Raising awareness in the field of basic skills and key competences

The Spanish Education Organic Law mention the importance of acquiring these key competences in order to get the general certificate of secondary education, that means that the students who finish the high school should be provided with the basic skills and key competences to face a higher education or the labour market. The fact is that this is not happening in real life. People are not prepared in all of these competences even after the high education at university. So it is more complicated for adults who stopped studying a long time ago to have these competences. That is the reason why a lifelong learning approach should be carried out. Adults need to keep them training and learning about innovations and changes on their professional field.

In base of the European framework of key competences, some changes have been done in order to promote the acquisition of the basic skills, which are required in every job. To this end, some of the actions that government is doing are referred to the provision of high quality learning for all students based on relevant curricula that is being demand on the labour market. One of the action to avoid the existence of adults without key competences is to reduce the early school leaving and to increase the early childhood education in order to get adults more prepared in case they do not keep studying and receiving formation after school. The most relevant action to get the implementation of the key competences in the most of the population is to improve the support for teachers, schools leader and teacher educators, because it is impossible to teach someone about some knowledge that the own teacher or responsible person does not have.

Once students finish their preparation, the approach to improve their skills and key competences is aimed to get employing basics, to obtain new qualifications, to up-skill or re-skill for employment or for personal growth. The organic education law establishes adult education in order to offer people over eighteen years old the opportunity to acquire, bring up-to-date, complete or expand their knowledge and aptitude of their personal and professional development. There is also the possibility of entering university courses without school qualifications for people over 25 years old by passing a simple test, with the aim of increase the university formation between adults. In addition, adults may also benefit from other training processes outside the regulated education system, through extended vocational training and from initiatives that aim at aiding specific groups at risk of being excluded, to help them to re-include them in society and, consequently, in the labour market.

Adults can get formal education, which include literacy, consolidation of knowledge, languages, preparation for access to university or VET and other technical courses. Furthermore, within the non-regulated education system, adults can access to a wide variety of training courses, such as short or long-term training courses aimed at improving professional skills or reintegration into employment (organized by social agencies with public funding), and courses with a variety of objectives as literacy, languages, etc. of different duration (organized by various agencies with public funding, usually as part of specific projects).

The main providers of adult education in Spain are:

• In regulated university education: Universidad Nacional a Distancia UNED (National Distance Learning University).
• In non-university regulated education: Centros de Educación de Adultos (Adult Education Centres).
• In non-university regulated education via distance learning: Centro para la Innovación y Desarrollo de la Educación a Distancia CIDEAD (Centre for Innovation and Development of Distance Learing Education).
• In non-regulated education: There is a complex network, which includes a multitude of associated companies with different geographical áreas and backgrounds. There is also an emphasis on the classroom mentor, which is an open system of learning provided by the ministry of education, which is implemented into lifelong learning, whose training relies fundamentally on the Internet.

Legal basis of this kind of education systems reside in the ministry of education, but every autonomous community counts on its own public organization because legislative and executive competence on several issues is transferred to the autonomous communities, between them, education system.