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This article explores the efficacy and cost effectiveness of New Labour's skills-based policies to help low paid workers adjust to the pressures generated by globalisation, of which the leading example was Train to Gain (T2G). It also analyses the more general issue of how, why and under what circumstances education, training and skills can help imbue low paid workers with greater bargaining power within the labour market.

The role of public education has never been more important--it is the bedrock of democracy. The failure to provide an equitable public education that enables equal access to opportunity unravels the American dream. Competency-based education holds promise as a uniquely powerful model for fostering equity, but only if equity is an intentional design feature embedded in the culture, structure and pedagogy. Across the country, educators and policymakers are coming to the same conclusion: the structure of the traditional system is a barrier to equity. The premise of competency education is that the culture, structure and pedagogy of the traditional education system, having been designed to sort students, must be and can be replaced with culture, structure and pedagogy that are designed to ensure every student can succeed. Still, the question remains: How should equity be thought of in a personalized, competency-based system to ensure that every student is indeed successful? This paper seeks to explore the potential pitfalls and strategies to ensure a more equitable education system. The driving questions include: (1) How should equity be defined to be meaningful in a personalized, competency-based system?; (2) Why does the traditional education system need to change and how will competency-based systems offer more equitable learning environments?; (3) What principles or elements need to be in place to ensure that competency-based education fulfills its promise to offer a more equitable education system?; and (4) How can educators work together as a field to ensure that competency-based systems take full advantage of what is known about equity strategies to benefit all students, especially those who have been historically underserved? This paper begins with a vision and definition of educational equity. It then explains how the traditional system was designed to promote inequitable outcomes and how competency-based education differs from the traditional system. In section III, the authors introduce an equity framework for personalized, competency-based education. The authors include a discussion of each principle, examples of policies and practices that will help to create an equitable environment and examples of red flags of shallow or weak implementation. The last section provides recommendations for future action. A glossary is provided in the appendix to clarify the terms used in the paper.

This working paper will share the experience of Ashta No Kai (ANK), a grassroots nonprofit the author founded in 1998 in 10 villages in Shirur County, Maharashtra state, India, to promote the empowerment and education of women and girls in rural areas. The paper will, at first, examine the state of education in India including the Indian government's policies and programs that are attempting to address the gender gap in girls' education. Next, the barriers that girls in rural areas face to access their right to an education will be discussed followed by an introduction of various holistic, need-based, and low-cost educational interventions that ANK has initiated to address some of these impediments. Findings will then be reported from quantitative and qualitative surveys conducted, as well as case studies to gauge the impact of these interventions. Finally, the paper will propose evidence-based recommendations of integrated and sustainable strategies and approaches as guidance to policy practitioners to help promote educational outcomes and enhanced agency for adolescent girls to better navigate their world.

Despite the multifaceted causes of educational disparities, schools' responsibility for reducing inequality undergirds American ideals. Educators operate as street-level bureaucrats to accomplish this equalizing work. Surprisingly, we know little about how teachers think about inequality or enact strategies to combat it, even though their execution of this mandate is almost certainly mediated through pre-existing understandings. This paper provides a framework (applicable to other sectors) to examine educators' beliefs about inequality and their role in advancing equity. To progress, teachers need to believe that doing so is valuable, feel empowered to overcome disadvantage, and be willing to make tradeoffs in pursuit of equity goals. Our framework highlights the salience of individual differences between low and high achievers as a form of inequality that may divert teachers' focus from the structural inequality that is central to policy and sociological concern. We test this framework empirically using novel survey data from over 1,500 teachers collected in a diverse urban school district. Although most surveyed teachers believe addressing inequality is important and feel empowered to do so, many seemingly equity-minded educators do not endorse strategies aligned with closing racial and socioeconomic inequality--indicating an important barrier to reducing inequality.

Amid growing recognition that strong academic skills alone are not enough for young people to become successful adults, this comprehensive report offers wide-ranging evidence to show what young people need to develop from preschool to young adulthood to succeed in college and career, have healthy relationships, be engaged citizens, and make wise choices. It concludes that rich experiences combining action and reflection help children develop a set of critical skills, attitudes, and behaviors. And it suggests that policies should aim to ensure that all children have consistent, supportive relationships and an abundance of these developmental experiences through activities inside and outside of school. The Wallace Foundation awarded a competitive grant to UChicago CCSR in 2013 to undertake the project, which included a review of relevant literature spanning decades as well as interviews with national experts in research, policy and practice, and young people and the adults who work with them in schools, programs and agencies throughout Chicago. The report offers evidence to show how, where, and when the "key factors" to success develop from early childhood through young adulthood, emphasizing the kinds of experiences and supportive relationships that guide the positive development of these factors. Recognizing that there are no silver bullets to promoting social-emotional learning, the report emphasizes a range of factors that build on one another over time. It also emphasizes factors that are particularly malleable, as well as the age at which each of the key factors comes into prominence, offering adults the most promising window for positive intervention. A key problem the report identifies is that disadvantaged youth often face extra challenges. For example, they often have fewer in-school and out-of-school opportunities for consistent, positive developmental experiences and relationships and face significant opportunity gaps to developing the essential skills to become productive adults. An appendix provides a list of experts who provided input and feedback throughout this project. [This report was written with David W. Johnson, Sarah Dickson, Ashley Cureton Turner, Ashley Mayo, and Kathleen Hayes.]

This working paper is intended to enrich an initial description of alternative businesses and A-Way Express Couriers, in particular. (A-Way, a 12-year-old community organization, is a psychiatric survivor-run alternative business.) The paper begins with a brief commentary on the psychiatric survivor movement and research on it. The paper traces the emergence and entrenchment of learning as a key feature of psychiatric survivor-run or alternative businesses. The methodology used is to re-read previous research projects and results through the lens of informal learning. Early research on psychiatric survivor-run businesses is reviewed in view of a definition of social learning with these three dimensions: solidarity learning, reshaping the definition of self, and organizational learning. A more detailed examination of informal learning processes at A-Way builds on a previously generated profile and is organized according to the three dimensions of social learning. Comments are based on face-to-face interviews with five employees from each of these three groupings within A-Way: couriers on commission, part-time office staff on salaries, and full-time management on salaries. The final section constructs a narrative account of one woman's learning at A-Way--how over nine years she moved from courier to executive director of the business on a journey that evokes the richness and complexity of informal learning in this context. (YLB)

This document describes the rationale and the strategy of the new United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Initiative for literacy: LIFE. The Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE) is designed as a global strategic framework through which national governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society, the private sector, UN agencies, and bilateral and multilateral agencies collectively revitalize and accelerate literacy efforts in countries where illiteracy poses a critical challenge. LIFE is a strategy for action to support basic education through promoting competencies in reading, writing and numeracy for the achievement of Education for All (EFA) and to substantially increase literacy learning opportunities within the framework of the United Nations Literacy Decade (UNLD). LIFE will be implemented in 35 countries with a literacy rate of less than 50 percent or a population of more than 10 million without literacy competencies. Presently 85 percent of the world's population without literacy competencies and life skills live in these countries, the majority of whom are women. LIFE will, therefore, aim to empower women and girls, in particular, who have inadequate literacy competencies. This report commences with a Message of the Honorary Ambassador to the United Nations Literacy Decade; Foreword; Executive Summary; and Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE). It then divides into nine sections: (1) Why LIFE?; (2) The Goals and Objectives of LIFE; (3) Strategic Areas for Action; (4) The Scope of LIFE; (5) Making It Happen: The Activities of LIFE; (6) Implementation; (7) Funding; (8) Monitoring and Evaluation; and (9) Annexes. Annexes include: (1) Countries of Priority (35 Countries); and (2) Logical Framework. (Contains 12 footnotes.)

Collaborative, shared leadership among administrators, students, faculty, and staff is a key component to creating campus environments that foster student success. Collaborative work groups can be powerful vehicles for launching and institutionalizing student-friendly policies and practices and for developing complementary programs such as first-year initiatives, fresh approaches to general education curricular offerings, service-learning, and student leadership development programs among others. Such initiatives almost always result in richer learning opportunities for students when done collaboratively than when an individual unit develops them. But collaborative approaches to leadership and program development do not come naturally within higher education institutions that reward individualistic endeavors over collaboration. The guiding principles offered here for promoting shared leadership and collaboration are based on an in-depth examination of 20 diverse four-year colleges and universities that have higher-than-predicted graduation rates and, as demonstrated through the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), effective policies and practices for engaging their students. (Lists 2 sources.)

This discussion paper explores interactions among formal learning, informal learning, and life conditions and opportunities experienced by aboriginal people in Canada. The contradictory importance of education for aboriginal people is examined with respect to three related aspects of these relationships. First, the paper summarizes students' accounts of their experiences in conventional and alternative school settings in three Saskatchewan communities, exploring how these relate to the students' broader cultural and home environments. Second, it examines the formal and informal educational experiences of a small group of adults surveyed in an urban Indian and Metis Friendship Center. Finally, the paper explores issues that arise around the emergence of entrepreneurial training and entrepreneurship, areas posed by many commentators as a possible way of bridging formal and informal learning and overcoming the longstanding marginalization of aboriginal people from labor market and economic participation. The paper concludes that gaps remain in the attainment of educational success by aboriginal people, relative to the general population, when viewed in terms of conventional educational indicators. However, the aboriginal youth and adults involved in the study place a high value in formal schooling, mainstream economic activities, and entrepreneurial opportunities to provide routes for individual and community advancement. The study suggests that the aboriginal peoples could benefit more if the educational system better integrated their skills and culture and acknowledged the strengths that the aboriginal people bring to learning. (The paper lists 40 references.) (KC)

A multinational, multidisciplinary team examined the impact of globalization on education, training, and small and medium sized enterprise development in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. The study focused on the following issues: developing a learner-led competitiveness approach; building learning enterprises; education for microenterprises and macroeconomic growth; and training for self-employment and competitiveness. The study documented the importance of learning-led competitiveness and identified obstacles to development of learning enterprises in all three countries. The following are among the 12 recommendations offered to national governments and international agencies with development concerns: (1) insert learning-led competitiveness into development debates; (2) understand the implications of globalization better; (3) address the range of barriers to development of learning enterprises; (4) consider interenterprise linkages and the role of learning therein; (5) place learning-led competitiveness at the heart of small enterprise development policy; (6) broaden the universal primary education vision; (7) construct a curriculum for competitiveness; (8) improve public training's ability to support competitive self-employment; (9) empower training providers to be more market responsive; and (10) emphasize skills transfer from large to small firms. (The bibliography lists 139 references. Brief profiles and addresses of the research team members and a list of project papers are appended.) (MN)

A study interviewed 37 Canadian sex workers in 4 cities to determine how they acquire a working knowledge of safer sex practices and what that knowledge constituted. Findings indicated the vast majority exhibited high levels of knowledge and efficacy regarding safer sex practices; sex workers took the initiative to obtain information and engage in safer sex practices; and peer group educators advanced educational messages in their community. Staffed by current or former sex workers, the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) was established as a government-endorsed organization using state funding, infrastructure, and support services for sex workers, clients, and the public. The Canadian government might profit from lessons learned from the successful NZPC to recruit sex workers as peer educators and should consider the possibility of developing a prostitute-centered pedagogy of safer sex practices that affirms the right of women to control the conditions of work and recognizes the skills and knowledge of that work. Providing sex workers with an opportunity to have input into public policy and design and delivery of prevention programs would be a useful way to transmit their skills and knowledge to other sectors of the community. Such knowledge could provide sexual self-determination that might result in greater knowledge, resistance, agency, and empowerment in other aspects of women's lives. (Contains 87 references and 30 endnotes.) (YLB)

A study explored how rural women in the village of Srefultoli, Bangladesh describe, from their own point of view, their experiences with nonformal education (NFE). Feminist research has shown that existing NFE programs in developing countries give women traditional knowledge of family planning, nutrition, and health care, but they do not deal with the need to increase women's awareness of their oppression and exploitation. The study examined whether current NFE programs in this village in Bangladesh give women new knowledge about their current situation in society and in the family and whether these women are conscious of their strategic and practical needs. A social mapping methodology was used to pattern these women's perspectives, and the map serves as a conventional symbol for the "way things are," or perceptions of truth. Findings suggest that rural Bangladeshi women are aware of their socio-economic and political subordination and that they use multiple strategies to resist patriarchal domination. Most of the women see participation in NFE programs as an empowering process. Findings also suggest that rural women wanted NFE programs to provide increased opportunities for income generation, for better access to education, for training to help them become economically independent, and for the conscientization of men, so these other objectives may flourish. These women also had specific suggestions regarding the class time, course design, and courses for men that would enhance female participation and would introduce some changes in men's and women's relationships. Conclusions were that certain more participatory NFE programs may bring meaningful changes in women's lives, and that rural women themselves can best identify their own needs. (Contains 5 figures and 43 references.) (Author/BT)

The needs of grassroots farmers in Uganda and Ghana for locally developed print materials were examined through a postal survey of nearly 200 organizations and examinations of 75 autonomous farmer groups and 95 organizations sharing agricultural information in both countries. Both printed agricultural information relevant to grassroots farmers and networks for distributing such existing information were in short supply. Most large organizations directed their efforts mainly toward networking with similar organizations rather than toward visiting grassroots farmers or meeting their information needs. Group support to grassroots farmers was deemed very important because it provides a safety net that allows members to share and try out new ideas. The study confirmed the existence of considerable potential for supporting extension services, nongovernmental organizations, mass media services, farmers, animators, and literacy services in the generation and production of agricultural information in local languages and aimed at group usage. (Thirty-two tables/figures and 100 references are included. The following items are among those appended: sample pages of the publication "Footsteps"; samples of materials in local languages; information about the survey respondents; a list of languages used for sharing information by survey respondents; maps showing areas and groups visited; lists of organizations contacted; and sample newsletters and locally generated materials.) (MN)

This report examines access to lifelong learning opportunities on Canada's information highway. The report begins with a glossary and a learner-centered model in which the information highway links learners with learning opportunities provided through educational institutions, community organizations, government, and business and industry. Presented next is an overview of the economic, technological, social, and education and training-related factors that have led to recognition in Canada and worldwide of the leading role that lifelong learning must play in preparing individuals for the competitive, information-based global economy of the 21st century. The following three challenges facing Canada as it develops a lifelong learning system are discussed: (1) economic and social restructuring; (2) situational, dispositional, and institutional barriers to lifelong learning; and (3) learning models in response to new learning technologies. Trends and best practices in lifelong learning, the formal education sector, and nonformal education sector are reviewed. Next is a "made in Canada" response to the challenges. Included in the response are a conceptual framework and goals for lifelong learning in Canada. Appended are the following: barriers to learning identified in a 1982 survey; goal summary of a lifelong learning framework; overview of lifelong learning in the formal and nonformal sectors; and selected bibliography. Contains 39 references. (MN)

School leadership ranks among the most influential factors in student learning. Yet, principals contend with complex challenges every day, including teacher shortages, student well-being and safety concerns, resource constraints, and much more. It's no surprise they are reporting unprecedented levels of job-related stress. To position principals to overcome these obstacles and reach their full potential as leaders, we must adopt a fresh perspective on how they are prepared, supported, and developed. The paper examines how five districts and states are empowering principals to focus on the leadership work only they can do--cultivate positive school climates and deliver rigorous academic experiences for every student.

Critical consciousness (CC) scholarship frames how more marginalized people deeply analyze, feel empowered to change, and take collective action to redress perceived inequities. These three dimensions of CC correspond to critical reflection, motivation, and action, respectively. This paper aims to re-center action in CC scholarship, given the disproportionate attention that has been paid to reflection. To achieve this aim, this paper (a) reviews empirical associations between critical action and positive developmental consequences among more marginalized youth (b) highlights promising practices to foster critical action, and (c) notes open questions and key areas for future inquiry. Our hope is that this paper serves as a call to action, to re-center critical action in CC scholarship, policy, and practice. [This paper was published in "Child Development Perspectives" v15 n1 p12-17 2021.]