Accreditation of Prior Learning as a Lever for Lifelong Learning: Lessons Learnt from the New Opportunities Initiative, Portugal

The New Opportunities Initiative (NOI) is a Portuguese flagship programme to recognise and accredit prior learning (RPL, APL) and to endow low-skilled adults with upper secondary qualifications, which is defined as the minimum entry threshold to the exercise of a full citizenship in a knowledge-rich society. NOI's major achievement has been its ability to attract the least-skilled adults to embark in a system of informal and non-formal skills recognition, accreditation and certification, with complements of formal learning, to achieve academic and/or vocational certification. A record enrolment of about one half of the targeted adult population of roughly 3.7 million low-skilled in barely 5 years of implementation is a fact to be duly recognised and lies beyond dispute. This book gives an account of the robust research efforts deployed at the independent evaluation of NOI. Written on a solid foundation of empirical evidence, this publication encompasses seven papers which were submitted to an extensive peer review procedure inspired by best practices in academic refereeing. The peer reviews were done initially at a distance by senior referees with solid scientific backgrounds and extensive international experience in the domain under appraisal; the process then continued with a face to face seminar where each peer reviewer examined three papers in depth and all experts were invited to act as discussants of each paper; the procedure was concluded by a second round of individual reviews whenever the paper had undergone serious change. This publication contains the following: (1) "New Opportunities and New Government": A Paradigm Change in Policy (Roberto Carneiro); (2) The New Opportunities Initiative: Understanding Public Policy from a Diachronic Perspective (Maria Amelia Mendonca and Maria Ana Carneiro); (3) Bringing Lifelong Learning to Low-Skilled Adults: The New Opportunities Initiative (Ana Claudia Valente, Lourenco Xavier de Carvalho, and Andre Xavier de Carvalho); (4) Family: A Key Variable to Explain Participation in NOI and Lifelong Learning (Henrique Lopes and Roberto Carneiro); (5) Brand Modelling: The Citizen Perception of a Public Policy (Carlos Liz, Mariana Machado, and Jorge Portugal Rocha); (6) Discussing New Opportunities Inside S-D Logic: New Opportunities as a Tool of Governmental Approach for Nation Value Creation (Henrique Lopes); (7) Organizational Self-Regulation and Self-Assessment: The Case of New Opportunities Centres (Rodrigo Queiroz e Melo and Sofia Reis); and (8) NOI Evaluative Research Final Review External Experts (Marja van den Dungen, Alejandro Tiana, Claudio Dondi, Joe Cullen, Nikitas Kastis, Walter Kugemann, and Fabio Nascimbeni). Individual sections contain tables, figures, footnotes, references and appendices. [This paper was created with the collaboration of Centro de Estudos dos Povos e Culturas de Expressao Portuguesa and Menon Network.]