A decade of European agendas on adult learning (2011 and 2021). Shifts in the beliefs of the Council of the European Union

Although the European Union (EU) has limited formal competences in education, the current millennium has been marked by the aspiration to build a ‘European space of education’ (Hingel 2001), strategic goals which find support in the EU’s multiannual financial framework. Accordingly, education has come to be recognised as an important element of the European integration project, and is subject to European governance (Milana 2023). Previous research has traced continuity and change in the evolution of the ideational foundation of EU adult learning and skills policies, demonstrating that external shocks to the EU political system, like the 2010 Eurozone Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, have produced incremental changes in this policy trajectory (e. g. made skills investment more urgent and pressing), but basically confirmed its dominant economic orientation (Bussi/Milana forthcoming). This prevails in spite of the fact that crisis narratives popularised during the pandemic had the potential to bring change in education policy (e. g., Morris/Park/Auld 2022; Zancajo/Verger/Bolea 2022) and that adult learning rose in visibility under COVID-19 (Milana/Mikulec 2023). Against this backdrop this chapter examines continuity and change in the Council’s beliefs on adult learning, crystallised in its ten-year agendas, which followed the 2010 Eurozone Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. To this scope we performed an analysis of the Council’s belief systems at two points in time (2011 and 2021), drawing on the actor coalition framework (Sabatier/Weible 2007) and its distinction between deep core, policy core and secondary beliefs. Moreover, the chapter considers which policy actors are called upon by the Council in 2011 and 2021 to implement its agendas on adult learning.