Odile Quintin, Director General for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, European Commission, concluding speech at the Grundtvig conference 26-28 January, Brussels:
"Investment in people and their skills is crucial to creating new sources of growth, even when budgets are under pressure; this means prioritising investment in high-quality education and skills development. This message needs to be heard in the wider political arena but also by those responsible for funding and systems development in adult education.

The economic crisis is also stark reminder that lifelong learning needs to support individuals throughout the economic cycle – the booms and the busts. Recessions bring change. And change requires new skills.
Even before the crisis, work was changing, with more and more jobs requiring a mix of high-level skills and soft skills. Clearly, to work in a particular sector, people need the relevant technical capacities. But these have to be underpinned by the cross-cutting skills that help people meet new demands: team-work, problem-solving, initiative-taking, creativity...

EU 2020 strategy: Key role for education and training

As the world evolves, education and training must evolve too, to capture and impart these skills on which our ability to innovate and our future prosperity depend. Our “New Skills for New Jobs” initiative aims to do just this: to improve our capacity to anticipate the new job trends, and to gear our systems and people’s skills for the changes ahead and to ensure that everyone can benefit from change and not feel threatened by it.
We are all agreed on the diagnosis. We must work towards a smarter, greener economy, where our prosperity will come from innovation and from using resources better, and where the key input will be knowledge.
The proposed EU 2020 Strategy, which will be a core tool for the new Commission, allots a key role to education and training as drivers of the higher skills that will fuel sustainable, knowledge-based growth in Europe.
But – as the strategy, and our own European cooperation framework make clear – education and training are not only about preparing for jobs; they are vital for levering innovation and for creating the socially inclusive societies that must be a European hallmark,
And of course, his is also what the Grundtvig programme is all about, with is dual objective of responding to the educational challenge of an ageing population in Europe and helping to provide adults with pathways to improving their knowledge and skills.
Given the demographic trend which provide the backdrop for the EU 2020 strategy, it is clear that we must rethink education and training to give far more weight to helping adults improve their existing skills and develop new ones. For a start, we must tackle the issue of the 80 million under-skilled adults who are trying to survive in the workplace with only low or basic skills. If they are not helped to improve their skills, their employment prospects, which are limited now, will be even more so in the future.

Re-double our efforts to bring down numbers of low achievers

Not that improving school education and initial vocational training is any less important than in the past. We must re-double our efforts to bring down the numbers of low achievers in basic skills and early school leavers.
But we need to move beyond rhetoric to genuine lifelong learning. For a start, any change introduced into schools and vocational training will by its nature take a decade to make itself felt.
Even more to the point, in a world where knowledge quickly becomes obsolete, and skills change, we need to offer people learning opportunities beyond school and university education to acquire the new skills for the new jobs being created.
Traditionally, adult learning has been seen principally as a remedial tool – and it will always have this purpose. But adult learning must now become an integral part of the education system, so that over their lifetime people can refine their skills and acquire the new ones on which we can build an inclusive knowledge Europe.
It can be done. Take the example of Slovenia: by investing in adult education as a priority, Slovenia managed, in under a decade, to upgrade the skills of its people in a way that completely transformed its labour market and ist prosperity. (...)

Fresh thinking and experimentation

To conclude, the EU 2020 strategy and the “New skills for new jobs” initiative are an excellent basis for investing in adult learning. We now have an overarching strategy embracing the social and individual as well as the job-related aspects of learning.
First, adults must be able to keep improving their skills: we need to continue developing genuine lifelong learning and to increase the participation of adults in lifelong learning, including through opportunities for learner mobility.
Second, the goal of quality and efficiency must go hand-in-hand with improving equity and social cohesion. We must continue to provide adult at risk of exclusion with pathways to improve their knowledge and skills – not least through “second-chance learning” for those whose experience of formal education was less than happy.
Third, education and training must promote innovation. Learning should stimulate rather than stifle fresh thinking, accept that not every risk succeeds, and encourage experimentation alongside solid educational achievement. Adult learning is no exception to this need for innovation. So it is important that Grundtvig, and the continuing training strands of Leonardo da Vinci, help us put new policies into practice, experiment with new ideas and promote the transfer of good practice between European countries."