Newly elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer did not hold back at the launch of Skills England -- a new government agency -- in July 2024. The Labour Party's 2024 election manifesto had stated that Skills England would 'bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure we have the highly trained…

In this essay, I argue that our recent pivot toward digital learning, in addition to the social discontent and economic turbulence exacerbated by the pandemic, requires a re-imagining of how we "do" adult and workforce education (AWE) policy. First, I briefly describe the 2014 Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA) policy.…

This paper analyses the potential of micro-credentials in adult education through upcoming EU policies and initiatives, bearing in mind the increasing use of online learning platforms globally. Understanding national and international approaches to micro-credentials allows undergraduate programmes and teaching practices to flourish in economically…

This article analyses the development and implementation of policies that aim at improving the 'recognition of prior learning' (RPL) in the vocational education and training (VET) systems of Sweden and Switzerland. It argues that the evolution of RPL policies and schemes needs to be analysed in relation to educational expansion, which creates…

Organizations advocating for federal, state, and local level support for adult education have long relied on the power of individual story to influence both public perception and public policy. They have developed training programs, provided advocacy toolkits, and organized visits with policy makers in order to promote and sustain awareness of the…

One in every six adults in the United States is an immigrant. These immigrant adults contribute to the vitality of local communities and economies across the country, but many also face barriers to integration and economic mobility, including limited English proficiency, varied levels of formal education, and persistent employment in low-wage…

Dr. Jacobson's analysis of "hard to serve" is well founded, especially from an academic and theoretical perspective, yet the author is left wanting. Is the solution to merely change the language, the terminology of the legislation, or the terminology used by policy makers as well as practitioners? Are these adults hard to serve or ill…

Adult basic education's role, from the beginning, has been about serving people with foundational skill needs. The author, Judy Mortrude, agrees with the argument that adult literacy education needs to be repositioned within a new framework of lifelong and life-wide learning, a framework in which new policies are formulated, programs are designed…

The bifurcation of nature, taken as a gap between the scientific conception and the subjective experience of the world, is according to Alfred North Whitehead, one of the major epistemic fallacies of modernity. This paper draws on insights from Whitehead's process philosophy to map some analytical trails that the author followed in her work on the…

This special issue calls us to examine the dictatorship of capital. The rule of capital in the labor/capital relation has always been a form of dictatorship. Therefore, we need to consider the particularities of this relation as they manifest today. In recent decades, the nature of the labor/capital relation, or capitalism, has generally been…

This article explores the efficacy and cost effectiveness of New Labour's skills-based policies to help low paid workers adjust to the pressures generated by globalisation, of which the leading example was Train to Gain (T2G). It also analyses the more general issue of how, why and under what circumstances education, training and skills can help…

The Mississippi Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (MIBEST) program provides pathways into college for adult education students across the state. This brief serves as a supplement to the Urban Institute's original evaluation of MIBEST (Briggs et al. 2022) with an analysis of two factors not explored in the original MIBEST report: the…

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the complexities and connections between women, femme, and nonbinary (WFN) collective social entrepreneurs, social movement learning (SML), and critical participatory action research (CPAR) within the fields of adult education (AE) and human resource development (HRD). WFN collective social…

Social movement organisations and unions can be spaces of transformative learning in which organisers research, debate, create, and put into action frameworks for social change. In this article, I engage with themes from Aziz Choudry's writings to explore learning and knowledge-making within and through the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File…

Transnational organizations like the OECD and the EU have, for many years, focussed on adult career guidance (ACG) as a policy for solving problems, especially those related to the labour market and labour market transitions. In this article, we take a closer look into the development of ACG policies in Finland and Denmark. Drawing on multiple…