Between Inclusion and Fairness

The article claims that equity is an indispensable dimension of the widening of access to adult education. Building on the understanding of social justice in adult education as a complex phenomenon, two indicators are developed: an index of inclusion and an index of fairness in participation in adult education. The article analyses social justice separately in formal and nonformal education for two social groups—people with low and high education. Using data from the Adult Education Survey from 2007 and 2011 for 25 countries, it is shown that in most of the countries, there are signs of improvement in the fairness aspect of social justice as a result of a decrease in the overrepresentation of people with high education and in the underrepresentation of people with low education. However, the inclusion of people with low education in adult education remains considerable lower in comparison with the inclusion of people with high education.


Introduction
The social inequality perspective toward adult education 1 is becoming more important among researchers (Bask & Bask, 2015;Di Prete & Eirich, 2006;Elman & O'Rand, 2004;Hällsten, 2011). Patterns of participation in adult education, which have been Against this background, the present article claims that the social justice perspective is indispensable for both research and policy making in the sphere of adult education. It aims to rethink the way social justice in adult education can be conceptualized and measured. The article proceeds as follows: First, we outline the theoretical background of the article and formulate our research questions. Then, we propose research methodology. After that, we present the results of the study. Finally, we make some concluding remarks and suggest directions for further research.

Theoretical Background and Research Questions
Among different lines of reasoning about how justice may be achieved, two are very prominent-the institutions-centered approach of John Rawls and the human-centered approach of Amartya Sen. The first one is based on the idea of establishing a hypothetical social contract, which aims at contributing toward the achievement of justice in society. In his theory of "justice as fairness," John Rawls (1999) develops an approach which is concentrated on identifying perfectly just institutions and, in its essence, is arrangement focused. It implies the identification of the right behavior or right institutions. In a strong contrast to this line of reasoning, the human-centered perspective adheres to the idea that justice may be achieved on the basis of making comparisons between different ways in which people's lives may be led, and thus, ascertaining which one is more or less just. This approach focuses on ranking alternative social arrangements, instead of concentrating exclusively on the identification of a fully just society.
As a theoretical background of our attempts to rethink social justice in adult education, we propose to bridge these two approaches and their mutual enrichment, claiming that both provide value when trying to conceptualize social justice in adult education and how it can be achieved nowadays. In contrast to the Rawlsian understanding of justice as fairness, in Sen's view, justice is a "momentous concept" (Sen, 2009, p. 401) and the comparative questions are inescapable for any theory of justice that intends to give some kind of guidance to public policy or personal behavior. Sen, who has expressed many times that although he criticizes Rawls, he is enormously intellectually indebted to him, has a more realistic vision of how justice can be enhanced. He acknowledges that there is a possibility, even having just institutions, of observing injustices at the individual level and in people's everyday lives. The informational basis of Sen's theory of justice is human capability, as the capability should be understood as a special kind of freedom, which refers to the alternative combinations that are feasible for a person to achieve. In this sense, capability is determined by the space of possibilities open to an individual-not in terms of some prior end such as utility or initial conditions such as equality of primary goods, resources, or utilities. The capability is also constrained by the so-called conversion factors (personal, institutional, or environmental) which determine the capacity of people to convert the recourses they have into good living. These factors may vary a lot and can explain why people with the same resources available are not able to achieve the same outcomes. The important role of conversion factors is neglected in Rawlsian theory of justice. As Regmi (2016) has noted, Sen's approach and its application in the area of education can fall into the group of humanistic models of lifelong learning, whose main purpose is to create a better world by alleviating social inequality, reducing social injustices, and ensuring human rights for all.
Simon Marginson (2011) argues that the aforementioned two understandings of justice resonate in the two perspectives in which social equity in higher education has been conceptualized: inclusion and fairness. The inclusion perspective refers "to the significance of improvement in participation of any particular group, irrespective of how other groups have fared" (Clancy & Goastellec, 2007, p. 146). The fairness perspective "implies ensuring that personal and social circumstances-for example gender, socio-economic status or ethnic origin-should not be an obstacle to achieving educational potential" (Santiago, Tremblay, Basri, & Arnal, 2008, pp. 13-14). Thus, whereas the first approach "focuses on growth in the absolute number of people from hitherto under-represented socioeconomic groups, as defined in terms of income measures or social or occupational status," the second one concentrates on the proportional distribution of student places (or graduations) between different social groups (Marginson, 2011, pp. 23-24). Marginson is in favor of the inclusion aspect of equity as it provides better basis for improvement, because instead of trying to achieve structural distribution of students, when inclusion is pursued as a goal each advance in the participation of persons from underrepresented groups represents a move forward. However, we do think that both aspects are important and none of them should be neglected. Such understanding is in line with the idea of bridging the Rawlsian and Sen's approaches, instead of looking at them as rival ways of reasoning for justice (Brighouse & Unterhalter, 2010;Maffettone, 2011;Robeyns, 2008).
Building on the discussion of the two approaches to justice and Marginson's (2011) differentiation between fairness and inclusion aspects of equity in higher education, we argue that in order to explore the development of adult education in a given country, we need to ask at least three questions: What growth? Access for whom? and Access to what? The answer to the first question provides a general view of the increase in proportions of people from different social groups involved in adult education, and thus captures the inclusion aspect of participation in adult education. The second question refers to the relative chance of representatives of different social groups of entering different types and programs of adult education and thus reveals the fairness aspect of participation in adult education. The third question takes into account the differences in the offered programs of adult education: the three main ones being formal adult education, nonformal, and informal. There are also qualitative differences within each of these forms, but within this article, we will not pay attention to them. Thus, we conceptualize social justice in adult education by differentiating two aspects of participation in it: inclusion and fairness and argue that they need to be analyzed separately for different types of adult education.
So far, many studies have focused on revealing the main micro-and macro-level factors which determine participation in adult education. With the unfolding of the process of globalization, two important macro developments-demographic aging and accelerated economic change-have emerged as common factors influencing participation in adult education all over the world (Buchholz, Jensen, & Unfried, 2014; Kilpi-Jakonen, Buchholz, Dämmrich, McMullin, & Blossfeld, 2014). Both developments are important drivers for active national polices in the sphere of adult education, and thus positively influence participation rates in it. However, data show that, despite the influence of these common factors, there are considerable country differences in participation in education and training (past 4 weeks) of people aged 25 to 64 years. For example, in 2014, the participation rate ranged from below 2.5% in Bulgaria and Romania to more than 25% in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland (Eurostat, code: trng_lfs_01. Data extracted on 06.11.2016). Relying on cross-national survey data, a study has shown that "adult education and training systems are deeply embedded in national social and institutional structures, in how state, market, and family structures deliver social rights, and in patterns of social stratification" (Boeren & Holford, 2016, p. 137).
Based on our understanding of social justice and taking into account these studies, we aim to answer the following research question: Research Question 1: Do countries differ with respect to the development of their adult education as inclusive and fair?
There has been a clear tendency among researchers to acknowledge the specificity of different types of lifelong learning. Analyses show that there are not only differences between countries and social groups in participation rates in formal and nonformal adult education but also that the level of social inequalities is different depending on the type of adult education Boeren & Holford, 2016;Kilpi-Jakonen,Vono de Vilhena, & Blossfeld, 2015).
An important feature of modern societies is rapid economic change, which in recent years has been associated with the development of knowledge economies and knowledge societies. In order to catch up with these developments, people need to constantly advance their knowledge and skills. This refers especially to low-educated people. Data show a pattern of progressive decline in the number of low-educated people in all age groups, although the trend is slow and is more pronounced among the younger generations (European Commission, 2013). Based on this, we ask the following research questions:

Research Methodology
Having outlined the theoretical background and the main research questions of the present study, we proceed with a presentation of the data and the indexes which will be used to answer these questions.

Data
The empirical basis of our study is the Adult Education Survey (AES). This survey, conducted via random sampling procedure, targets people aged 25 to 64 years who live in private households. The AES is part of the European Union (EU) statistics on lifelong learning and collects primary data on participation in education and training (formal, nonformal, and informal learning) and a wide range of socioeconomic characteristics, such as age, gender, highest educational level, and country of residence. The survey takes place every 5 years. So far, this survey has been conducted two times: in 2007 and in 2011. The data from the AES 2016 are still not available. The survey allows us to adopt a wide comparative perspective, as it was conducted in many European countries. The number of countries who participated in AES 2007 was 29, whereas in 2011-30. However, in the files with micro data for the survey obtained by Eurostat, for AES 2007, data are available only for 26 countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Norway). In 2011, four countries joined the survey: Ireland, Malta, Switzerland, and the Republic of Serbia. However, in the data set from this year, there is no information for Croatia. This is why, the following analysis is based on data for 25 countries-the countries which participated in both years. The analytical sample size for 2007 includes 197,806 cases, whereas for 2011-167,454 cases.
In terms of the overall quality of the data, it is worth mentioning that in the Synthesis Quality Report of the AES (2007), it has been evaluated as a good one. 2 The EU Quality Report for AES (2011) notes that it is possible to compare the results of the two waves for the main indictors on participation in lifelong learning. This does not apply to informal learning and that is because it is not included in our analyses. Classifications related to education follow the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) revision 1997 for both years.

Indexes
We introduce two indexes to capture social justice in participation in adult education of different social groups at a country level: an index of inclusion in participation in adult education (IincluAE) and an index of fairness in participation in adult education (IfairAE).
Social groups could be defined based on different characteristics, such as completed level of education, occupation status, place of residence, gender, and age. We focus only on social groups with respect to completed level of initial education because previous studies have shown that the educational attainment is a key factor influencing participation in adult education (for instance, Blossfeld et al., 2014). More specifically, we calculated the IincluAE and the IfairAE for those with a low level of education, ISCED 1997 0 to 2, and those with a high level of education, ISCED 1997 5 to 6. For the levels of education of the population of a given country, we used data from Eurostat that correspond to these two groups.
For the calculation of IincluAE, we estimated binomial logistic regression models for formal and nonformal adult education separately for all 25 countries using a variable distinguishing between whether people participated in a given type of education and training (1 = participated) or not (0 = not participated) as a dependent variable. The main independent variable is educational attainment, measured by three categories: low (ISCED 0-2), medium (ISCED 3-4), and high education (ISCED 5-6). We include in the models gender and age as control variables. We use one of the measures derived from the multivariate models: predicted probabilities for the people with low and high education. The IincluAE is calculated as the ratio between predicted probabilities of a given social group in two temporal points, in our case-2011 and 2007. An index above 1 indicates the increase of inclusion of the given social group within one and the same country within the above-described period of time, whereas an index below 1 shows a tendency toward exclusion of this group over time. An index value of 1 indicates that no advancement of inclusion was made by this group.
The IfairAE measures how the representation 3 of a given social group in adult education in a given country has changed over time. The IfairAE is calculated as the ratio between the representation of a given social group in two temporal points, in our case-2011 and 2007. An IfairAE index above 1 for people with low education indicates a decrease in the underrepresentation of this group in adult education and thus more fairness in participation in adult education of this social group, whereas an index below 1 shows an increase in the underrepresentation of this group in adult education and thus a tendency toward deterioration of the fairness of participation of this group over time. In case of the group of people with high education, an IfairAE below 1 would mean that the overrepresentation of this group has decreased and thus, the fairness of participation of this group has increased. An index of 1 indicates that no change of fairness was made by this group, whereas an index above 1 would mean an increase in overrepresentation, that is, a decrease in fairness of participation of this group in adult education.
Both aspects of social justice could also be assessed from a cross-national perspective; this means comparing the indexes of inclusion and fairness in adult education of different countries. However, due to AES data use rules, which refer to the cell size thresholds, it was not allowed to present results that refer to less than 20 observations. 4 Therefore, it was not possible to calculate the indexes for the groups with low and high education for both forms of adult education for all 25 countries.
It should be emphasized that adult education is characterized by its internal diversity, and its programs vary according to the type of education offered. Therefore, to capture the two main forms of adult education, we calculated the indexes separately for formal and nonformal education. We measure formal education as the proportion of adults who participated in formal education during the past 12 months, whereas nonformal education as the proportion of adults who participated in at least one nonformal education and training activity (such as courses, workshops and seminars, guided on-the-job training, private lessons) during the past 12 months.

Results
In this section, we present our results separately for formal and nonformal education.

Formal Education Participation and Representation of People With Low and High Education in Formal Adult
Education. Figure 1 shows the participation rates in formal education by the level of education people have attained in 2007. It indicates two main trends: the proportion of adults who participated in formal education activities is not very high and adults with higher education are more likely to participate in formal education compared with their low-educated peers. The figure demonstrates that countries differ considerably in the participation rates in formal adult education. Thus, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Sweden have the highest proportion of adults with higher education who pursue formal education, while Greece, Hungary, and Bulgaria having the lowest rates. Figure 2 presents the values of representation of the groups of people with low and high education in formal adult education, as of 2007. The results show that the group of people with low level of education is underrepresented in all countries for which data were available, whereas the group of highly educated people is overrepresented in all countries. This suggests that adult formal education reproduces already existing educational hierarchies in all countries. Despite this, there are country differences in the extent to which these two groups are represented. The data show that in some countries, like Denmark and Norway, the underrepresentation of people with low education is at the lowest levels, whereas in Poland and Italy, the underrepresentation of these people is very pronounced.
With regard to people with high education, the countries in which their proportion in adult education is closest to their proportion in the general population are Denmark, Germany, and Finland. At the other extreme are Latvia, Romania, and Poland, where the representation of the group with high education is more than three times higher than its proportion in the general population.

Inclusion and Fairness in Participation in Formal Adult Education of People With Low and High
Education. The analysis of the IincluAE for adults aged 25 to 64 years reveals that countries differ in terms of the inclusiveness of formal education for adults with different levels of education (Research Question 1; see Figure 3). Thus, formal education has become more inclusive with regard to higher education in the period between 2007 and 2011 in 10 of the countries, with Hungary, Austria, and the Netherlands being among the ones who made the largest advancement with regard to inclusion for this period. The figure also shows that the majority of the countries' formal education has not achieved more inclusion of the highly educated adults in the studied period. This is very pronounced in Italy, Lithuania, and Romania. The index for people with low education shows that advancement of inclusion of this group occurred in 15 out of all countries, being highest in Bulgaria, Latvia, Austria, Hungary, Estonia, and Portugal (Research Question 2).  Formal education has become considerably fairer with regard to low educated in this period in Portugal, Sweden, and Poland and to a lesser extent in Spain, Finland, and Belgium. The figure also shows that the majority of the countries' formal education has improved the fairness in the representation of the highly educated adults in the studied period. The formal adult education has become less fair with regard to the representation of people with high education only in Slovakia, Romania, France, Germany, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Austria (Research Question 2).
Given the observed trends, a relevant question becomes whether the changes in inclusion in formal adult education are associated with changes in fairness in participation in this form of adult education (Research Question 3). Despite the low number of countries included in the analysis due to the data use restrictions (only nine), we found a positive correlation between the inclusion achieved by people with low education in formal education between 2007 and 2011 and in the advancement of fairness of this group (Pearson's r = .482). However, it is not significant at (p < .05). With regard to people with high education, we did not find any significant association between the inclusion of this group in formal education and to the advancement of fairness (Pearson's r = .121, not significant at p < .05).

Nonformal Education Participation and Representation of People With Low and High Education in Nonformal
Adult Education. Figure 5 shows that in Hungary, Romania, and Greece, a very low proportion of adults with low and high education participated in nonformal education in 2007, whereas in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom a very high proportion of adults did so. Figure 6 presents the values of representation of the groups of people with low and high education as of 2007 in nonformal adult education. The results show that, similarly to formal education, in all countries, the group of people with low levels of education is underrepresented in nonformal education, whereas the group with high education is overrepresented. Despite this, there are country differences in the extent to which these two groups are represented in this type of adult education. In some countries, like Finland and Norway, the underrepresentation of adults with low education is relatively low, whereas in the Czech Republic, Greece, Lithuania, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom, it is very high.
With regard to adults with high education, the countries in which their representation in nonformal adult education is closest to their proportion in the general population are Finland, Norway, and Sweden. At the other extreme are Poland, Portugal, and Romania.

Inclusion and Fairness in Participation in Nonformal Adult Education of People With Low and
High Education. The analysis of the IincluAE in nonformal education for adults aged 25 to 64 years reveals that countries differ in terms of the advancement of inclusion of groups with different levels of education (Research Question 1; see Figure 7). Thus,   we observed that the nonformal education has become more inclusive with regard to people with high education in the period between 2007 and 2011 in more than half of the countries studied (Research Question 2). The figure also shows that nonformal education has achieved better inclusion with regard to low-educated people than with regard to high-educated ones in 13 of the countries. This is very pronounced in Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, and Portugal.
The analysis of IfairAE reveals some positive trends with regard to the fairness in the participation of the group of highly educated in nonformal education (Research Question 2). Thus, Figure 8 shows that there is a decrease in the overrepresentation of this group and the representation of people with high education has become closer to the fair one in most of the countries, except Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden. More specifically, there was a considerable increase of fairness in Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and Romania. With regard to the fairness with regard to the representation of people with low education, the analysis shows that it increased in 11 of the countries, as highest increase was achieved in Italy, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom and lowest in Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, and Spain.
In order to more systematically describe the relationship between inclusion and fairness, similarly to formal education, we also conducted a correlation test for nonformal one. The analysis reveals that there is a weak positive correlation between the advancement of inclusion among people with low education in nonformal education and the advancement of fairness achieved by this group (Pearson's r = .351). However, the correlation coefficient is not statistically significant (at p < .05). With regard to people with high education, we found a weak negative association between the advancement in inclusion among this group in nonformal education and to the change in the representation of people with high level of education (Pearson's r = −.397), but it was not significant (at p < .05). These results show that more inclusion in participation in nonformal education of people with low and high education is not associated with achieving a better representation of these groups within this type of education (Research Question 3).
The above results and analyses show that the inclusion and fairness aspect of equity in adult education differ for formal and nonformal education (Research Question 4).

Discussion and Conclusion
The article demonstrates that equity is an indispensable dimension of the widening of access to adult education for both research and policy making in the sphere of adult education. It contributes to the literature on social justice in adult education in a number of ways.
First and foremost, we suggest a way of how social justice in adult education can be conceptualized and measured. It is stated that "like 'equality of opportunity' or 'choice,' 'social justice' is one of those politically malleable and essentially contested phrases which can mean all things to all people" and that it tends to suffer from "vagueness and oversimplification" (Thrupp & Tomlinson, 2005, p. 549). In defining social justice in adult education, the article bridges two of the main contemporary lines of reasoning about justice: the institutions-centered one and the human-centered one and considers their application to higher education by Marginson (2011). We argue that social justice in adult education is a complex phenomenon, which is context and time-specific. The article differentiates between inclusion and fairness aspects of social equity in adult education and claims that both aspects of equity should be studied separately for different social groups.
Second, the analysis goes beyond the narrow information provided by the participation rates in adult education and explores how participation in adult education in different European countries looks like through a social justice perspective. Recently, the issue of indicators for adult education has attracted researchers' attention. Studies have questioned the use of the EU's lifelong learning participation index for policy purposes, particularly at the national level, as limiting the analyses of changes over time (e.g., Boeren & Holford, 2016). As Boeren and Holford (2016, p. 137) put it, "lifelong learning participation index is no more than a descriptive tool; it allows no multivariate exploration of other variables related to participation." Building on the understanding of social justice in adult education as a complex phenomenon, the article develops and applies two indicators-IincluAE and IfairAE-for measuring how the inclusion and fairness aspects of social justice in adult education change over time and tries to show that for explorative and explanatory purposes, both perspectives should be simultaneously taken into account. By developing these two quantitative indexes, the article also methodologically enriches the study of equity in adult education which has been analyzed mainly through qualitative research methods (see, e.g., the special issue Lifelong Learning and Social Justice of the International Journal of Lifelong Education [Jackson, 2011]).
The IicluAE and IfairAE reveal specific features of participation in adult education, which are not captured through the already existing measures and indicators. This is clearly evident from the fact that some countries, which do not have high participation rates (e.g., France), has achieved better advancement with regard to the inclusion and fairness in the studied period (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011) in comparison with countries with very high participation rates.
In terms of how our indexes refer to already developed ones, it is worth mentioning that Eve-Liis Roosmaa and Ellu Saar (2012) develop an inequality index which captures the labor market status of adults with regard to nonformal education. The index consists of the ratio of the participation of high-skilled white-collar workers against the participation of low-skilled blue-collar workers. In contrast to theirs, we focus on the groups with low and high education, adopt a dynamic perspective with respect to the advancement of inclusion and fairness in their participation in adult education over time, and try to cover not only nonformal but also formal education.
By relying on data from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Survey of Adult Skills database, 2013 and by using a wide range of control variables, such as age, gender, parents' education, functional literacy, and immigration status. Richard Desjardins (2015) shows that while inequality in participation in adult education activities is present in all 22 countries who participated in the survey, a number of countries are much more successful at extending adult learning opportunities to those who initially had low levels of educational attainment. The higher probability of more educated adults of participating in adult education than the low educated remains in all countries even after adjusting for the aforementioned control variables. However, his index misses to capture whether some advancement has been achieved with regard to the inclusion or fairness in the participation of these two social groups. Furthermore, it focuses on adult education as a whole, although it acknowledges that it has an internal diversity.
The social justice index (see Schraad-Tischler, 2015) includes equitable education as one of its core dimensions and offers a dynamic measure of social justice at national level for 28 countries. However, it neglects access to and participation in adult education as one of the key aspects of equitable education. Similarly, the social progress index (see Porter, Stern, & Green, 2016) calculated for 133 countries recognizes access to basic knowledge as a foundational for human well-being, but focuses only on adult literacy rate and does not acknowledge the participation in adult education. In general, the latter two indexes adopt a much wider view of what matters for social justice or social progress. Although the present article focuses only on social justice in adult education in two of its aspects, we do agree that "the different dimensions of social justice are strongly interrelated" and that "weak educational opportunities translate into weaker opportunities on the labor market and-as a consequence-into weaker opportunities to achieve higher incomes" (Schraad-Tischler, 2015, p. 15). Given this, we think that the identification of spaces of injustice in adult education in both of its forms and the timely policy interventions with regard to them are necessary because of their influence on the overall level of justice and progress achieved at a country level.
Third, in contrast with most previous studies, the article focuses not on adult education as a homogenous good, but considers its internal diversity and makes separate analyses for two of the most common forms of adult education: formal and nonformal education for two different social groups-people with low and with high education. The results obtained show that the inclusion aspect of social justice in adult education differs for the two types of education. Thus, our approach and results are consistent with other studies, which have shown that the isolation of different types of lifelong learning is a fruitful endeavor since it unfolds patterns that may be hidden and because they may indicate different conclusions about the inequality (or different mechanisms) of the distribution of lifelong learning (Hällsten, 2011;Kilpi-Jakonen et al., 2014).
Fourth, the analysis makes cross-national comparisons and uses both macro-and micro-level data. In answering our research questions, we reveal both differences and similarities between counties in terms of the advancement of inclusion and fairness of adult education for people with different levels of education. For example, in the majority of the countries, there is a tendency for improvement of the fairness in the representation of the highly educated adults in formal education over time. The index of inclusion in formal education for low-educated people shows that half of the countries studied have become more inclusive for this group. With regard to nonformal education, we observe that low-educated people have increased their inclusion in a greater extent than the high-educated ones in 13 of the countries.
Almost all of the studies of adult education confirm that "at first sight, adult education lacks capacity to contribute significantly to social transformation for social justice" (Tuckett, 2015, p. 245) and that people with high levels of initial education are able to pursue opportunities for lifelong learning far more readily than those with low or inadequate formal education (Kilpi-Jakonen et al., 2015;Roosmaa & Saar, 2012;Waller, Holford, Jarvis, Milana, & Webb, 2015). Our results are in line with those authors who have challenged this main strand of research, by revealing that adult education has a potential-although a limited one-to mitigate the power of the exiting educational hierarchies (Hällsten, 2011;Kilpi-Jakonen et al., 2012). Although adult education reproduces existing educational hierarchies in almost all countries studied, the fact that countries differ considerably with regard to underrepresentation of people with low education and overrepresentation of people with high education and in the tendencies over time, points out that adult education has some power to influence educational inequalities. Although "lifelong learning involves atypical educational transitions off the main track and cannot be the main driving force behind educational or other inequality on a larger scale," under certain social conditions, it "may provide a possibility to 'catch up' for the unemployed, for individuals in marginalized positions in the labour market and for individuals with initial educational failures" (Hällsten, 2011, p. 538) and thus help build a fairer society.
The present article raises some serious questions, which deserve further research. It is very important to continue the theoretical reflection on the understanding of social justice in adult education and how it relates to other issues in adult education, for example, quality and effectiveness. The social justice in adult education needs to be studied with regard to all different social groups that is, to groups differentiated, not only on the basis of completed initial education but on characteristics such as occupational status, place of residence, and age. A fruitful direction for future study refers to factors at both macro and micro level, which could explain differences between countries with regard to inclusion and fairness aspects of social justice in adult education. At macro level, for example, it is worth investigating how different types of welfare regimes, social cohesion regimes, and specificity of educational systems influence social justice in adult education. Previous research has demonstrated that the person's capability to participate in adult education can be bounded by the nature of welfare regimes of the states they live in (Rubenson & Desjardins, 2009). It is worth studying which of the existing typologies (e.g., Green & Janmaat's [2011] "regimes of social cohesion" and the Saar, Ure, and Desjardins's [2013] institutional contexts) are more relevant for the analysis of both inclusion and fairness aspects of equity in adult education in different countries.
Having in mind the conclusion of Kilpi-Jakonen et al. (2012, p. 65) that "adult education does not fully fit with general social inequality patterns," it is also interesting to examine the relationship between countries' Gini inequality index and social justice index (see Schraad-Tischler, 2015) and indexes for inclusion and fairness in adult education. We have analyzed social justice in adult education without differentiating between job-related and nonjob-related adult education. A recent study (Knipprath & De Rick, 2015) shows that participation in lifelong learning is marked by a Matthew effect only in the case of job-related learning activities. This is in line with our theoretical argument that social justice in adult education needs to be analyzed separately for different types and different programs of adult education.
The analyses presented in the article could be of interest from a policy point of view as well. The report Adult and continuing education in Europe: Using public policy to secure a growth in skills? published by the European Commission (2013) defines " [g] uaranteeing adequate equity in growth opportunities" as the second function of adult and continuing education policy (p. 14). Other authors (Thrupp & Tomlinson, 2005;Waller et al., 2015) also argue for the need to support a notion of social justice against policies which will maintain or intensify injustices. Applying a social justice approach to adult education is a way to counter the purely economic view on lifelong learning (Heckman & Masterov, 2007). A prerequisite for the transformation of the social justice perspective of national and European policies to adult education from an inspiring slogan into reality and for the development of adequate policy measures is the deepening of the theoretical understanding of social justice in adult education and the improvement of data and indicators for its assessment.
3. The representation is calculated by dividing the proportion of participants in adult education, aged 25 to 64 years, with a given initial level of education, by the proportion of people with the same educational level in the entire national population aged 25 to 64 years. A value of representation above 1 indicates overrepresentation of the given social group among the participants in adult education, whereas a value below 1 shows that this group is underrepresented. A value of 1 means that a given social group is perfectly represented within a given form of adult education in the respective country. 4. See 1.3 calculation of AES indicators and reliability thresholds: https://circabc.europa.eu/ sd/a/d3bbb686-e9fe-4448-a74a-a35aeec43703/LLL_Metadata_Section1_AES.htm