Public Management, the political face of
neoliberalism
• changes in the ‘architecture of education systems’,
including their relationships with capitalism and
modernity, and their relationship to each other;
• changes in the ‘capacity’ (conceptions of what is feasible)
and the ‘mandate’ (conceptions of what is desirable) of
education systems;
• and changes in the appraisal of the contribution of
education systems to the demands created by these
changes in context.
The EU and education; the formal position
• Education –apart from Vocational and Technical
Education—is subject to ‘subsidiarity’, meaning that it is a
Member State responsibility and the EU cannot intervene
in it.
• However, Article 149.1 of the Treaty states that ‘The
Community shall contribute to the development of
quality education by encouraging cooperation between
Member States and, if necessary, by supporting and
supplementing their actions, while fully respecting the
responsibility of Member States for the content of
teaching and the organization of education systems and
their linguistic and cultural diversity’. (Article 149.1)
Community Actions in Education
• The actions of the Community in the field of education
should according to the Treaty aim at:
• ‘developing the European dimension in education
• encouraging the mobility of students and teachers
• promoting co-operation between educational
establishments
• exchange of information an experiences
• encouraging the development of distance education’
(Article 149.2)
• Furthermore, the Community “shall foster co-operation
with third countries…in the field of education” (Article
149.3)
The Open Method of Coordination as the means by
which the education objectives were to be met
As stated in the Bulletin on the Conclusions of the Portuguese
Presidency, ‘the open method of coordination, which is designed to
help the Member States to progressively develop their own policies,
involves:
• fixing guidelines for the Union combined with specific timetables for
achieving the goals which they set in the short, medium and long
terms;
• establishing, where appropriate, quantitative and qualitative
indicators and benchmarks against the best in the world and tailored
to the needs of different Member States and sectors as a means of
comparing best practice;
• translating these European guidelines into national and regional
policies by setting specific targets and adopting measures, taking into
account national and regional differences;
• periodic monitoring, evaluation and peer review as mutual learning
processes. (emphases added). (European Presidency 2000, para 37)
European Education Space
• European Education Space can be seen as an opportunity
structure framed
• formally by Treaty responsibilities,
• substantively by the Lisbon agenda and the European
Social Model; the EES as framed by Lisbon is concerned
with Education only in so far as it may be seen as related
to those purposes and implications
• and historically by the ‘pre-Lisbon’ education activities of
the European Commission
• EU has no discretion over the areas that dominate
national education politics and policies in most MS
• Consequence?: pressure to create parallel system/sector?
European Education Policy
• Driven by the EU’s ‘hegemonic projects’, in a context
where the ways that education can bring about change
are fundamentally framed and limited by the nature of
the EES
• HPs include three very broad and basic elements, each
with an explicit relevance for education;
• economic competitiveness,
• developing a European Social Model,
• and enhancing ‘Europe’s’ claims to be a distinct and
significant political/economic/cultural entity
• Overall programme of KnELL-Knowledge Economy and
Lifelong Learning--?? Parallel sector?
Methodological Preamble: the ‘isms’
• ‘ism’ is used to suggest an approach to objects that takes
them as unproblematic and assumes a constant and
shared meaning; they become ‘fixed, abstract and
absolute’ (Fine, 465)
• Methodological Nationalism
• Methodological Statism
• Methodological Educationism—the tendency to regard
‘education’ as a single category for purposes of analysis,
with an unproblematically accepted scope, and a set of
implicitly shared knowledges, practices and assumptions.
Methodological Educationism
• Treats ‘Education’ as abstract, fixed, absolute, a-historical and
universal
• Equates ‘Education’ with schooling
• Takes for granted the grammar of schooling (Tyack and Tobin) as the
basis and framework of studying ‘Education’
• Regards ‘Education’ as a single category for purposes of analysis,
with an assumed common scope, and a set of implicitly shared
knowledges, practices and assumptions
• Assumes a common base to all uses of ‘Education’
• Takes the set of activities collected together and politicaladministratively so classified (and typically assembled under
common statistical rubrics) as comprising the ‘Education’ sector.
Three components of sectors
• Representation: what it is seen as ‘being for’
• Technology: its discourses and practices
• Governance:how the activities and technologies
making up the sector are coordinated
• +, of course, a bracketing of ‘nationalist’ and
‘statist’ assumptions
Central argument; parallel Education sectors
at European and national levels, with
different representations, technologies and
governance
• Educationism leads us to make the idea of an ‘education
sector’ problematic
• NB, not rescaling upwards of national systems
• Not zero sum; not necessarily hybrids, or combinations of
regional and national activities and agents, but
(somewhat) overlapping, and mutually influential
• Emergent functional,scalar and sectoral division of
labour, with issues around economic competitiveness
shifting ‘upwards’, and issues around education’s role in
the distribution of opportunities within national societies,
etc remaining at the national level, or moving
‘downwards’, to the subnational level
The (?A?) European Education
Sector?
• At the European level, existing education sectors become
themselves what is at stake, as they are perceived to be
‘unfit for purpose’ in a global knowledge economy. It is for
this reason that we see the development of a European
capacity in education, with a particular agenda to reform,
reconstruct or transform the representation, the
governance and the technology of education
• But note again the deep embeddedness of the grammar
of schooling, and the irreplaceable contribution to the
national----’Europe’ cannot change these, but may rather
‘parallel’ them
Policy sectors in the EU; the case of Social
Policy---Reasons
• Strategic and instrumental reasons for development of
sectors at EU level
• Strategic: creates new areas of EU activity, competence,
while avoiding issues of subsidiarity
• Instrumental: enables added ‘Euro-value’ by synergising
national capacities
• ‘the significance of EU social policy lies in how it serves to
construct and create a social sphere or space for EU
action which in turn has dynamic effects on European
identity and European society’(Daly, 2006, 465-6)
Policy sectors in the EU; the case of Social
Policy---Differences
• Purpose: not part of state-building and group identity and
placement as at national level, but providing the
underpinnings for a European integration project that is
envisaged foremost as market integration
• Values: the importance attributed to both subsidiarity
and a competitive form of solidarity
• Substance: lacks the core notions of social protection and
redistribution that are synonymous with social policy at
national level.’ (Daly, 2006,464)
•
Policy sectors in the EU; the case of Social
Policy---Methodologies
• These changes ‘disable’ the major (nation-state based) research
approaches in the area—comparative welfare state analysis, and
‘effects on’ domestic politics, which emphasise states’ capacity to
regulate welfare
• Instead, ‘the Lisbon strategy and the OMC can be regarded as signs…
that the EU social policy has left its customary place and has become
a project to invent the social within the confines of the European
Union……After Lisbon, it has no longer been relevant to make a
distinction between EU-level and national level social policy, as this
division, based on the Treaties' definition of competences in the area
of social policy, is not recognised in the efforts to modernise social
protection by means of the OMC’ Savio and Palola, (2004,4)
(How) do we see this in Education?
• First, we need to recall that the Lisbon summit ‘does not
acknowledge education as a “teleological” policy area, an area in
itself..(it) is part of social policy, labour market and overall economic
policy’ (Gornitzka 2005,17).
• Argument is that we see this most clearly in the rise of Lifelong
Learning as a sector, with different purposes, substance and values
from those of MS ‘Education’ sectors, and linking (different forms of)
education to Social Policy and Knowledge Policy sectors
• Strategically, LLL is not a ‘sector’ in any MS (and may be distributed
across different sectors in some of them), while that the new
generation of EU DGEAC programmes is being coordinated under
the heading of LLL (see, e g, CEC 2004).
• A key element of the LLL agenda is its capacity to weld together the
competitiveness and social cohesion components of the Lisbon
agenda through the policy of ‘productive social policy’ (see Dale and
Robertson 2005)
The development of the KnELL agenda
• The LLL agenda very much a part of the response to the
Lisbon goals and especially the competitiveness agenda;
A ‘main political orientation’ following the 2005 mid term
review of the Lisbon process is that ‘new priorities (be)
defined for national education policies, i e, turning
schools into open learning centres, providing support to
(all) population groups, using the Internet and
multimedia’ (Rodrigues 2004, 5)
• This emphasis on the need for Europe to move towards
becoming a Knowledge Economy makes it more useful
to see call it the KnELL (Knowledge Economy and
Lifelong Learning) sector
GOVERNANCE
MECHANISMS
PURPOSE
‘EUROPE’
PHASE
1—PRELISBON
Working
Party of MS
Indicators
Common
conception
of
‘Education’
Coordinator of
National
experiences/definer
of ‘Quality’
PHASE
2—
LISBON
2000-05
OMC
Benchmarks;
Best practice
Common
problem
identificatio
n and policy
coordinatio
n, diverse
means;
Orchestrator of
Functional and
Scalar Division
of Labour of
Educational
Governance
PHASE
3—
LISBON
POST
MID
TERM
REVIEW
Single (LLL)
Organising
Framework
Targets (e g
Investment)
Common
objectives,
common
route
Creator of new
European
‘Social policy’
and ‘Knowledge
policy’ sectors
Phase 1
• Development of common indicators to allow mutual
learning through comparison of common interests and
shared differences
• A move way from evaluating efficiency in the direction of
cooperating towards common objectives…
• And beyond to common challenges and agendas
Phase 2
• OMC (social) areas politically linked to economic project
• European level in areas like education brought into being
by OMC, which provides the means of constructing
(European) ‘unity’ and enabling national diversity
• Benchmarks for E+T ‘are not concrete targets for
individual countries.. ..but reference levels for European
average performance’ (Gornitzka)
• OMC involves ‘unlearning and partial demolition of
(nationally) entrenched institutional patterns, that brings
home to MS political elites…the need for ‘modernization’
and ‘recalibration’ of their hitherto adopted social
policies’ (Offe)
Phase 3: Lifelong Learning
• 2000 (post Lisbon) Memo on LLL; ‘LLL is no longer just
one aspect of E+T; it must become the guiding principle for
participation across the full continuum of learning
contexts
• 2006, emphasis on need to accelerate pace of reform..in
LLL,seen as a ‘sine qua non of achieving the Lisbon goals
while strengthening the ESM’, calls for ‘Effective interMinisterial synergy between ‘knowledge policies’
(education, training, employment/social affairs, research)
• Following MTR redirected goals for E+T, with an
‘integrated action programme in the field of LLL ‘as the
basis of new generation of EU education programmes’
Lifelong Learning for Knowledge Economy
and Knowledge Society (J Brine, 2006)
• Based on textual analysis of EU LLL documents, finds
‘absolute consistency’ in construction of two categories of
learner’, HKS (?European?) and LKS (?national?)
• Knowledge Economy, associated with competitiveness
agenda, means ‘EU needs its citizens to have high-level
knowledge skills..(with individual responsibility) to
continually update them through graduate study’
• Knowledge Society, associated with high unemployment
and social exclusion, which is linked with LKS people, who
must improve knowledge-skills to increase employability,
through ‘cyclical vocational training’ (and no reference to
HE)
Key Competences for LLL in Europe (EC
2005): A ‘Knowledge Society agenda’/Social
Policy cluster?
• Competence comprises knowledge, skills and
attitudes…that serve for personal fulfilment, social
inclusion and active citizenship and employment
• ‘Key competences that all citizens should have for a
successful life in a knowledge society’
• They need to be active, concerned, able to adapt and
learn continuously
• The key competences are: 1) communication in the
mother tongue; 2) communication in foreign languages;
3) competences in maths, science and technology; 4)
digital competence; 5) learning to learn; 6) interpersonal,
intercultural and social competences, and civic
competence; 7) entrepreneurship; 8) cultural expression.
A Knowledge Economy agenda/’Knowledge
Policies’ cluster?
• ‘No European country is large enough or strong enough
to step into the knowledge era by itself. Given the scale of
operations of our global competitors, it is not logical or
efficient for any individual EU member to go it alone. The
challenge is global, the response has to be European.
Only if Europe plays as a team will we regain the lead in
the world knowledge league….Of course, it is important
to uphold the principle of subsidiarity: education and
research policies are, and will remain, mainly national
responsibilities. However, you will agree that there is a lot
we can do together. Education, research, and the drive
towards innovation are textbook cases in which the
European whole is larger than the sum of its national
parts. The most compelling example is the drive to
establish genuine European areas in Higher Education,
Research and Innovation’. (Barroso (2007))