Financing Adult and Continuing Education - Some Comparative Results
Author(s):
Lorenz Lassnigg (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2013
Network:
02. Vocational Education and Training (VETNET)
Format:
Paper

Session Information

02 SES 06 C, Comparative Studies / Benchmarking: Welfare Policies, Financing, Success Rates and Satisfaction

Paper Session

Time:
2013-09-11
15:30-17:00
Room:
A-104
Chair:
Len Cairns

Contribution

The paper presents results from a recent study that has analysed the total expenditure for adult and continuing education and training (ACET) in Austria, and has made a comparison with four other countries: Finland, Sweden, Australia and Scotland/UK.

The research question is threefold:

- How and from which sources can we assess the total expenditure?

- How does Austria compare with coiuntries from different welfare regimes, and with relative high participation?

- How do the patterns of expenditure relate to aspects of participation in ACET?

Financing does ambiguously relate to policies for the support of adult education, as sufficient resources are obviously necessary on the one hand, however, on the other hand there is research showing, that there are also other obstacles against participation (e.g. time constraints) and resources seem not a sufficient condition for an increase in participation.

A key point of the analysis is the separation of three kinds of sources, public, employers contributions, and individual contributions. A specific kind of resource is the contribution of labour market policy, that is mostly raised from employers and employees.

A well established proposition concenring the financing of ACET is that the three kinds of sources should be somehow balanced, and that market failure might be overcome by public support. Be fore we speak about balance, we must know, how the proportion between the sources looks like.

Using the types of welfare regimes, conservative-corporatist, liberal, and Nordic-social-democratic, we can expect some rough basic patterns, with the a strong market contribution in the liberal and a strong statecontribution in the Nordic regime, the Austrian conservative-corporatist regime being somewhere in between.

The confrontation of resources to participation can show, to which extent more resources are related to higher participation.

The study was based on a sequence of research projects in Austria, that have subsequently built up a basis for aggregating the total expenditure (Lassnigg et al. 2006, 2008, 2012). The recent study has built on the administrative data about the public budgets, the European Continuing Vocational Training Survey (CVTS) data about employers contributions, and the European Adult Education Survey (AES) about individual contributions (grossly these kinds of sources are available for the countries compared, with problems for Scotland which must have been mixed with UK data, and Australian data, which could be found for financing, however, could not be compared about participation). In principle these sources fit together quite well, with major omissions with employers contributions (below 10 employees and certain mainly public sectors). A similar study was conducted for the UK in the course of the Inquiry for the Future of Lifelong Learening (IFLL) project (Williams et al 2010)

Method

A first challenge is to develop a framework for the gathering of the information about the resources. The decision about the definition of ACET was taken from the Austrian analysis, concentrating on non formal ET and the 25-64-years population. A second challenge were the technical issues of bringing the different data bases on a consistent time line; we chose 2009, deflated the data to this year. The third challenge was how to compare the different countries, here we standardized the financial indicators to the 25-64 population, thus we can compare relative indicators of expenditure per population between the countries. After conducting the analysis for Austria, the next step were enquiries (by telephone and email) with representatives of the administrations of the comparison countries, which provided us the main sources to analyze. The analysis must be clearly seen as explorative, however, gives some basis to discuss and to built further on.

Expected Outcomes

Main results are (1) total expenditure for ACET in Austria per population are the highest of the countries compared (2) individual expenditure is relatively the highest, and much higher in Austria and public expenditure is very much lower than in the countries compared (3) the relationship of expenditure to participation is weak, except a consistent positive relationship of public expenditure to participation in formal ACET, (4) in liberal countries public expenditure is relatively high and total expenditure is rather low. A specific issue concerns the homogeneity of the welfare regimes, and how the selected countries are typical for the regimes. Some analyses of indicators from Education at a glance EAG 2012, extended to five regimes including a South European type and a Transition type show some patterns between regimes, however, also heterogeneity within the regimes. - in the conservative regime women are consistently less participating in CVET across the life cycle as compared to men - there are typical patterns of employers investment for different qualifications, the conservative regime investing in medium and low qualified, the liberal and Nordic regime investing in low qualified, and the Southern regime investing in highly qualified.

References

Lassnigg, Lorenz/Vogtenhuber, Stefan/Steiner Peter M. (2006): Weiterbildung in Österreich. Finanzierung, Beteiligung, Wirkungen. IHS-Projektbericht im Auftrag der Arbeiterkammer Wien. Internet: http://www.equi.at/dateien/ak-ihs-weiterbildung.pdf [2013-01-31]. Lassnigg, Lorenz/Vogtenhuber, Stefan/Kirchtag, Rafael. (2008): Lebenslanges Lernen in Österreich. Ausgaben und Entwicklung der Beteiligungsstruktur, IHS-Projektbericht im Auftrag der Arbeiterkammer Wien. Internet: http://www.equi.at/dateien/LLL-Ausgaben-Beteiligung-200.pdf [2013-01-31]. Lassnigg, Lorenz/Vogtenhuber, Stefan/Osterhaus, Ingrid (2012): Finanzierung von Erwachsenen- und Weiterbildung in Österreich und in ausgewählten Vergleichsländern. IHS-Projektbericht im Auftrag der Arbeiterkammer Wien. Internet: http://www.equi.at/dateien/AK-IHS-EB-Kovgl.pdf, http://www.equi.at/dateien/AK-IHS-strat.pdf [2013-01-31]. Williams, Jenny/McNair, Stephen/Aldridge, Fiona (2010): Expenditure and funding models in lifelong learning. A Context Paper. National Institute of Adult Continuing Education. Leicester. Internet: http://www.niace.org.uk/lifelonglearninginquiry/docs/Expenditure-funding-models.pdf [2013-01-31].

Author Information

Lorenz Lassnigg (presenting / submitting)
Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS)
Sociology
Vienna

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