Accreditation of prior learning as a lever for lifelong learning: lessons learnt from the New Opportunities Initiative, Portugal

The book gives an account of the research conducted in the independent evaluation of the New Opportunities Initiative (NOI), one of the largest Portuguese governmental programmes in recent decades to upgrade qualifications. The NOI demonstrates that the recognition of non-formal and informal learning is crucial in order to improve the competences needed in our societies today. This book reflects on the NOI and its potential for societies in Europe and the rest of the world.
The publication is based on a solid foundation of empirical evidence, encompassing seven papers subjected to an extensive academic peer review procedure.
The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, together with its partners in this publication, MENON and the Study Centre on Peoples and Cultures of the Portuguese Catholic University (CEPCEP), hopes that discussions on the NOI research papers will help to shed light on a reform agenda that is of the greatest urgency in our continuing and lifelong learning systems.
Preface
Lifelong learning, is and will remain for many more years, the single major challenge for the future posed to our learning systems and to the education public policy. Notwithstanding the fact of the matter is that educational systems, generally speaking, have been unable to design and adopt a large-scale model of lifelong learning as efficient, and productive, as the traditional factory-inspired schools of the industrial age. It is not without irony that while we cultivate a vigorous discourse geared at the foundations of a knowledge/learning-driven society for the 21st century our education infrastructure remains stuck to ideas and is built out of concepts that date back to the 19th century.
Innovation and creativity in this field are disappointing in spite of a general feeling that enormous externalities – social, cultural, economic and citizenship wise – could be derived from a strong lifelong learning put in place. The difficulties to move from a (mass)-production led to a (individualised)-demand driven paradigm are conceptually challenging and of complex implementation. This is especially true in times of fiscal crisis and lean public budgets that tend to favour ‘more of the same’ models that have already “proven” their efficient ways of tackling masses of students packaged into classrooms and provided with an “assembly line type” of educational provision. Hence, the fundamental challenge that lies before us consists in ‘imagineering’ demand oriented networks that are capable of: (i) personalising learning preferences and (ii) warranting economies of scale that may drive down unit costs to the level that is considered manageable by decision-makers.
Another known caveat remains with the lack of sufficient research-based evidence on ‘what works’ in lifelong learning. Reforms are only too often piecemeal, short-term, fragmented and seldom undergo evaluative research processes that are independent at their roots. Under the present uncertainties and ever-growing issues, learning from past successes and failures, and benchmarking our experience against that of others becomes so much more important. Moreover, evidence based structural reform – and sustainable innovation – puts a high premium on vision, stewardship, strategy, motivation and leadership, at both political and institutional levels.
The New Opportunities Initiative (NOI) is a portuguese flagship programme to recognise and accredit prior learning (RPL, APL) and to endow low-skilled adults with upper secondary qualifications, which is defined as the minimum entry threshold to the exercise of a full citizenship in a knowledge-rich society. NOI’s major achievement has been its ability to attract the least-skilled adults to embark in a system of informal and non-formal skills recognition, accreditation and certification, with complements of formal learning, to achieve academic and/or vocational certification. A record enrolment of about one half of the targeted adult population of roughly 3.7 million low-skilled in barely 5 years of implementation is a fact to be duly recognised and lies beyond dispute.
This book gives an account of the robust research efforts deployed at the independent evaluation of NOI. Written on a solid foundation of empirical evidence, this publication encompasses seven papers which were submitted to an extensive peer review procedure inspired by best practices in academic refereeing. The peer reviews were done initially at a distance by senior referees with solid scientific backgrounds and extensive international experience in the domain under appraisal; the process then continued with a face to face seminar where each peer reviewer examined three papers in depth and all experts were invited to act as discussants of each paper; the procedure was concluded by a second round of individual reviews whenever the paper had undergone serious change.
Research Director and Editor: Roberto Carneiro
Publishers: UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning -MENON Network- Centro de Estudos dos Povos e Culturas de Expressão Portuguesa, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Year of publication: 2011. No. of pages: 384. Size: 167 mm x 237 mm. ISBN: 978-972-9045-29-5. Download Accreditation of prior learning as a lever for lifelong learning: lessons learnt from the New Opportunities Initiative, Portugal.