The development of clusters in adult education to tackle educational exclusion processes

Abstract

In Europe, participation in adult education is substantial. A high number of providers is related to that. Nonetheless, in all European countries the whole range of education and training supply tends to be addressed to the most favoured strata of the population for whom it is designed and planned. Everywhere the opportunity to access adult education seems to be dominated by the theory of the two groups of people, or what is here defined as the “learning exclusion equilibrium”.

The adult education supply is so wide and varied that in no country is it possible to find a system that regulates and governs all the opportunities. In the public sector, too, there is everywhere a broad breakdown of interventions. Rather, opportunities seem to be determined by a wide-ranging, changing and differentiated set of organisations that come together in varied and dynamic clusters to manage activities or projects of common interest. This seems to be the factor that determines the merits and limits of the current state of adult education in Europe and prompts a renewed reflection on the importance of the local and regional dimension of organisational models and on the opportunity to promote the development of clusters of organisations, institutions and projects that can include the excluded public. The essay aims at proposing the reflections that emerged from a recent research on the organisation of adult education at a regional and local level.