In many countries, educational policies include a strategy for literacy, language and numeracy (e.g. in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, South Africa). In France and Australia, this includes Adult Literacy, Language and Numeracy, while in Germany and South Africa the focus is on Adult Basic Education. The strategies cover adolescents, the adult population as well as – in some cases – recent immigrants.

But these policies are heavily influenced by supra-national organisations such as the OECD, the UNESCO and the European Union. This often leads to a neo-liberal overshadowing of the funding of Adult Education. The idea of literacy practices and adult biographies gets lost, while large-scale assessments take over. The perspective of Portugal, as a small, southern European country which participated in the costly PIAAC survey, informs this symposium. Findings from Denmark indicate how – even without a public „shock“ (Cort & Larson, 2015), the grassroots movements and popular education is pushed aside by the neo-liberal focus on employment and the workforce.

Furthermore, recent large-scale assessments like PIAAC rounds 1, 2, and 3 seem to improve country comparison and they expand to more and more countries (e.g. Singapore, Peru, Switzerland). But comparison remains different issues, comparability is limited and the traditional policy borrowing approach is outdated. The underestimated value of comparative research may lie in small-scale, in-depth analyses with strong theoretical backgrounds and huge epistemological outcomes (Egetenmeyer, Schmidt-Lauff & Boffo, 2017) and less in mere rankings of proficiencies e.g. in literacy and numeracy. Still, literacy and numeracy strategies are more often started from and informed by representative surveys than from micro-analyses. The more the OECD covers the world with a „single story“ (Addey, 2018) of definitions and test instruments, the more it will influence national literacy and numeracy strategies.

This symposium narrows the focus from educational policies to adult education policies, but widens it beyond the European Union to a more global perspective. While some authors understand globalisation as an enhancement of free trade (WTO & ILO, 2011), critical voices about the power of seemingly ‚consent‘ policy-making and semantics (Moutsios, 2010), or within postcolonial approaches (Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew & Hunt, 2015) see a re-colonization of the global south (Grotlüschen, 2018).

The symposium thus contains the perspective from the global South, which shows policy changes since the Apartheid Regime until the most recent cut-backs in Adult Basic Education. This historical perspective on the shift of educational policies from postcolonial South Africa shows how difficult it is for low literate adults, especially black people and people of color, to raise their voice and claim appropriate literacy and numeracy provision.

The fourth contribution shows how the OECD definitions of global competence, are strongly informed by northern scientists and thus represent an re-colonisation by itself (Ledger, Bailey, Their & Pitts, 2019). Global competence is a new domain in the PISA surveys, but several countries withdrew from it. Moreover, northern values are discussed as being attributed to a notion of ‘South’ which is not a geographical distinction but discriminating those who are said to belong to the South.

The overall symposium tries to intersect the European perspectives with global activities started by the North (e.g. OECD and UNESCO headquarters in Paris with their expert groups from the global North). We claim to decolonize assessment and to carefully watch the conclusions drawn from large-scale assessments as they are easily used for neo-liberal shifts in adult educational policies, which are often enough legitimized with an over-generalisation of data (e.g. PIAAC webinar by (Schleicher, 2013)).

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