Odile Quintin, the European Commission's Director-General for Education and Culture, opened the symposium. In her speech, she underlined that quality education and training are crucial for economic growth and employment but also indispensable for cultural development, for personal fulfilment, for active citizenship, for inclusion and social cohesion. Education leads to better lives said Mrs. Quintin and stressed that the benefits of learning are wide-ranging and multilevel, both for individuals and for societies. She underlined that education and training should be recognised more as important building blocks and that there is a need to strengthen the role of E&T within the broad socio-economic policy context, both at the national and European levels. She stressed that education and training are at the heart of the Lisbon strategy and that the future of Europe and of its regions depends largely on our decisions related to learning. She identified demographic change, the combination of excellence with equity, migration and innovation as some of the key challenges for European E&T systems. She also spoke about the need to strike a better balance between the economic and socio-cultural objectives of learning in Europe. While she put a lot of emphasis on the crucial role of education and training policies, she emphasised the need for holistic approaches and cross-sectoral cooperation. She finally recognised the important role of the research community in the quest for better policies and strategies informed by evidence.
The first session covered the contribution of education and training to innovation and growth.
In the first presentation, Prof. Ludger Wößmann (Ifo Institute for Economic Research and University of Munich) presented insights from recent economic research on the subject. His conclusions were threefold: First, educational quality – measured by what people know, in terms of test scores in international student achievement tests – has very powerful effects on long-run economic growth. Second, both a decent “education for all” and a sufficient number of “rocket scientists” are important for growth. And third, the mechanism through which educational quality affects economic growth seems to be primarily operating through increasing the rate of technical progress.
In his presentation, Gert Jan Koopman, Director for Industrial Policy and Economic Reforms in the European Commission's Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry, underlined the crucial role of education for economic outcomes. He stressed that the skill intensity of jobs is rising in all sectors, and that skill upgrading – changes in the skill composition within industrial branches – contributes more to the changing demand for higher- vs. lower-skilled people than shifts of workers across sectors or industries. He raised the issue that the comparative advantage of EU countries as revealed in trade patterns is lacking in sectors requiring very high skills. He also warned that reaching the education targets of the Lisbon strategy may not lead to impressive additional growth in the very short run, but only in the medium to long run.
The discussion that followed these two presentations focused partly on the question whether advanced economies should put more resources into higher education or whether early childhood interventions are most effective. It seemed widely accepted that public investments in the early childhood should have priority, because the foundation for people to participate in higher education is laid very early and because quality early childhood education is especially important for considerations of equity. Another issue discussed was the relative future importance of vocational and general education. The views on this issue were diverging. While some held general education to be more effective for future developments because the flexibility of knowledge is greater than in vocational education, others pointed out that vocational training smoothes the transition into the labour market.
In the second session, the first speaker, Professor Roger Dale of the Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies at the University of Bristol, began by pointing out that ‘social cohesion’ had many, possibly contradictory, and changing, meanings, though following Lisbon it is clearly associated with competitiveness and employment, whether as the outcome of, and/or the basis for, educational achievement. In terms of demography, it was pointed out that the ‘Tempo effect’—the effect on population growth of delayed age of childbearing—would for the next five decades have a considerable effect on the ‘Dependency ratio’ (ratio of employed to retired), and that this might be slowed down by such education policy interventions as more early childhood education, a shortened school life, a more flexible system of higher education, or easier access to paid educational leave. A number of aspects of education’s relationships to migration and social cohesion were presented, including: the differences between a multicultural policy and a management of diversity policy; the relationship between educational achievement and social capital (strong at individual level, but very difficult to scale up because of positional good status of social capital (and education credentials); the independent contribution of inequality to educational achievement.
The second speaker, Xavier Prats Monné, Director for Employment, Lisbon Strategy and International Relations in the European Commission's Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, focused largely on demographic issues, where he took a somewhat different view from the first speaker. He suggested that there were three possible alternative solutions to the problem of an ageing population. First, greater participation of the working age population in the labour market—despite recent increases in the percentage of women working there was still major differences across the EU. Second, immigration, of a range of types; and third, increased productivity through increased skill levels in the labour force brought about by more effective education systems. This should include a stronger focus on vocational education and training.
The first part of the discussion that followed these two presentations was focused around the themes of demography and the relative value of intervention in early childhood education, which had to an extent been an overlap between the two presentations, with the first suggesting that it was a possible policy response to the Tempo effect and the second favouring a concentration on increasing skills, jobs and productivity. The discussion covered the issue of how efficient spending on early childhood education (ECE) would be when most children did not really need it, having been effectively socialized at home. This was countered by the argument that a large minority of children entered school already unable to benefit from education and these children certainly would benefit from, even need, ECE, since without it they would never catch up, and this led to a consideration of the possibility of targeting ECE interventions, notwithstanding the difficulties known to be associated with it. Finally, there was some discussion on the potentially negative effect of brain drain forms of migration.
Prof. Angel de la Fuente (Instituto de Análisis Económico Barcelona) opened the third session with his presentation on “the fiscal returns to education in the EU”. From the viewpoint of public finance, public expenditure on education can be seen as an investment that increases future tax revenues and may reduce public expenditure on social benefits. Constructing estimates of the fiscal returns to increasing educational attainment in 14 EU countries revealed that in most EU countries, post-compulsory education largely pays for itself. The net fiscal surplus was reckoned to range between 500 and 6000 € per student and year. De la Fuente concluded that as a policy implication it could be drawn from the research that countries should not subordinate their education policies to short-term budget constraints.
The next presentation on “Education and the quality of public finances” was given by Fabienne Ilzkovitz, Head of Unit in the Directorate for Structural Reforms and Lisbon Strategy-Economic Evaluation of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs. She stressed that the quality of public finances is becoming increasingly important because public spending and revenues account for a large share of GDP. At the same time, education spending accounts for a large share of total public spending but can have large benefits in contributing to productivity as well as to social cohesion. Thus good quality education is crucial. In view of these connections, the last ECOFIN Council has resolved to improve data availability and to develop analysis of public expenditure efficiency and effectiveness, in particular in the area of education.
In the subsequent discussion, the concern was raised that citizens were increasingly looked at solely as economic actors, whereby many other important aspects of peoples’ lives as carers and individuals were neglected. However, there was a general consensus that no-one viewed education as being important only in economic terms, but that at the same time, stressing and quantifying the economic benefits of education was very important for policy making and for societies at large.
The fourth session’s first speaker was Kathleen Lynch, Professor of Equality Studies at University College Dublin. She began by pointing out the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, emphasising their very different connotations, and the very clear relationships between economic and educational inequality. Education is a human right and both a personal and a public good, as well as being the basis of social class advantage in gaining credentials and labour markets. This middle class domination of access to educational credentials leads some groups to feel that they ‘cannot win’; they have no chance of competing successfully. In the second half of the presentation, Professor Lynch emphasized that inequalities were not confined to the distribution of education, but result also from lack of respect, of power and of recognition. She concluded by advancing four key objectives in creating a more equal education system: economic equality, socio-cultural equality, political equality and affective equality.
The second speaker was Maria Graça de Carvalho, of the European Commission's Bureau of European Policy Advisors (BEPA). She began by discussing the role of BEPA and drew particular attention to two of its recent reports—on Europe’s Social Reality, and Youth. She discussed external and internal trends in social change in Europe, and the relationship between education and changes in the occupational structure and welfare states. Common challenges arising from the Social Reality report were: low level of education and skills in some Member States; generational inequity due to demographic change; the simultaneous need for and challenge of immigrants; risks of social polarization; increasing poverty and inequality; declining social mobility; high levels of child poverty. She said that human capital was at the heart of the Youth strategy, in five areas in particular; child well being, health, education, employment and civic participation. There were three major challenges for education in meeting the needs of the economy: more basic cognitive and meta-cognitive skills; an extension of the idea of Education for all and the development of alternative forms of education; and greater emphasis on higher education, especially in mathematics, science and technology.
The discussion of these two presentations centred around issues of the conditions of educational equality. However, there was general endorsement from those who intervened of the contribution of Professor Lynch’s approach to equality and rights and the need for Europe to also think about the rights of those in neighbouring countries.
Opening the fifth session on the contribution of education and training to employment, Prof. Francis Kramarz from Crest and Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) spoke about the difficulties in identifying “the causal impact of education on employment and wages”. He stressed that for policy making, it is of utmost importance to determining the causal effects of education, rather than just looking at correlations. He described newly developed estimation techniques that are designed to overcome the problems of reverse causality (Is it training that causes a good wage or is it a good wage that causes training?) and unobserved heterogeneity (Is it a Harvard education that causes good wages or is it the wealthy parents who helped their kids enter Harvard and helped them find a nice job?). The best available evidence on the causal effect of education on wages is that one additional year in education gives nearly 10 percent higher wages. Other recent research has shown causal effects of education on such outcomes as reducing teenage childbearing, crime and depression. Kramarz also stressed that recent evidence suggests that returns to early interventions are high, while there is little return from later remedial or compensatory interventions.
Matthew Higham from BusinessEurope stated that the current situation on the labour market in Europe is positive, since there has been an upturn in growth and employment. Yet youth unemployment is still quite high. To encounter the challenges, policy would have to focus on the acquisition of basic skills and the reduction of skill gaps to increase employability. Highman stressed that especially the problem of early school leavers needs to be tackled and urged for improved coordination between stakeholders.
In the subsequent discussion, issues again revolved around topics such as vocational education and training and the importance of investments at an early stage in order to lay the foundation for subsequent learning.
Dr Karin Henriksson, Counsellor for education and research at the Permanent Representation of Sweden to the EU, opened the final session on the topic of “the contribution of education and training to the achievement of the overall Lisbon goals”. She pointed out that while there had been some history of an education element of the EU, it was only with the Lisbon declaration that it really began to take off, and, indeed, education is an area where Lisbon has been best developed. However, it is not really at the core of Lisbon, or a priority; for instance, in the Guidelines for Growth and Jobs it appears under Employment, but it does not appear in EcoFin at all. However, the spring summits of both 2006 and 2007 made reference to education as a crucial part of the Knowledge triangle. Finally, Dr Henriksson emphasized that without the important contributions of education and training, there can be no knowledge society.
Some similar points were made in a rather different way by the second speaker in the session, Michel Servoz, Director for Better Regulation and Coordination in the European Commission's Secretariat General. He suggested that education is close to the core of the Lisbon strategy (which he said started for good only in 2005, with its next stage to run from 2008-2011, but not yet in the target). He said that there had been a new focus on education in this period, as part of the Knowledge triangle (together with Innovation and Research, though 1/3 of all recommendations to Member States are about education). These changes mean that Education has new needs; for Lifelong Learning; to be less discipline and more employment specific; to become involved in competition between Universities at a global level, and this will be assisted by more partnerships, especially on the model of the European Institute of Technology; an extended Erasmus scheme to create more mobility. It also has to become more relevant to the labour market, for instance as a link between the flexibility and security components of flexicurity schemes. It also has a budget problem, especially in higher education, where the contrast with the United States in terms of private contributions is very marked.
The discussion featured a long contribution from the floor which expressed the fear that we may be co-opting the idea of Europe to the economy at the expense of the socio-cultural, and that there is a need to strike a better balance between the economic and socio-cultural objectives of learning at a European level.
In his overall conclusion, David White, Director for Education and Training Policies in the European Commission's Directorate-General for Education and Culture, stressed the importance of education and training both for economic growth and for socio-cultural development and cohesion. He said that, for him, "education and training and lifelong learning are not only at the heart of the Lisbon strategy, but also at the heart of the human condition". He acknowledged that with such a rich and varied set of presentations and discussions it is difficult to come to definitive conclusions. However, he stressed, that this symposium demonstrated that in contrasting but often complementary ways economists and other social scientists interested in education are making significant contributions towards new understandings of challenges as well as opportunities for education in Europe that would enable new and more relevant and effective policy responses.
On the other hand, it was also clear from the Symposium that we need to find a way of balancing the economic and socio-cultural objectives of our education and training systems, so as to marry both their equally important political and moral dimensions. After all, the Commission's 2006 Communication on Efficiency and Equity in European Education and Training Systems has shown us that both dimensions can be mutually reinforcing.
Concerning the follow-up to the Symposium, David White mentioned that the outcomes from the Symposium would feed into the High Level Group discussions organised by the Portuguese Presidency at the end of June in Lisbon. Moreover, the Commission will put forward a Staff Working Document to provide an overview of the major actions being undertaken at the national and EU levels to strengthen evidence-based policy and practice in education and training, in September 2007. This SWP will identify some key challenges in this field, and will set out an agenda for future cooperative work. Finally, he said, the key points from this Symposium will provide inputs for the Draft Joint Progress Report of the European Commission in November of this year. Part of this Joint Report will offer reflections to take into consideration when establishing the agenda for the post-2010 Work Programme, which will be set in the framework of efficient and equitable lifelong learning policies.
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