With 39% participants in lifelong learning in Sweden, in our country they are only 1.4%
Eurostat’s new data on lifelong learning (UCL) of the adults people (25-64 years old) show that in 2023 Bulgaria is at the bottom of the EU. Even more disturbing is the fact that the proportion of people who have participated in some form of education and training in the country is even decreasing
compared to the previous year’s survey. It reaches 1.4% and is already almost ten times lower than the average for the EU and more than twice lower than that of the next worst performing country – Greece with 3.4%, writes “Mesoto” magazine as cites the Institute for Market Economics.
Data for the last decade shows that across almost the whole of the EU, after a sustained rise in 2022, there is a decline in UCL indicators due to the pandemic and related restrictions. After that, however, while the rest of the countries quickly began to recover to higher and higher levels of participation in training, in Bulgaria the decline continued, reaching a new low of 1.4%. For comparison – for this decade, the share of participation in UCL in Sweden has risen by 10 points to 38.8% (almost 30 times more than Bulgaria) and with this it occupies the top position in the ranking for 2023. At least one in four also took part in training in Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland.
Against this background, the goals of the strategic documents for the ULC are not being achieved, and the active policy of the labor market continues to focus on direct employment creation.
Coupled with these statistics, a number of other data show a host of related problems in the country – only 1/3 of the population covers the basic level of digital skills (DESI Index), the average 15-year-old student is below the functional illiteracy line in mathematics (PISA), in in all schools, the average GPA of seniors in BEL is below Average “3.00” – 148 schools in 2024, and eight of them have an average score of exactly Weak “2.00”. Illiteracy and difficult qualification and retraining do not allow structural unemployment to be overcome and put a brake on the transformation of the economy and new investments.
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