Introduction

This chapter analyses the barriers that potential participants in lifelong learning face when they consider returning to education. There are considerable differences between people in relation to the extent to which they participate in learning after their initial compulsory education. Some engage in learning to improve their opportunities in the labour market, while others do it for personal fulfilment or for social and civic reasons. Some people do not re-enter the education system after their experience of initial education. As mentioned in Chapter One, the need for ongoing engagement in education has become a central focus for policymakers through the lifelong learning agenda. Lifelong learning is seen as a means of enhancing the human capital of the workforce but also as a vehicle for promoting social inclusion by providing individuals with the relevant skills to participate in the labour market. Identifying reasons for non-participation and barriers to participation in learning is therefore of great importance. This chapter examines barriers to participation by comparing a target group of learners and a control group of non-learners. The aim is to identify the structural features that may deter individuals from obtaining additional qualifications, and how these features vary in relation to particular countries and groups of countries. Of prime interest is the way in which social structures shape a person's capability to participate.

Conceptual framework

Rubenson and Desjardins (2009), in their review of the comparative literature on barriers to participation, note that most analysts draw on the classification of barriers developed by Cross (1981). The types of barrier identified by Cross are situational (that is, relating to job, family or household), dispositional or institutional. According to Rubenson and Desjardins, the main problem with the raft of studies on barriers to participation is that they tend to overemphasise individual factors and underemphasise the salience of structural factors, such as an individual's position in the socioeconomic hierarchy and the way this affects all aspects of their world view. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu (1990) and his notion of habitus, they argue that structural factors are centrally involved in individual motivation, since a person's sense of their ability to actively construct their life is shaped by the social, economic and cultural resources that they are able to mobilise.