Adult education and continuing training
Main tasks
The area of adult education and continuing training covers both basic adult educational programmes and further adult educational programmes. Within the different levels we carry out evaluations and surveys and convey knowledge originating from the projects.
Our tasks within the area divide into two main tracks. We carry out initial accreditation assessments of short-cycle and medium-cycle further continuing professional education. In the assessment we focus on quality and relevance in relation to demands of the labour market.
We also carry out evaluations and surveys of how the different aspects of the area function, e.g. preparatory adult education and basic adult education – a parallel to respectively lower and upper secondary education in the mainstream education system.
We use acknowledged approaches from social science, both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Issues within basic and further adult education
The educational options at the basic levels are aiming at early school leavers and other persons with a low level of educational attainment. These options have the purpose of raising the minimum level of education and giving adults better skills in e.g. mathematics, reading, and writing. Adults from other ethnic groups than Danish are also a target group. The challenge within this field is typically to increase the participation at the right programmes and to stimulate small as well as larger enterprises to demand vocationally oriented programmes for the early school leavers among their staff.
Within further adult education where accreditation is a main task, our focus is on assuring quality, relevance, transparency and flexibility between the different levels, e.g. diploma and master levels.
Context
The Danish system for adult education and continuing training is a success. OECD’s assessment places Denmark as number one in the world with regard to participation in life long learning activities. The system fully covers the mainstream education system, it is coherent, and it has complete backing politically.
The Ministry of Education has published fact sheets on the Danish education and training system .
