Europe

Article Type: Research news From: Education + Training, Volume 52, Issue 2

Commission publishes Employment in Europe 2009 report

This is the 21st annual edition of the Employment in Europe report, which has become one of the main tools of the European Commission in supporting Member States in the analysis, formulation and implementation of their employment policies. The Employment in Europe 2009 Report, as in previous years,addresses topics that are high on the European Union’s employment policy agenda. It gives a comprehensive overview of the employment situation in the EU,as well as an analysis of key labour market issues, taking a deeper look at the dynamics of European labour markets and the implications of climate change on labour market outcomes. An extended extract is presented below:

The current recession is expected to significantly affect EU labour markets and lead to substantial rises in unemployment, although in certain Member States job losses to date have been restrained thanks to the use of arrangements such as shorter working hours or temporary partial unemployment. However, even if labour markets have proven to be more resilient, Europe is still expected to lose more than seven million jobs over 2009-10, and unemployment could reach over 10 per cent by 2010. Indeed, as employment reacts to economic conditions with a certain lag, labour market conditions will continue to worsen for some time even after the economy enters a recovery path.All this represents a significant setback for reaching the Lisbon targets for 2010. Since the beginning of the Lisbon Strategy, considerable progress has been made in the employment policy area – the overall employment rate has risen by close to four percentage points, reaching 65.9 per cent in 2008, while the employment rates for women and older workers have also increased substantially, attaining 59.1 per cent and 45.6 per cent respectively in 2008. Unfortunately, the current economic recession is expected to largely reverse that growth, leading to employment rates moving away from the respective targets between 2008 and 2010.This crisis is characterised by the severity of impact on some groups of workers more than others. In particular, workers with fixed-term or temporary contracts have borne the brunt of the employment contraction while unemployment among young people has reached new historical highs over recent months. These trends highlight a need for intensified action to tackle youth unemployment and reduce labour market segmentation.

Europe’s youth feel the pinch from the crisis

Monthly data for the EU27 shows the youth unemployment rate rose to 20.7 per cent in October 2009, taking the total number of young unemployed to 5.5 million from a recent low of four million in March 2008. This is significantly higher than the 7.9 per cent unemployment rate for 25-74 year olds and indicates the extent to which the young, especially low-educated, are at risk and the efforts required to ease their (re-) entry into the labour market.

The EU average conceals significant differences between countries, most notably in Spain where, at double the EU level, two in five 15-24 year olds could not find work in Quarter 3, 2009. Baltic countries registered the largest increases in the youth unemployment rate between 2008 and 2009 (Quarter 3):around 20 percentage point rises took Latvia and Lithuania to 34 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively, while a 14 percentage point rise took Estonia to 28 per cent.

Most European countries, however, registered increases in the youth unemployment rate of five percentage points or less. In Germany, The Netherlands, Romania and Slovenia the impact was less severe, rising by less than 2 percentage points.

Note: Data presented in this report originate from the Eurostat Labour Force Survey (LFS) (see Figure 1) which is available at: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/employment_unemployment_lfs/introduction

VET in Europe – country reports

The latest VET in Europe: Country reports are now available online. These overviews of the vocational education and training systems in the countries of Europe are organised according to a common structure for greater comparability,and can be accessed by theme and country. Latest updated information can be downloaded by country in pdf format or viewed by theme in html format.

Download by country at: http://libserver.cedefop.europa.eu

Changes in networks, Higher Education and Knowledge Societies (CINHEKS)

A three-year study within the European Science Foundation’s Higher Education and Social Change (EuroHESC) research programme has been launched.“Knowledge society” is a key idea in explaining the current changing relationship between higher education and society. This notion is based on a premise about the importance of knowledge in contemporary social and economic development. The CINHEKS project is a collaborative multi-country investigation into how higher education institutions are networked in knowledge societies in three regions of the world: Europe, the USA and Japan.

The research will focus on:

• the concrete linkages among academics, institutions and external role-players in different knowledge societies;

• the impact of such networks on academics, institutions and society; and

• the basis of distinct differences between different knowledge societies.

The project aims to refine “knowledge society” as an explanatory construct of social theory and critically examine how higher education institutions operate within knowledge societies. In this way, the project aims to provide more evidence-based content for policy development.

The CINHEKS project runs from October 2009 - September 2012. It is led by the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland) and is being undertaken in collaboration with researchers from CHERI at the Open University, and research teams at the University of Kassel (Germany), Hiroshima University (Japan), Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal) and the University of Arizona (USA).

For further information about the EuroHESC research programme visit: www.esf.org

Still too few women in science in Europe

Women represent only 30 per cent of European researchers and only 18 per cent of full professors, according to the latest edition of the She Figures,a survey on Statistics and Indicators on Gender Equality in Science published on 1 December 2009 by the European Commission. Even if the number of female researchers is growing faster than that of men (+6.3 per cent annually compared to +3.7 per cent from 2002 to 2006) – and despite an increase in the proportion of female PhDs of +6.8 per cent over the same period, the under-representation of women in scientific disciplines and careers remains a serious challenge in Europe. The publication of the She Figures 2009coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Helsinki Group on Women in Science,through which the EU Member States and the European Commission worked together to address gender inequalities in science.

ECER VETNET Proceedings, 2009

(With acknowledgement to Sabine Manning; WIFO Gateway to research on education in Europe.)

The latest edition of the ECER VETNET Proceedings has now been published, (www.b.shuttle.de/wifo/abstract/!ecer09.htm)including the papers submitted at the European Conference on Educational Research in Vienna (September 2009), as part of the programme drawn up by the European Research Network in Vocational Education and Training. The Proceedings 2009 have been produced in collaboration between VETNET, with Ludger Deitmer (Convenor VETNET) and Lorenz Lassnigg (Programme Chair Vienna) as co-editors, and the Research Forum WIFO. They are linked to the conference resources provided by the new social networking site for VETNET (http://vetnet.mixxt.org/).

This year’s collection of papers (67) is the largest ever, bringing the total number of papers included in the ECER VETNET Proceedings since 1998 up to 390. The following thematic aspects are worth noting, based on the index of keywords (www.b.shuttle.de/wifo/p-index3.htm)which is part of the Proceedings covering all the papers in the 12-year period (1998 to 2009):

• 1.

  Among the large variety of themes addressed in the papers throughout the period, there is an obvious concentration on a few keywords: “Learning”is by far the most popular subject, featuring in every fifth paper as a major keyword, with an extensive range of themes involved. The thematic clusters, also centred on keywords such as competence and skills, knowledge, training and qualification, indicate the intensity of research on major issues of VET.

• 2.

  New themes, identified by keywords addressed in 2009 for the first time,include the following:

• 3.

  • benefits of further training (Schmid - AT);

  • CVET and company competitiveness (Figueira et al. - PT);

  • complex performance (Eraut - UK);

  • European core profiles vs. ECVET-units (Saniter et al. - EU);

  • “evidence” about “outcome-orientation” (Lassnigg -AT); and

  • foresight framework in an educational organisation (Saikkonen et al.- FI).

• 4.

  Quite a number of papers in 2009 are related to the keyword “profession”,which has only occasionally been addressed in previous years. The themes involved demonstrate a wide spectrum of research across initial and continuing vocational education, human resource development and adult education:

• 5.

  • professional growth and learning (Nokelainen et al. - FI);

  • professional learning in nursing homes (Trunkenpolz - AT);

  • professional responsibility (Englund et al. - NO);

  • professionalism of trainers (Fuchs - DE);

  • time and profession (Schapfel-Kaiser - DE); and

  • VET professions (Volmari et al. - EU).

• 6.

  Across the various themes, a substantial proportion have a cross-national/European perspective: nearly one-third of all papers submitted in 2009 (as against an average of 20 per cent in the previous period). Most of these papers have been put forward by teams of authors related to either European projects or to transnational organisations (Cedefop, OECD/CERI).