LAUSR

A few years ago, the European Commission commissioned and published an influential report, reviewing what adult education policy-makers could learn from research – chiefly research funded by the Commission itself under successive Framework research programmes (now rebranded ‘Horizon’) (Federighi, 2013). The report covered a range of areas, including the aims of continuing vocational education and training and adult education, how adult education could contribute to reducing the number of low-skilled people, workplace learning, and training for innovation. Its final section addressed the governance of ‘markets and systems of adult and continuing vocational [sic] and training’: perhaps its major point here was the ‘strongly fragmented nature’ of what it called ‘the adult and continuing education market’ (p. 61). One of its arguments was that, from a public policy perspective, we should think of adult education as a market (or a series of markets): ‘relationships of exchange of goods, services and capitals between different economic subjects (companies, families, the state) operating on local, national and global levels’. Policy-makers should intervene on ‘the existing circuit of production/distribution/exchange/ consumption of services’, and not limit themselves ‘to interventions which affect only those who operate within sectors directly or indirectly dominated by public financing’ (p. 67). However, although it argued public policy intervention in these markets was essential, it also saw them as difficult for a number of reasons. The most prominent was sheer complexity – the great ‘variety of problems and . . . number of actors’ – but it placed the strongest emphasis on problems of evidence. Policymaking ‘relies on good-quality data’ for a range of purposes: to ‘support the decision-making process; inform the choice of the problems to be tackled; elaborate policy options; carry out impact analysis; compare possible options; and structure monitoring and evaluation’ (p. 77). Few would dissent from this: accurate information is an essential base for policy debate. At the same time, there was something just a bit too simple about the claims the report built on this need for evidence. A common theme of critical research in recent years has been that while accurate information is necessary for good policy, it by no means guarantees it. Importantly, of course, this is because policy (some might say, by definition) is the outcome of politics: assertions to the contrary (such as the European Commission’s 1995 claim to have witnessed ‘the demise of the major ideological disputes on the objectives of education’ (European Commission, 1995, p. 23)) do not really stand the test of time. People do not all agree about what they want policies to achieve. So even when policies ‘work’, we may differ on what we want them to work for. The intractable embeddedness of disagreement is not, of course, an easy position for civil service bureaucracies to adopt – any more, for instance, than it has been easy for employers to accept a deep difference of interest between their enterprise and those they employ (cf Fox, 1974). The rise of neoliberal ideology, and the eclipse of political and social alternatives to globalised markets and capitalism, has brought recurrent efforts to shape and regularise opinion. In adult education, we – and other authors in this journal and elsewhere – have long since noted a desire in elite policy circles to achieve, build or assert consensus over purpose. This has been necessary because, before anything else, people, businesses and countries have been seen as having to compete in global markets. Thus