Adult education has long been considered a second chance for people to gain education and decent employment opportunities. However, the nature of adult education has changed since the turn of the century. Today, it is mainly centred around specialised skills-oriented courses aimed to help people return to the labour market after an unemployment spell or health problems, or to facilitate integration of refugees.
In their lecture, which was part of the One Hour at the Faculty of Education lecture series, they described adult education as a field that has undergone dramatic changes since the s.
Thus, the number of people participating in SFI Swedish for immigrants courses has increased from 36 in to today. Overall in basic and upper-secondary adult education β which includes SFI β 44 per cent of the students were not born in Sweden. In , the share was 24 per cent. At the basic level, 93 per cent were born abroad. All of these figures stem from the Swedish National Agency for Education.
One example is the major investments in special programmes from β that aimed to reduce the unemployment rates and give adults with low levels of education access to employment and continued learning. The initiative was called Kunskapslyftet and had room for students in municipalities across the country.
For example, the field became much more competitive when a large number of new education providers entered the stage. Adult education is not some fringe thing. Sweden has 10 adult education associations that provide courses on a wide range of topics to people each year Sweden has a population of 10 million as well as so-called folk high schools, which many adults attend to complete their upper-secondary education.
