11. Do low-educated adults have fewer opportunities to participate in education and training?

Lifelong learning should be a reality for everyone in the EU and adult participation in lifelong learning needs to increase, particularly for individuals and groups at risk of exclusion, such as those with a low level of education. 

The indicator below is defined as the percentage of adults aged between 25 and 64 years old with, at most, a lower secondary qualification (ISCED 2), who participated in education and training in the four weeks prior to the EU labour force survey. 

Low-qualified adults’ participation in education and training - last 4 weeks (%)

Source : Eurostat, EU Labour Force Survey (LFS).

Key points

In 2020, 3.4% of low-educated adults in the EU participated in lifelong learning. This percentage continues to be far lower than the corresponding share of all adults (9.2%). Sweden, Finland and Denmark reported the highest levels of participation in 2020, at 21.9%, 14.7% and 14.2% respectively. Greece and Poland had the lowest participation levels among low-educated adults (less than 1%, flag indicates low reliability of estimates for Poland).  

Resulting from an increase by 0.3 percentage points until 2019 and a drop by 0.9 percentage points in 2020, between 2015 and 2020, the EU average recorded a decrease of 0.6 percentage points. Nevertheless, considerable increase, by about or more than two percentage points were estimated in Estonia (2.5) and Finland (1.9). A break in time series means that data for 2020 for Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Poland and Sweden, cannot be reliably compared with data for 2015. Data for 2020 are not available in Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Romania and Slovakia due to low reliability. 

Among non-EU countries, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland had higher levels of participation than the EU average. The share of low-educated adults participating in lifelong learning in Turkey, Serbia and North Macedonia was lower than the EU average.

Table 11. Low-educated adults’ participation in education and training – last 4 weeks (%) 

Source : Eurostat, EU Labour Force Survey. Notes: (b) ‘break in time series’;(p) ‘provisional’; (u) ‘unreliable’; data are not presented when they are not available and/or do not support sufficiently reliable comparisons across countries or over time.