In the introduction, I contextualize the object of study: educational activities in individualized social inclusion programs for adults at social risk. In order to do so, first I will review the Welfare State foundations and its evolution towards residual models by public cuts and privatisation. Then, I will focus on the EU Social Policy and its linking with activation and workfare. Finally, I describe Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) programmes, where the object of study takes place, and their increasing vinculation with individual responsibility (Wacquant, 2010).

I argue that these neoliberal transformations, which are global in the European Union social and educational policy, influence greatly my object of study: professional training activities for adults at social risk. This neoliberal influence will have effects on different aspects of these professional training programmes such as: curriculum, contents, activities, aims, teacher role and so on.

The next chapter is dedicated to the research strategy and the methodologies used to produce information: observation, semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis and focus groups. It is a qualitative approach based on Political Discourse Analysis and Case study, and aimed at deconstructing the educational discourses that conform and give shape the object of study: The educational activities inserted in Guaranteed Minimun Income (GMI) programmes, in the county of Asturias, Spain. In order to analyse the interrelation between global neoliberal transformations and professional training programmes for poor people, I use the Triple Area of educational decisions (Cascante, 2005) as a nested research strategy: Technical decisions dimension: Where I study what happens at classroom level. In this dimension, I focus on explicit curriculum vs hidden curriculum, kind of educational activities, material resources, methodology used in the classroom, use of spaces and time, type of participants’ evaluation, etc. • Theoretical decisions dimension: where I focus on teacher role and on psychological theories of teaching-learning. • Metatheoretical decisions dimension: where I try to highlight the relationship with wider themes. For example, what concept of subject is implicit in these programmes?, what kind of role does education have in society or in fighting against poverty.

In the last chapter, I highlight some principal results of my research: for instance, I argue that competence-based pedagogical methodologies, the aim of empleability and the notion of entrepreneurship as an educational aim should be studied as effects of neoliberal hegemonic discourse. In order to do so, I will use the New Humanitarian Discourse (Amin, 2009) as an analytical frame to show the impact of the hegemonic neoliberal discourse on these programmes. This humanitarian discourse is based on the following categories: -Good governance and New Public Management. -Civil society and Private individual initiative. -Fight against poverty as a limited form of social justice.