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Beyond school glossary
34 terms from C16, Beyond school: early years to lifelong learning — each defined in the primer's own words. Every term the primer teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
C16 · Schools and systems
Beyond school: early years to lifelong learning
“Edtech means school edtech.”
Every term below is defined in the words of beyond school, primer C16 of understanding the context of education, and opens the primer at the slide where it is taught. 3 terms are also defined by another primer in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole context glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | |||
| Adult learning | Organised learning by people past the age of compulsory schooling, whether for work, for a qualification or for its own sake. The OECD measure used here counts formal and non-formal education and training in a twelve-month period (OECD, 2019). |
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| Andragogy | Knowles’s account of teaching adults, built on assumptions about a maturing self-concept, accumulated experience, readiness tied to social roles, immediate application and internal motivation (Knowles et al., 1984, as reported in Smith, 2002). It is a design stance, not a theory of learning. |
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| Apprenticeships | Employment with structured training, in which a learner is paid, works, and is assessed against an occupational standard. Quality and duration vary enormously between countries and sectors, and the label is applied to programmes that share little else. |
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| C | |||
| Capability against competency | In heutagogy, competency is demonstrated knowledge and skill; capability is the confidence and ability “to take appropriate and effective action to formulate and solve problems in both familiar and unfamiliar and changing settings”. Capability extends competency and does not replace it (Blaschke, 2012). |
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| Credential inflation | The process by which qualification requirements rise as qualifications spread, without the work itself changing, so each credential buys less than the one before (Collins, 1979). | ||
| D | |||
| Double-loop learning | Learning in which a person questions not only the action and its result but the values and assumptions that produced the action. Heutagogy takes it from Argyris and Schön and makes it the difference between self-directed and self-determined learning (Blaschke, 2012). |
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| E | |||
| Early childhood education and care | Provision for children from birth to the start of compulsory school, combining education and care in proportions that differ by country. Effects on children depend strongly on quality rather than attendance (Sylva et al., 2011). |
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| F | |||
| Fade-out | The disappearance of an early gain after a programme ends; lasting effects need malleable, fundamental skills that would not have developed anyway, a well-timed intervention, or a good environment afterwards (Bailey et al., 2017). |
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| Formal, non-formal and informal learning | Formal learning leads to a recognised qualification in an institution; non-formal learning is organised but does not; informal learning happens through work and life without being organised as learning. The boundaries are contested and are measured inconsistently (Clardy, 2018). |
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| G | |||
| Graduate premium | The earnings gain from a degree: about 20% in average net lifetime earnings for English graduates, an average that hides substantial variation by subject and university group (Britton et al., 2020). |
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| H | |||
| Heckman curve | Heckman’s much-reproduced figure showing returns falling with the age of the people served; it was a stylised pattern, not a plot of estimates, and costed programmes show no such ordering (Rea & Burton, 2020). C19 The schematic curve associated with the economic argument for investing in disadvantaged children early; the claim that returns fall steadily with age has been tested and did not hold (Heckman, 2006; Rea & Burton, 2020). |
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| Heutagogy | Defined by Hase and Kenyon in 2000 as the study of self-determined learning, in which the learner negotiates and determines what is learned, how, and how it is assessed. Reviews describe it as an emerging approach rather than an established theory (Moore, 2020). |
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| Higher education | Post-secondary education at degree level and above, delivered by universities and, in many systems, by polytechnics and colleges. Worldwide enrolment as a share of the relevant age group roughly doubled between 2000 and 2024 (World Bank, 2026). |
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| L | |||
| Learning contracts | A written agreement between learner and educator setting out what will be learned, by what means and how it will be assessed. Associated with Knowles and carried into heutagogical practice, where the learner writes more of it. |
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| Learning ecosystems | A way of describing the whole set of places a person can learn — institutions, employers, platforms, libraries, communities — and the connections between them. Useful as a framing; rarely operationalised well enough to be measured. C24 A way of describing provision as a connected set of settings — schools, families, workplaces, libraries, online communities — rather than as one institution. The OECD’s “schools as learning hubs” scenario is one version of it. | ||
| Legitimate peripheral participation | Learning as taking part in a community of practice: the newcomer takes on real but bounded work and moves inward as competence grows, a description of apprenticeship generalised (Lave & Wenger, 1991). |
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| M | |||
| Massification | The shift of higher education from an elite sector to a majority destination; the world gross tertiary enrolment ratio roughly doubled between 2000 and 2024, changing the institution, not only its size (World Bank, 2026). |
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| Micro-credentials | Short certified units of learning, often designed to stack toward a larger qualification. The OECD (2023) describes them as envisioned as “a sort of all-purpose solution” while noting that “evidence on the value and impact of micro-credentials remains scarce”. |
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| P | |||
| Parity of esteem | The long-standing policy aim of equal standing for academic and vocational qualifications, which Wolf calls a misguided objective because every country has a status hierarchy for school and university level options (Wolf, 2011). |
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| Play-based learning | Early years practice in which children’s own activity carries the curriculum, with adults extending it rather than directing it. It is not the opposite of teaching: EPPE found effective settings combined child-initiated activity with adult-led “sustained shared thinking” (Sylva et al., 2004). |
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| Polytechnic and ITE education (SG) | Singapore’s applied post-secondary routes. The Institute of Technical Education, established in 1992, offers Nitec, Higher Nitec, full-time Technical Diplomas and employer-partnered Work-Study Diplomas; polytechnics offer diplomas described as “hands-on, practice-based learning” (Institute of Technical Education, n.d.; Ministry of Education, n.d.-c). |
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| Post-secondary pathways | The set of routes open after compulsory school: academic pre-university courses, applied diplomas, technical certificates, apprenticeships, employment with training, and combinations of these. Which routes exist, and how easily a learner can move between them, is a policy choice. |
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| R | |||
| Recognition of prior learning | Assessing and certifying what someone already knows and can do, however they learned it, so that it counts toward a qualification or an exemption. It matters most for adults returning to formal study and is administratively expensive to do well. |
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| S | |||
| School readiness | The idea that children should reach school with a defined set of skills and dispositions. It is a useful planning concept and a contested one, because the standard is set by the receiving institution rather than by anything about the child. |
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| Self-determined learning | Heutagogy’s central idea: the learner sets the path, the content and the assessment, and the educator supplies resources and guidance rather than direction (Blaschke, 2012). |
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| Self-directed learning | Knowles’s (1975) term for “a process in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes” (p. 18, quoted in Blaschke, 2012). |
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| Seventy-twenty-ten split | The most quoted number in workplace learning, repeated as a finding that most learning at work is informal; a review of its sources found the evidential basis weak (Clardy, 2018). |
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| Signalling | The account that education can raise earnings by revealing pre-existing qualities to employers rather than by creating new ones; most economists accept that signalling and skill-building both operate (Spence, 1973). | ||
| Skills-based hiring | Recruiting against demonstrated skills rather than qualification requirements. Widely announced, less widely practised, and so far thinly evidenced on whether it changes who actually gets hired. | ||
| Stackable credentials | Short qualifications designed so that completing several adds up to a larger award. The design depends on a qualifications framework that makes the units comparable, and on institutions agreeing to honour them. | ||
| Sustained shared thinking | The strongest practice EPPE identified in effective pre-school settings, used to extend children’s learning; it is adult-led as well as child-led, with staff who talk with children rather than at them (Sylva et al., 2004). |
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| T | |||
| Technical and vocational education and training | The international term for education preparing people for defined occupations, in schools, colleges and workplaces. It carries most of the world’s post-school learners and, in most countries, most of the status problem (Wolf, 2011). |
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| Transitions | The moves between sectors: nursery to school, school to work or college, college to university, study to employment, employment to retraining. Transitions are where learners are lost, and where systems have the least data. C06 The shifts between activities, places or groupings within a lesson. Unstructured transitions are associated with more disruptive behaviour (Arlin, 1979). |
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| W | |||
| Workplace learning | Learning that happens through, and at, work: induction, structured training, coaching, and the everyday participation Lave and Wenger (1991) describe as legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice. |
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