In the last decades policymakers struggle to cope with major labour market shifts triggered by processes of globalization, technological advancement and -recently- the overlapping economic, refugee and pandemic crises. In this context, increasingly, education and training have been perceived by International and Supranational Organizations as destined to ensure that no human capital is left unexploited.  The focus on skills, and the inclusive rhetoric of quality, flexibility and performativity, positions education policy as an essential aspect of economic policy (Bøyum, 2014). The political agenda on skills instrumentalizes Lifelong learning (LLL) and draws on technologies of metrics, comparison, standards and best practices for ‘neutral’ scientific legitimation and validation (Sellar & Lingard, 2013; Tsatsaroni & Evans, 2014). The OECD occupies a prominent and influential place in the globalized skills discourse, producing ‘mechanisms of change’ for all those involved in the field (Berkovich & Benoliel, 2020: 498).

Such mechanisms promote governance processes that ‘solidify previous ambiguous concepts among educational actors, by ‘building on past successes’, ‘assembling knowledge capacity’ and ‘deploying bureaucratic resources’ (Morgan and Shahjahan, 2014: 194). The reinforcement of a globalized LLL discourse that emphasizes skills further bolsters the OECD’s expertise, which however is ‘laden with value assumptions’ emanating from the global north and ‘hidden by numbers’ difficult for lay users to approach (Hamilton, 2020: 72). The OECD has been pushing and marketizing the competencies and skills’ agenda since the early nineties alongside with more recent ventures such as PISA and PIAAC, fabricating sine qua non conditions for establishing ‘policy understanding, travel, translation and thus, despite local idiosyncrasies and histories, policy consensus’ (Grek, 2013: 704). Similarly to the use of skills, competence is closely linked to labour and has been endorsed as an outputs descriptor of all education and training provision, functioning as a ‘governance tool’ of educational systems’ ‘mental priming’ for a ‘market driven management’ (Salling Olesen, 2020: 81).

The narrative of key skills (literacy, numeracy and problem-solving), through PIAAC, ‘offers a simple model of causality in relation to social reality and its logic is seductive’, making adult learning ‘tractable to comparative analysis and policy’ (Hamilton, 2020: 65-66). Similarly, the critical literature has unveiled the normative power of the PISA discourse and the operationalization of the overlapping -with vocational education and training- skills rhetoric for the promotion of comparison and standardization in search of future economic growth (Rappleye & Komatsu, 2019; Engel et al, 2019). In the last decade, however, the OECD has reinterpreted and introduced the skills discourse to -a relatively new sector for its policy instruments- Early Childhood Education and Care(ECEC), defining the field as the ‘foundation of LLL’ (OECD, 2012: 17), marketing comparison via best practices, and bearing ideas, values and assumptions emanating from its other knowledge-based governance tools.

Drawing on critical policy analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study seeks to ‘pull apart’ the skills discourses ushered by the OECD’s expansive LLL agenda (Walker, 2009: 337). We aim to uncover the overlapping discursive dynamics, to unpack the assumptions, values and ideas produced by two seemingly unrelated governance tools. To be specific, this paper explores the OECD’s position of power within the LLL discourse and the normative function of two written results of its policy (“Starting Strong III”(2012) & “Skills Outlook”(2013)) that encompass ideas about the way the world should operate, thus reinforcing a causal and rather simplistic correlation between education and employment. In doing so, we engage with Bernstein’s (2000) conceptual grammar and introduce the concept of the pedagogic device. What is being relayed by the device, through a ‘repair function’, shapes new self-governing subjects and monopolizes the conception of skills (Robertson & Sorensen, 2018:474).

The purpose of this study is to investigate and scrutinize the discursive dynamics under the OECD’s lifelong and life-wide learning skills agenda, and its recontextualization from adult to early childhood learning. In this direction, we are examining two influential documents that have produced the underpinnings of the OECD’s dominant discourse on skills in both fields: the OECD’s “Starting Strong III: A Quality Toolbox for Early Childhood Education and Care” (2012), and “Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills” (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies - PIAAC) (2013). The first policy text is intended to become a ‘reference guide for anyone with a role to play’ in promoting quality in ECEC (OECD, 2012: 3). Although there are five “Starting Strong” publications in the OECD’s series for ECEC, the one selected is deemed to be a ‘Quality Toolbox’ providing ‘practical solutions’ for promoting quality in this field (OECD, 2012: 15) and introducing ‘critical learning areas’ (including the skills of literacy, numeracy, ICT etc.) (OECD, 2012: 86). Interestingly enough, Starting Strong III targets not only bureaucracies and policymakers centrally, but it also aims directly at individuals and organizations, reshaping their conception of skills and quality through epistemological assumptions based on international comparison of data and examples from other countries. Similarly, the OECD Skills Outlook Report is the ‘inaugural edition’ of the series, providing a ‘rich source of data’ from the first round of the Survey of Adult Skills (a product of PIAAC) and setting the foundation for a discourse of skills (e.g. literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology rich environments) that are ‘invaluable in 21-century economies’ (2013: 3). Drawing on Bernstein’s (2000) concept of pedagogic device, Fairclough’s ideas (2003; 2006) and following Walker’s (2009) approach, we utilise critical discourse analysis (CDA) to uncover the assumptions, the implications, the choice of words, the narratives behind the dominant skills discourse underpinning the selected OECD documents. Discourses ‘reflect a certain understanding about the world and simultaneously reinforce, and help bring about, the world envisioned through those particular Discourses’ (Walker, 2009: 338). Our analysis of the selected written policy devices combines the discursive and socio-cultural dimension of Fairclough’s CDA method, to offer insights into the discursive and normative dynamics used to market and expand the OECD’s position and conception of LLL key skills.

This contribution could enrich the existing literature from a CDA approach of the OECD’s expansive LLL skills agenda for all levels of education and diverse audiences including policymakers, experts and educators. Our paper explores the links between the PIAAC and Starting Strong’s skills discourse, in terms of values, assumptions, visions and emphases, illustrating the OECD’s -constantly increasing- power position that bolsters a causal relationship between education and employment. We perceive the overlaps and recontextualization of the discursive practices from adult to early childhood learning, under the OECD’s longitudinal LLL agenda, as systems of reason informing and influencing policies of both sectors. The two selected policy devices sustain technologies of comparison, positioning economy over society, monopolizing the conception of skills and pathologizing educational systems that fail to keep up with change. The key narrative underpinning the field of adult learning promotes an individualist and consumerist conception of freedom and choice as a means of tackling the skills mismatch/ gap. Hence, our tentative conclusions suggest that the OECD’s shift of gaze and the expansion of the spectrum of its skills agenda to ECEC, in search of the ‘redemptive power’ (Walker, 2009: 347) of learning and skills, will have major repercussions on the policy regimes dominating ECEC, and also on the demarcation and governance dynamics of the field of LLL as a whole.

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