This paper will examine how educational authorities conceive of the learning outcomes of the 18- to- 29 population in sixteen regions located in Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. In the last decades the European Union has attempted that this age group continues education beyond low secondary education, avails of opportunities of employment and education, improves its digital skills, engages in 'upskilling' pathways, and elaborates their own 'individual learning accounts' (European Commission, 2020; European Council, 2021).

The paper will focus on the reception of this official discourse by the educators and employment officers who cater to the education, training and career guidance of young people who are exposed to social vulnerability in these regions. The underlying argument acknowledges that psychologists of education have defined learning outcomes to indicate a gradient of lower- to- higher- level cognitive operations, namely: remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and creating (Anderson et al, 2001). However, instead of the actual learning of young people living in very different social conditions, I will analyse how policymakers and first-line professionals make sense of learning and learning outcomes. The correspondence or the discrepancy between their construal and the academic concept are open to empirical research.

This analysis will spell out how education policy recontextualises the concept of learning to set specific ules of evaluation (Bernstein, 1996). In my view, while an array of policy instruments (Le Galès, 2016) recontextualize the key official tenets, professionals evaluate students’ learning on the ground, in particular regions, according to certain institutional requirements (Löw, 2016).

Policy instruments are relatively stable socio-technical arrangements (Le Galès, 2016) which set certain expectations of desirable social changes (e.g., the economy of knowledge, emulation of best practices, social mobility), underpinned by an array of technical tools (e.g., soft law, data, dashboards, classifications). In the European Union, four of these instruments convey learning outcomes from Brussels to young people through the work of educators and employment officers: (1) Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs) insist on enhancing synergies between education and employment; (2) Dashboards of statistical indicators must allegedly monitor advancements in learning outcomes in terms of the European Pillar of Social Rights, the Skills Agenda and the European Education Area; (3) A database compiles information about accomplishments derived from the CSRs in each country; and  (4) Individuals must review their own learning on the grounds of classifications of instructional levels and professional qualifications.

Regions are components of the social structure, which is both the means and the outcome of human agency, shaping space by setting rules and distributing resources. Spacing and regional syntheses configure regions in space. Spacing involves placing social goods and people in different geographical positions, while a regional synthesis consists of amalgamating goods and people in imagined places (Löw, 2016). When policymakers, educators and employment officers deal with young people living in conditions of social vulnerability, both parties of this social relationship are positioned in a given region and retrieve a particular construal of the main concerns regarding education and employment in that place.  

The analysis will also consider how teachers and employment officers construe the potential of young students of vocational education and training (VET) programmes delivered by schools and public employment systems in sixteen regions (Parreira do Amaral et al, 2019; Benasso et al, 2022). It will focus on how these street-level professionals account for the success and failure of VET students through shared understandings of inequalities and social vulnerability.

The paper is a product of project CLEAR, funded by Horizon Europe under Grant Agreement No. 101061155. URL https://clear-horizon.eu/

The paper will draw on an expanded grey literature review of official definitions of learning outcomes, as well as on interviews with educators and employment officers in Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Two thematic content analyses have delivered several significant results from this corpus of documents. In 2023, the CLEAR consortium tracked the definition of learning outcomes from pieces of legislation to educational programmes in compulsory education as well as in the health, hospitality and IT specialties of vocational and higher education in these eight countries. While that analysis reviewed 500 national documents, the paper will also expand the corpus to take the CSRs into consideration. Between October 2023 and May 2024, the consortium interviewed 105 professionals in the following regions (from East to West): Kainuu and Southwest of Finland, North Central and South Central Bulgaria, Kentriki Makedonia and Dytiki Ellada in Greece, Vienna and Upper Austria, Hamburg and Haale in Germany, Marche and Liguria in Italy, Catalonia and the Valencian Community in Spain, and North and the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon in Portugal.

A tentative conclusion of the paper is that the official approach misaligns the psychological and the policy concepts of learning outcomes. Rather than focusing on cognitive operations, the educators and employment officers who work with the most disadvantaged youth retrieve relatively homogeneous beliefs on employment, training and youth emancipation to assess their potential. A set of policy instruments has embedded learning outcomes into this type of professional assessment. Country- Specific Recommendations (CSRs) frame learning within the employment life of individuals. The adopted dashboards of indicators measure academic credentials and employment rather than actual learning. The EU and the member states negotiate policy reforms on the grounds of these CSRs and indicators, which are publicly systematised in a data base. Eventually, individuals become aware of their learning when they achieve instructional levels and professional qualifications amid the variegated circumstances of their lives. Teachers and employment officers across the different regions of the EU often reiterate similar professional beliefs about learning. The prevailing professional perspectives tend to discuss individuals’ soft skills and the labour market through the lens of a one-size-fits-all notion of learning outcomes. The coincidence of so many professionals agreeing on these common points is a telling result. This homogeneous discourse has spread to regions with disparate socio-economic structures. Moreover, institutional coordination and policy evaluation practices also differ among the regions, yet the educators and employment officers who cater to disadvantaged youth share similar views on the social conditions of this target group on so similar grounds.

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