Economising education: From the silent revolution to rethinking education. A new moment of Europeanisation of education?

Abstract

Rethinking Education (EC, 2012) suggests a new phase in European education policy. The constitution of education as a marketable service and the European (Higher) Education area as a market was pinpointed as an implicit agenda in the silent revolution in education landscape fostered by the open method of coordination and the Bologna and Copenhagen Processes. What suggests a new momentum is that: (i) education appears programmatically conceived as a marketable service, in the terms of a business and a European-wide and global market; (ii) a VET reform is underway based on German apprenticeship model, which brings together a version of minimal cheap education and a commercial strategy; (iii) there are signs of centralisation of European education policy on the EC and the CEU, under the European semester, and the apparent decline in importance of the Bologna and Copenhagen Processes and the Education & Training 2020 Programme. When looking at Portugal nowadays, the Europeanisation of education, fostered by economic and financial, as well as educational, European policies, and the choices of the government, presents a complex picture, with the shrinking of the welfare state, the increase in education privatisation and commercialisation, and the growing gap between national and European education welfare levels.

Introduction

By analysing the documents underpinning the European education policy it is possible to ascertain that, in 2014, the policy is centred on some developments: the Erasmus+ Programme; the midterm stocktaking report on the EU2020 strategy in the European semester; the development of the European Alliance for Apprenticeships (EAfA); and the launch of the U-multirank. ¹ For those studying the issue, it conjures up a peculiar feeling of dejá vu mixed with strangeness: on the one hand, some of the main thrusts that have long been typical of European education policy (the constitution and the attractiveness of the European Higher Education Area/market; the emphasis on intra-European mobility; education as economic and employment policy; the open method of coordination of education policies) are present in these processes. On the other hand, familiar mainstays of education policy in the first decade of the 21st century (the Bologna and Copenhagen Processes, the Education & Training 2010 maintain Education & Training 2010 and the Lifelong Learning Programmes) seem to take a back seat with priority being given to the European Commission’s Country Specific Recommendations (CSR), to an all-embracing Erasmus Programme and a unique European Alliance for Apprenticeships. If, as suggested by Nóvoa, there are some unsettling continuities in the manner in which education is dealt with in the EU, bearing in mind the current seemingly endless social and political crisis, recent developments also suggest that ‘the major turning point’ (Nóvoa, 2013: 114) may already have passed, even if questions may arise as to its nature, course and effects.

Thus, over the past 40 years of political intervention in education within the European Economic Community/European Union, including the first decade of the 21st century, education has been established, in a multidimensional and unbalanced fashion, as a fundamental human and social right, as a private and commercial good, as an economic and employment policy and as an instrument for constructing Europe (Antunes, 2006; Dale, 2008; Dale and Robertson, 2009; Field, 1998; Lawn, 2003; Nóvoa, 1998); in this second decade, the drive towards a European education policy more focused on favouring accumulation ² (competitiveness, commodification, privatisation) seems to be currently prevailing, despite the fact that it is brimming with contradictions, is discursively aligned to serve the economy, feeds off its own failures and inability to answer the problems it is supposedly addressing.

This paper begins by theoretically discussing and proposing a relational approach to the concepts and processes of Europeanisation and Europeification of education, understood as analytically and empirically distinct, but not separate, processes. The discussion proceeds by analysing which policy of education ³ is being built in the EU, how education is positioned, which policies are supporting and lending substance to such positioning, what changes have been taking place more recently, and since when; all this at a distance from the political engineering underlying both the programmes and the landmarks set for specific dates. Beyond the evidence-based policies, what is to become of the European Union’s territorial and social cohesion, what asymmetries, cleavages and dualisms arise from European education policies?

The paper then examines the case of Portugal, seeking to discuss the complex and multiple relationships involving: (i) a globally structured educational agenda, mainly conveyed by the European economic and financial policies; (ii) Europeanisation of education national policies; and (iii) the Portuguese government’s (2011–2015) political project and options. Then, we explore the argument that European intervention, with the so-called structural adjustment and austerity policies, has been a crucial vehicle and support for a neoliberal revolution that is mining the fragile (educational) welfare state in Portugal and the statute of fundamental social rights (like education) in the Portuguese constitution and society. Can the Portuguese educational specificities and realities be articulated with the European education policies, by the political authorities in office, to deepen the divergence from the levels of social welfare in education in the EU and to accentuate the (semi)peripheral position of the country?

In the final section, and based on the above discussion, it will be argued that today the EU education policy is both more centralised by the main political bodies of the EU, the European Commission (EC) and the Council of European Union (CEU), and more restrictively confined to its supposed economically worthwhile dimensions and/or geared towards social control. This pressure to instrumentalise education seems to repeatedly generate contradictions between and within education policies. On the other hand, the national political education agenda may comprise multiple and selective Europeanisation processes.

Methodologically, according to theoretical and methodological relevance parameters, it was constituted a documental corpus as the empirical basis to understand the discourses, purposes, concepts and effects that give shape to the current European education policy, on one hand, and the recent Portuguese education policy, as a case study. The documental corpus includes official European Commission and Council communications, reports and other information, as mentioned before, and, as will be observed later, Portuguese national programmes and reports. Those documents have been analysed and will be frequently referred to in order to substantiate the discussion. Other official secondary sources of empirical data will be considered too, aiming to ground the arguments produced.

What is Europeanisation?

There is a lengthy current debate in literature around the analytical accuracy, relevance and relationships of the concepts and processes of Europeanisation and Europeification (see, for instance, Alexiadou, 2007; Börzel, 2002; Cort, 2010; Dale and Robertson, 2009; Lawn and Lingard, 2002; Marciacq, 2012; Radaelli, 2000; Sabour, 2009). We understand that, in education as in other social spheres, it is important to considerer both the processes – which are analytically and empirically distinct – of constitution of a European education sector and policy (Dale, 2009) and the processes and implications of the imbrication of European and national education priorities, policies and institutions (Antunes, 2006). Nevertheless, we observe, too, that those processes are nowadays strongly connected and interdependent in a way that suggests an approach that considers European and national as social processes and relationships and as dimensions of a complex, multi-scalar dynamic. ⁴ So, even if in the next section we discuss what some specifically define as the Europeanisation of education policy, and in the third section of the paper we analyse what, in the same line, could be taken as Europeification of national policy, we prefer to underline the relationships that constitute one and the other processes, considering that they are analytically and empirically distinct, not separate. Accordingly, taking Portugal as a case study, we focus on the relationships between national and European education priorities and orientations and the construction of national policies within the framework of European policies, options and guidelines (Europeification, as proposed by Andersen and Eliassen, 1993). Bearing in mind the abovementioned analytical distinction and relational approach, we use the most common term Europeanisation to cover both phenomena (European policy and sector; European and national relationships, intertwined processes and dimensions of education policy). Additionally, this is a way to work with the tensions brought about by a methodological strategy of casting a (bi-directional) glance, either from European or national education policy and space.

European education policy, a glance from the EU

If a ‘turning point’ appears to be visible in European education policy, then it is more emphatically formulated in the Communication from the Commission entitled Rethinking Education: Investing in Skills for Better Socio-Economic Outcomes (2012). Assuming a strategic reorientation here is underlined the concentration of the focus of intervention on two structural problems: ⁵ (i) fuelling accumulation and (ii) favouring social control. For the first problem, several responses are pursued: an education that serves competitiveness and innovation as a source of human capital; boosting the European education and training market, at a domestic level, in the EU and Europe, and competing for world markets at an international level; by reducing public budgets and responsibilities for the provision of education. For the second problem, responses favour work-based learning both as a public policy and an educational answer.

This rethought education programme highlights the corresponding strategic action lines: (i) apprenticeships and work-based learning as the answers for youth unemployment, envisioned as a(n education) problem of skills mismatch and supply, and European economic growth as a matter of bolstering human capital ⁶ – and this is called quality; (ii) open education and distance learning (the digital revolution) presented as the way to elevate and disseminate information and communication competences for all and to build tailored provision to an expected increased demand for learning all around the world; as it is explained that this exceeds the existing systems’ capacity, the proposal is to prepare the adequate business models – accessibility is the chosen label; (iii) ‘efficient investment’, ‘strong partnerships between the public and private sectors’, ‘cost-sharing’ schemes (Vassiliou, 2012) underline the options promoted for shrinking public and socialised funding, through state participation, under the umbrella of ‘austerity’ or ‘budgets constraints’ (Vassiliou, 2012), and using the consumerist neoliberal principle (when advanced to commodify public goods that embrace human social rights) of ‘user pays’ (business, employers and even students); in those preferred proposals, public funding by the state is now described as being a means to ‘leverage private sector match-funding’ (EC, 2012: 12).

As education is politically and ideologically transported to the edge of the hurricane – ‘Delivering the right skills for the future is fundamental for ending the current crisis’ – the text goes on to legitimise economising and centralising education policy initiative and control within the EC and the CEU: ‘The challenge we face today is too great to be resolved by any one country or any one policy area’ (Vassiliou, 2012).

We thereby come to a political and discursive framework (an orthodoxy) which generates hypervisibility for the problems and educational responses chosen and fabricated blindness (Nóvoa, 2013) to universes, visions, narratives and alternatives removed from the discursive and the spotlight of political action. As such, the following issues are overshadowed: (i) unemployment deriving from how the economy operates (the economic and financial policies) to the destruction and concentration of jobs, to undervalue work, to shift productivity gains in favour of the remuneration of capital ⁷ and to prevent the distribution of employment as a means to access income; (ii) universal access to education and knowledge as a fundamental social and human right and as a decommodified public good, which is realised through political and not technical choices (the latter are merely instrumental) that are grounded on societal projects aimed at building communities and subjects; (iii) the reduction in funding and in public budgets resulting from political options both within the EU and individual Member States, aiming at the concentration of produced wealth, and geared towards the shrinking of the welfare state, which has become increasingly squalid and is now consigned to the role of leveraging private funding (it is worth noting how the use of such a vague and diffuse concept as private funding, which encompasses the actual students as well as foundations or businesses, actually creates an effect of non-knowledge). A closer look at the development of one of the most emblematic and enlightening processes of recent years, the European Alliance for Apprenticeships (EAfA), will bring some of these orientations, priorities and tendencies to light.

The European Alliance for Apprenticeships, education policy and commercial strategy

The EAfA was launched in July 2013 and constitutes a unique initiative that seeks to commit Member States to Vocational Education and Training (VET) reform. It is aimed at increasing the development of apprenticeships, so that young people spend a significant part of their training time in a real workplace context with both professional and school certification. The so-called ‘dual model’, whose best known version is the German one, although there is a strong tradition in Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands as well, is put forward for emulation, allegedly because the countries in which it is more widespread have lower youth unemployment rates. ⁸ This Alliance was proposed by the European Commission in its Communication Rethinking Education (November 2012) only a few days before the launch of a bilateral agreements process, at the invitation of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and with Commission sponsorship, involving six countries. ⁹ Establishing the timeline is not the most important issue, since the transition from this relatively modest event, which nevertheless obtained widespread coverage in the news, to the launch of an European Alliance for Apprenticeships as official EU policy a mere few months later, in July 2013, is not clear. This last event was accompanied by an official statement at the highest level ¹⁰ and, in the version produced by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Alliance corresponds to the continuation of VET reform in the EU initiated in December 2012 by the German government and is part of a process involving the export of educational services, namely the dual model: ‘With a “European Alliance for Apprenticeship”, the Commission also plans to integrate further countries into the reform process initiated by Germany.’ ¹¹ We thus come to a European policy of VET reform comprising the marketing of educational services which had been in the pipeline for a long time (Antunes, 1999, 2012; Dale and Robertson, 2009). This process has recently become more visible and strongly encouraged through a discourse in which the internationalisation of VET and the mobility of trainees and trainers plays a role in boosting the education and training market dynamics:

As players on the global education market, national VET systems need to be connected to the wider world in order to remain up-to-date and competitive. They have to be more capable of attracting learners from other European and third countries, providing them with education and training as well as making it easier to recognise their skills. (Bruges Communiqué, 2010: 4)

The programmes, the proposals and the language used have made it seem natural for the discussion of education and social policy issues (such as transition to employment, access to education and training, funding, governance, participation rates) to be part of the discourse in which ‘internationalisation’ is thematised as competition and as an affirmation and competitive strategy in the global education services market. European education policy appears, therefore, also as a component of a commercial strategy in which, apparently, the export of the ‘dual model’ by the German providers of educational services figures prominently. As such, the following issues become interconnected: (i) the legitimisation of both a minimal education policy and the de-schooling of the socially and academically most fragile youngsters, and the social control of young people’s aspirations, on the basis of work socialisation in an unemployment context; (ii) the promotion of the reduction in state funding and, through this, of privatisation ¹² (iii) a commercial strategy aimed at creating a market through the dissemination of a model that favours a segment of educational services exporters. How this European reform promoted by the EAfA and its high-level sponsors will play out is something only time will tell, but this is the official vision of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research:

International Vocational Training Cooperation: Success in Education Export. […] Starting in 2014, the new EU education programme ‘Erasmus for everyone’ and the new European Social Fund will contribute significantly to financing. […] Under the motto of ‘Training – Made in Germany,’ the BMBF initiative iMove (International Marketing of Vocational Education) promotes German initial and continuing vocational training. German education service providers are supported in establishing international cooperation and business relations by means of trainings, delegation visits and market studies. In the long term, Germany is to become the export champion in the area of education services. ¹³

The European semester and policy-making in education: The remaking of the open method of coordination

The so-called European semester of economy policies coordination includes, within the scope of the EU2020 strategy, the two educational targets as a priority area ((i) ‘by 2020, the share of early leavers from education and training should be less than 10%’ and (ii) ‘by 2020, the share of 30–34 year olds with tertiary educational attainment should be at least 40%’ ¹⁴ ) and one of the seven Flagship Initiatives, ‘Youth on the move’. Every year since 2011, the EC has presented progress reviews on the two goals in the Union and in the various countries and has issued country specific recommendations (CSR) which are then submitted for approval to the CEU. Since 2012, the Education and Training Monitor has also been published annually reporting on the situation in the EU and each country’s progress regarding the two abovementioned Europe 2020 headline targets and the six additional Education & Training 2020 benchmarks. As such, the open method of coordination (OMC) has bolstered its capacity to achieve binding political commitments, particularly as regards countries whose quest for legitimation is stronger (see Alexiadou et al., 2010; Dale, 2008).

If governance embraces the institutional formulae of the ‘coordination of the coordination’ of education activities (financing, provision, regulation and property), including decision-making and policy development processes (Dale, 2010), it seems that a new momentum of a more centralised decision-making process combined with intensified data production can be underway (Lawn, 2011; Nóvoa, 2013). This is suggested, above all, by the apparently growing importance, in the education landscape, of the European semester (2011) and the associated CSR, accompanied by the recently (2012) established Education and Training Monitor, with its 2014 version online. As every year Member States must present to the EC a National Reform Programme to account for their pursuit of European options, education policies and developments are worked and positioned to contribute to this economic coordination of priorities and guidelines (see European Commission, 2014a, 18; EC, 2014b). It seems that Bologna and Copenhagen Processes are losing their previous high profile in the making of ‘the silent revolution’ in education, during the first decade of this century, while policy processes under the direct aegis of the EC and the CEU have gained prominence. It is as if a kind of trilogy has become the renewed architecture of decision-making and development processes in education policy: (i) those central, formal instances of the European political system (EC and CEU); (ii) the ‘elite of technocrats, professionals and academics with specialized knowledge and skills’, that is ‘out of sight and excludes politics’, ‘governing’ ‘in the understory’ (Lawn, 2013: 20); (iii) the national governments. Increasingly further away from this equation seem to be some European and national actors and citizens who are accountable for politically recognised and institutionalised processes of democratic representation and legitimation: European and national parliaments unions; other elected, or otherwise representative, bodies; social movements.

On the one hand, national policies are significantly shaped by European priorities and policies as well as by governance, the decision-making process, the form of policy development and the weight of evidence-based policies; on the other hand, the data in the successive stocktaking reports are clear as to the extent of the asymmetries, dualisms and cleavages that are increasingly visible as a structural component in the EU (see Ballas et al., 2012; EC, 2014a, 2014b).

The 2014 assessment of the 2020 Strategy, therefore, clearly states that the two headline targets for education will probably be met in 2020, but the gaps between the Member States, despite having been reduced, will still be for early school leaving: ¹⁵ ‘20.7 percentage points, with the lowest value at 4.2% for Croatia and the highest at 24.9% for Spain’ (2012), and slightly below 20 percentage points for 2013 (Croatia with 3.7% and Spain with 23,5%); for the headline target of 40% of the population aged 30-34 years having completed tertiary education the gap is ‘reaching 29.4 percentage points in 2012. Italy has the lowest tertiary attainment rate, standing at 21.7%, whereas Ireland is the best performing country, with a rate of 51.1%’. In 2013, the distance between EU countries grew to 30.2 percentage points, with 22.4% in Italy and 52.6% in Ireland of the population aged 30–34 years having completed tertiary education (see EC, 2014b: 20–25; Online Education and Training Monitor, 2014 ¹⁶ ). If we take Adult participation in lifelong learning (where in 2013 the range goes from 1.7% in Bulgaria to 31.4% in Denmark) or Low achievement in reading (9.1% in Estonia and 39.4% in Bulgaria, in 2012), the asymmetries are as strong in education as in poverty or inequality, showing ‘a widening gap between regions inside and across Member States’ and ‘growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth and of income’ (EC, 2014a: 21).

Portugal as a case study

Europeanisation as a neoliberal revolution of Portuguese education?

Funding: Reduction and degradation of the public sector; commercialisation and privatisation

When it comes to understanding European education policy by taking into account what has happened in Portugal in recent times, it becomes clear that Europeanisation in education proceeds in the first place through the framework of European financial and economic policies. But one understands too that national governments’ political projects and options matter a lot.

Portugal has been under external intervention by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (the troika of lenders’ representatives), formalised by the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of 17 May 2011, which registers the structural adjustment policies as conditionality for the loan. ¹⁷ The budget cuts on public expenditure and structural reforms required by the MoU commitments (and its successive revisions) were the source of the strongest Europeanisation processes of education policies, which entail profound educational and social change. In this sense, Europeanisation of national education policies is a process that depends on the financial and economic policies directed at shrinking the fragile Portuguese welfare state, as a so-called structural adjustment process. This means that some processes of the Europeanisation of Portuguese education policies may be not related to the formally adopted European education policies and may even diverge from them.

Portugal (and other Member States) had to make, in an amazingly short time, very severe cuts in public expenditure, which meant reducing the scope, the resources, the capacity and the beneficiaries of public social policies, education, health and social security. As a result, the conditions to provide the services and the capacity to meet needs become more difficult and insufficient (see, for instance, EAPN, 2013; European Parliament, 2014; EPRS, 2013;Reis, 2014b). Therefore, the conditions for learning (and teaching) have substantially deteriorated, especially for those more in need, given that they have been frequently mistreated by the schooling system (e.g. adult population with low school qualifications, pupils with low academic performance). (See, for instance, Online Education and Training Monitor, 2014.)

When we look at the policy options of the Portuguese government ¹⁸ in education, we find several measures related to the structural adjustment process to account for budget cuts. Those enacted between 2011–2014 were almost three times larger than that defined in the MoU, ¹⁹ because the Portuguese government embraced the MoU policy so strongly that it was determined to go beyond the troika. ²⁰ MoU defines the obligation to: (i) ‘1.8. Reduce costs in the area of education, with the aim of saving EUR 195 million by rationalising the school network by creating school clusters; lowering staff needs; centralising procurement; and reducing and rationalising transfers to private schools in association agreements’ (in 2012); and (ii) ‘education and school network rationalisation: EUR 175 million’ (in 2013) (MoU, 2011: 33 e 36). ²¹ The Portuguese government has reduced the number of schools/school clusters by several hundred and the number of teachers or other school staff by tens of thousands; the minimum number of pupils per class has risen and the number of subjects diminished (see CNE, 2014: 252–281); moreover, several of these changes were ordered so fast and at the last minute – as in August 2013, at the end of the school year – that during the summer holidays, school-cluster heads and staff had to re-do the work already done regarding the grouping of pupils. ²²

In the meantime, there are reports that a significant contract of €500,000 for providing dual apprenticeship training in 2014–2015, has been made with ATEC, a Training Academy promoted by Volkswagen Autoeuropa, Siemens, Bosch and the Luso-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (or AHK). ²³

In higher education and in science and technology research, the budget cuts have been so brutal that the 2013 budget for HE institutions and the spending per student was less than in 2005 and the funding of S&T research returned to the level of 2006. This strangulation has had two major consequences. On the one hand, institutions have become more and more dependent on the so-called own revenue (students’ tuition fees; external funding obtained by research projects and other applications; external services, such as technical/scientific consulting), which, in some cases, accounted for as much as 40% of the annual budget (see, for instance, CNE, 2014: 274). ²⁴ On the other hand, it is increasingly common to hear the heads of the higher education institutions talk about internationalisation, with the attraction and mobility of foreign students becoming an export business, like, for instance, the tourism industry. So, Foreign Student Status was requested by those heads, who wanted to attract foreign students who will pay a tuition fee several times higher than national students. This has a direct impact on the difficulties facing families and students, narrowing the opportunities for the less affluent, since Portuguese students have to expend more economic effort than other European students to get a degree and they are the ones who more often indicate that economic issues are the reason they have dropped-out from HE and have not invested in it as lifelong education (see, for instance, EC, 2014c).

Education right versus education trade

Why can we talk about these alterations as a neoliberal revolution? We argue that what is at stake is a profound change in the place that education holds in the Portuguese constitution and society. These continuous measures are a threat to the public education system as they may lead to its degradation and destabilisation and as a consequence make it more difficult to reach an expected level of quality, performance and results; hence, they seriously risk undermining the centrality and the status of public provision and the de-commodified access to education as a fundamental right. ²⁵ Moreover, as we have argued before, HE is in fact, and increasingly so, vulnerable to losing its fundamental social right dimensions, already fragile and insufficient before the MoU. It has now been included as a private good within the scope of the trade of education services, a development which was precipitated by the scarcity, uncertainty and instability of public funding in the last four years, under the measures imposed or legitimised by the MoU.

According to several social policy scholars, even if a neoliberal government’s ‘coherent and global political project’ has not been formulated as such in Portugal, ‘a neoliberal ideological agenda’ is nevertheless prevalent (Carmo et al., 2014: 170) and ‘the Adjustment Program has served, above all, to protect and support an agenda of profound transformation […] that, based on fundamentals of essentially ideological nature, very clearly transcends the idea of   the simple financial contribution of the education sector to the balance of public finances’ (Cantante et al, 2014: 76).

But, from 2011 to 2014, we also find several measures that depend on the political-ideological project of the Portuguese government and do not seem to relate to the abovementioned Europeanisation process or European education policies and may even be at odds with them. For instance, the last Portuguese government, supported by the Socialist Party, in power from 2005–2011, clearly adopted policies directed at meeting the targets of Maintain Education & Training 2010 Programme in the domain of Adult Education and Training (AET) or teaching and learning in mathematics, Portuguese and sciences, and diminishing retention and expanding secondary and higher education enrollments. In contrast, the government in office between 2011-2015 has almost terminated AET. It has extended the exam policy so that they are held at the end of every education cycle, starting with the 4th grade. It has not continued with the mathematics, Portuguese and sciences national in-service teacher training programmes; these policies are not only unrelated to European options, but risk being at odds with several of the Education & Training 2020 benchmarks (e.g. those related to adult participation in lifelong learning or basic skills).

Europeanisation as a national answer to European education policy: Dual apprenticeships as priority

The abovementioned facts are the source of the feelings of perplexity that we, as analysts, have been confronted with in these past years, when observing that the Portuguese government, and the MoU education guidelines alike, seems to ignore some of the guidelines of European education policy, as expressed for instance by Education & Training 2020 Programme (e.g. the benchmark: by 2020, an average of at least 15% of adults (age group 25–64) should participate in lifelong learning). In fact the MoU underlines:

The Government will continue action to tackle low education attainment and early school leaving and to improve the quality of secondary education and vocational education and training, with a view to increase efficiency in the education sector, raise the quality of human capital and facilitate labour market matching. (Portugal-MoU, 2011: 25)

To this purpose three strategic action lines are enumerated: (i) a system to monitor education policies (ii) contractualised autonomy/formula-based funding (for public and private schools comprising performance criteria) and the enforcement of the General Inspectorate supervisory role; (iii) partnerships with companies and other stakeholders and provision of career guidance for vocational education and training (MoU, 2011: 25). As can be seen, these action lines embody: (i) the managerial agenda of functional decentralisation and at-distance tight control (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Newman and Clarke 2012) and (ii) the promotion of the (German model) dual apprenticeship. The E&T 2020 Programme benchmarks, or even the single two-headline targets of EU2020 (early school leaving under 10%; higher education attainment of 40% of 30 to 34-year-old people), appear to have been suspended for a long time; even if we accept VET or Apprenticeship as a pathway which could contribute to the former benchmark, the latter is ignored (see Online Education and Training Monitor, 2014).

From this angle, both abovementioned policy frameworks have appeared with formal, not substantial, reference to Portugal, due to its status of a country under external intervention. It is as if that special condition excludes it from the regular European policy processes. And in a certain way it does: for instance, the MoU regular assessments can replace the annual country specific recommendations endorsed by EC and CEU and included in the European semester of economic policies coordination. So, even if Portugal, as any other Member State, reports every year on EU2020 headline targets with a National Reform Plan (NRP), it is difficult to see how current education policy could contribute to the most part of the ET2020 Programme and benchmarks (e.g. as already noted, basic skills, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA); adult participation in lifelong learning; tertiary education attainment; employment rate of recent graduates, etc.). And the annual reports from Portuguese government illustrate this, when, for instance, referring to 2013, the target for the Portuguese flagship initiative ‘Strengthen the quality of teaching: curriculum, curricular goals and teacher training’ is the share of high achievement in PISA, discarding the E&T2020 benchmark (‘reducing to less than 15% the share of low achievement in Mathematics, Sciences and Reading’). The truth is that Portugal shows a worse performance in 2012 in all areas (see Online Education and Training Monitor, 2014). ²⁶

But, on the other hand, the Portuguese government 2011–2015 was an early supporter of the European Commission project to reform Vocational Education and Training with the widespread adoption of the German dual model of apprenticeship. Portugal is one of the six Member States participating in the 2012 meeting that signed a memorandum with the German government and has, since then, strongly incremented the number of enrollments in the Portuguese Apprenticeship System (AS) (from 21,056 to 33,366 youngsters enrolled, between 2012–2013, a growth of 58.5%, without parallel in any other secondary education pathway). Moreover, since its inception, more than 25 years ago, AS has never registered such numbers: of the 13,398 net increase in enrollments in secondary education in 2013, AS reaches 91.8% of the share, that is, almost 5.8 times more than Professional Courses (Cursos Profissionais), the pathway that has the next highest growth rate (2136 enrollments more than in 2012) (DGEEC/DSEE, 2014, 2013). The goal is to expand the enrollment in the AS to 100,000 students by 2020. According to the NRP 2014, the project is to substitute the existing four VET pathways for a ‘dual system, as single modality of vocational education and training of double [professional and schooling] certification’. To improve the investment in dual education and apprenticeship – integration and harmonisation is presented as a flagship initiative in the scope of the headline target EU2020 To Increase Employment. In fact, according to this document, it constitutes the second priority area for intervention in this domain (Portugal, 2014: 36–39).

The Portuguese government 2011–2014 was planning to make VET pathways more similar, or even to merge them, in order to make it more like the German dual Apprenticeship model. The available data show that more youngsters certified by the AS are unsuccessfully searching for employment, that they are less likely to continue studying in higher education and thus add to the ranks of NEET (not employed or in education and training) people, than for instance scientific-humanistic or professional courses (see Figueiredo et al., 2013: 42–44). But the Portuguese ministry and government insisted on expanding the enrollments in this pathway (apprenticeship), regardless of the caution advised by several social partners (Figueiredo et al., 2013: 88). We believe that this is because fostering expansion of dual or apprenticeship courses was more consistent with their beliefs, interests and more powerful constituencies, who want to restore the positional value of secondary general (scientific-humanistic) courses and, above all, higher education degrees, by restricting the provision of the former and the access to the latter.

Regarding the recent Portuguese education policy related to the EU 2020 headline target of ‘40% of the population aged 30–34 years having completed tertiary education’, the Higher Vocational Technical Courses (Cursos Técnicos Superiores Profissionais) were expected to begin in the academic year of 2014/2015, ²⁷ in the Polytechnic Higher Education sub-system. Unlike the Higher Education first-cycle degree courses (undergraduate degrees), they do not require students to have passed the final external secondary exams, they award a certificate of specialisation, but not a degree, they are 120 European credit transfer and accumulation system (ECTS) and classified at level 5 of European Qualification Framework (EQF). Yet, it is not known how this pathway relates to undergraduate degrees and level 6 courses of the EQF. It seems to constitute a way for the Portuguese government to accommodate the determination to maintain the selectivity of access to Higher Education degrees and still increase the numbers of tertiary education attainment for the next years until 2020. The National Reform Plan 2014 points to a target of 35,000 students certified, until 2020, by these new Higher Vocational Technical Courses.

So, the current situation in Portugal reveals at least two distinct processes of the Europeanisation of education policies: (i) national education policies are constructed within the framework, as an answer to and articulating European financial and economic priorities, guidelines and options, namely those directed to the structural adjustment of the foundations of the welfare state; (ii) national education policies are constructed within the framework, as an answer to and articulating European education policies, priorities and guidelines.

In either case, as already shown, the Portuguese government has chosen options that mark profoundly the direction and the intensity of the effects of the policies followed, as well as the constituencies affected.

Those two processes illustrate the complexity of the Europeanisation of (national public) education policies and how European education policies intertwine with other sector policies to structure the policy of education and the educational agenda. National governments can appropriate European political requirements or guidelines as legitimating umbrellas to expand and achieve the goals sustained by national constituencies: this has been observed in Portugal in the last years with the budget cuts and the shrinking of the public education system or the expansion of the Apprenticeship System; or they can selectively disregard the European orientations that the temporarily dominant national interests intend to put down (e.g. Adult Education and Training). In the case of Portugal, both pathways are likely to have the effect of interrupting the previous course of bettering the welfare levels in education and closing up the gap between Portugal and the EU as expressed, for instance, by the several indicators and benchmarks of the strategic framework of E&T2020 (see Online Education and Training Monitor, 2014). ²⁸

So, we find a very complex picture and many questions when we try to understand how European education policy and Europeanisation of national education policy relate to each other (Alexiadou, 2007; Cort, 2010).

What is Europeanisation? Looking at the EU and Portugal

This text discusses recent developments (between 2010 and 2015) in European education policy and in Portuguese education policy in order to understand the related and yet distinct processes of the constitution of a European education sector and policy and the imbrication of national and European policies, options and guidelines.

An analysis of the documents and initiatives that give shape to European Education policy in 2014 shows continuity and change regarding processes that were launched from the 1990s onwards. There are deep-set dynamics that remain, as would be the case of certain vectors of the policy of education and of the globally structured educational agenda: (i) the constitution of an European Education/Higher Education area comprising regulation procedures consistent with a market (Antunes, 2006); (ii) education as an economic and employment policy to stoke European competitiveness and foster social cohesion whilst minimising social and cultural dimensions (Hozjan, 2009; Alexiadou et al., 2010).

Nevertheless, the answer to the question ‘Is this a new moment of Europeanisation of education?’ is yes. In recent years we observed a new level of economising education: on one hand, since 2010 the EU2020 Strategy integrates two education headline targets and now the European semester of economic policy coordination includes monitoring (and centralising) the education and training policies by the EC and the CEU, supported by the Country Specific Recommendations and the Education Monitor. On the other hand, we argue, in line with Nóvoa (2013), that the November 2012 Communication of the European Commission, with the suggestive title Rethinking Education. Investing in Skills for Better Socio-Economic Outcomes, can be read as marking a turning point in various ways: (i) the explicit political and programmatic assumption of education as a marketable service within a European-wide market; (ii) the definition of education funding in this framework and in accordance with the distribution of any service, involving privatisation and commercialisation; (iii) bolstering VET as an educational response to youth unemployment, following the German model of minimal and cheap education geared towards social control of identities and aspirations. ²⁹ In the meantime, the Bologna and the Copenhagen processes, as broader European intergovernmental decision-making and policy development platforms and processes, seem to have lost importance. The place of the E&T2020 Programme and the open method of coordination in this context is not very clear: are they still meant to be instruments to support the European Commission? What is the importance of the benchmarks? This process seems to have lost centrality as a policies matrix, even though the Education and Training Monitor has high visibility.

In this sense, it is difficult to closely follow European education policy given the continuity and change game, often in the same domains. For instance, the constitution of education as a marketable service and the European Education/Higher Education area as a market have been identified by research, for over a decade, as vectors of the silent revolution in the education landscape, fostered by the Bologna and the Copenhagen Processes. What has changed is the explicit political embrace for education as a business becoming a strategic and programmatic approach of the European public education policy, as is literally stated in the Communication Rethinking Education, under the labels of accessibility and funding. What is new is a VET reform that is described and discussed as a commercial policy that may eventually benefit Germany. ³⁰ What is new is the lack of clarity regarding the relative importance of new processes and actors in relation to the Bologna and the Copenhagen Processes and the E&T2020 Programme, carried over from the previous decade.

In the meantime, education appears to be a somewhat fragile priority, given the several profound, and sometimes growing, gaps that continue to separate the welfare levels in education in the different Member States, putting the social cohesion of the Union under stress.

The MoU signed between the Portuguese government and the troika representing the lenders shows a substantial coherence between the definition of the guidelines for strategic action of the EU at the supranational scale and the translation of this globally structured educational agenda for a country under intervention. Besides the budget cuts mentioned in the ‘fiscal policy’ section of the MoU, the education measures (in Chapter 4: ‘Labour market and education’) were centred around: (i) low educational attainment and early school leaving; (ii) secondary and vocational education; (iii) setting up (autonomy) agreements with schools comprising performance criteria and the reinforcement of state monitoring, supervision, auditing, evaluation and inspection. These measures constitute the most important Europeanisation process currently underway in the sector; they provide a legitimating umbrella for the Portuguese government to make much larger budget cuts than were required by the MoU for education, and to promote the most important changes aimed at altering the public education system constructed in the past four decades, since the inception of a democratic regime in 1974. Therefore, the shrinking of the perimeter of the public education system, as far as structures, resources and educational responses are concerned, is one of consequences of this process of change associated to the budget cuts.

On the other hand, the commercialisation and privatisation of education has made very visible inroads into higher education as well as vocational education, thanks to a funding policy that: (i) by strangling higher education budgets and institutions forces HE institutions to search for alternative sources of revenue, including foreign students (as part of the internationalisation and export business), domestic students, enterprises or other partners that can acquire higher education services; (ii) expands contracting of public VET services from training enterprises or other private organisations, involving very significant contingents of youngsters and amounts of money.

That’s why we suggest that, analysing education changes from 2011 to 2015, we can talk about Europeanisation in Portugal as a neoliberal revolution that deepens the divergence with the levels of social welfare in education in the EU and accentuates the (semi)peripheral position of the country.

However, Adult Education and Training or the E&T2020 basic competences benchmarks, despite being objectives which are very unlikely to be achieved by 2020, seem far removed from the concerns not only of the Portuguese government, but also of the EC or the CEU. If these observations are confirmed, they are consistent with the hypothesis that the E&T2020 Programme has been moved to the background with the focus now being on the two EU2020 education headline targets. Understanding whether it is European education policy or the options taken by the Portuguese government that neglect, or even diverge from, a substantial part of the strategic E&T2020 framework will depend on the confirmation of the abovementioned hypothesis. In any event, European education policy seems more focused on a few far-reaching measures for the Member States and their populations, in line with Roger Dale’s (2009) suggestion that it constitutes a new sector and that national education policy has a very extensive landscape, covering a wide range issues, some of them with continuities with European education policies and others with no immediate relationship.