A report on Employment and Social Developments points out the need of investment in early childhood, school and adult education to tackle EU skills shortage.
On 19 September 2024, the European Commission (EC) published the results of the 2024 Employment and Social Developments in Europe (ESDE) report. It presents the main labour market and social developments with the current state of social convergence in the EU and the role of social investment for the year 2023. This report helps the EU to monitor its progress towards achieving the European Social Rights by 2030. The three targets are: i) at least 78% of the population aged 20-64 should be in employment, ii) 60% of all adults should participate in further education and training every year, and iii) the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion (AROPE) should be reduced by 15 million.
Overall, the EU is getting closer to the first target, with 75.3% of the adult population in employment and the unemployment rate being down to 6.1%. Moreover, the employment rate for women exceeded 70% for the first time in 2023. On the other hand, progress on the other two targets is not as successful. In 2022, 46.6% of the population aged 25-64 participated in training activities (+2.9 pp compared to 2016, +6.4 pp compared to 2011) and the rate of people AROPE decreased by 0.3 pp compared to 2021 to reach 21.4%.
Using data from the 2022 Adult Education Survey, the ESDE report states that 44% of adult workers aged 25-64 have received non-formal education and 6.3% have received formal education. The main fields of formal education are: i) health and welfare, ii) business, administration and law, iii) engineering, manufacturing and construction, and iv) arts and humanities. Only 1/4 of respondents with lower secondary education or less took part in training, while this figure rises to 2/3 of those with tertiary education. The survey also asked about the reasons for not participating in training. 75.9% of respondents who did not participate in training said that they did not see the need to do so. For those who wanted to undertake training but could not, the main barriers cited were the training schedule (25.3% of responses), family reasons (16%) and the cost of training (15.2%). The authors of the ESDE report note that progress towards the target of 60% of adults participating in lifelong learning is limited.
While action in adult and youth education (people aged 15-64) is important to address actual skills shortages, the report also considers social investments in school education (3-14 years) and early childhood education and care (ECEC, 0-2 years) as a strong early education system would help the EU achieve a long-term upward convergence and as basic reading and maths skills are needed in the everyday life. With the latest PISA results showing a decline of basic skills in the EU over the past decade (see SwissCore article), the ESDE report points out that the efficiency of public spending is also declining. The authors suggest that increasing the budget for school education must be accompanied by structural reforms to improve students’ basic skills. Among potential reforms, they cite Portugal’s expansion of Vocational Education and Training (VET) tracks alongside high school, which particularly benefited students who tended to drop out of school early.
In addition, investment in high quality ECEC is important for the convergence of a range of socioeconomic outcomes in Europe. Participation in ECEC helps children to develop language and physical skills and enables parents to work. The EC has recognised this, leading to the adoption of the 2030 Barcelona targets for ECEC in 2022. These targets aim to address several barriers to children’s access to ECEC, in particular the lack of available places and high costs of access. As indicators, at least 45% of children under the age of three and 96% of children between three and the starting age for primary education should participate in ECEC. While some EU Member States have already reached these targets, the ESDE report estimates that an investment of €11 billion per year is needed for the other member states to conform.