Activities of adult learning associations

Adult education

Education specially arranged for adults.

Subject

The courses are grouped after school subjects in accordance with Norwegian educational terms.

Level

The popular education organizations can offer courses on primary, secondary, and tertiary educational level in addition to many other courses.

Lessons

One course lesson is 60 minutes. Breaks of up to 15 minutes per hour are included.

Courses offering examination

Meaning to be a supplement to subject and level. Several courses arranged by popular education organizations give students the possibility to take an examination.

Classification of subject groups is worked out by Statistics Norway together with The Ministry of Education and Research, The Norwegian Association for Adult Education, Norwegian Association for Distance Education and Folk High School Council.

County is based on the classification of county municipality.

Name: Activities of adult learning associations
Topic: Education

Division for Education and Culture Statistics

The statistics are given on national and county level. It is also possible to order tables on municipal level.

Annual.

Collected and revised data are stored securely by Statistics Norway in compliance with applicable legislation on data processing.

Statistics Norway can grant access to the source data (de-identified or anonymised microdata) on which the statistics are based, for researchers and public authorities for the purposes of preparing statistical results and analyses. Access can be granted upon application and subject to conditions. Refer to the details about this at Access to data from Statistics Norway.

The main purpose is to show education arranged by popular education organizations from different angels. The aim is to reveal total course activities related to course level, choice of subjects and age as well as gender of the participants.

The statistics about course activities for popular education organizations started 1996 and were financed by The Ministry of Education and Research. The statistics has been published yearly since then and is financed by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills.

Users are the Ministry of Education and Research, the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills, other public services, researching institutions, media, the Norwegian Association for Adult Education and the association "Kompetanseforbunde", as well as individual popular education organizations.

No external users have access to statistics before they are released at 8 a.m. on ssb.no after at least three months’ advance notice in the release calendar. This is one of the most important principles in Statistics Norway for ensuring the equal treatment of users.

This statistics is a part of statistics of adult education in Norway.

The statistics are developed, produced and disseminated pursuant to Act no. 32 of 21 June 2019 relating to official statistics and Statistics Norway (the Statistics Act).

The statistics are part of the national programme for official statistics, topic Education, sub-topic Adult education.

All approved popular education organizations receiving grants report on course completions to Statistics Norway.

Each participant are reported by course subject, place of residence, and aim group in addition to course level, duration, and time when they started and finished the course.

The statistics are based on electronic reports from popular education organizations and include the entire population of these organizations.

Per 1 March in the year of census data is collected from the popular education organizations. After correcting the data, Statistics Norway put all files together to one basic file, on which the statistics are based.

Editing is defined here as checking, examining and amending data. All received data files undergo various controls, such as deleting duplicates and checking variables for valid values. In case errors are discovered, the popular education organizations will be contacted for corrections. Statistics Norway makes test tables based on corrected data, so the individual organizations get the possibility to compare own figures.

Statistics about popular education organizations is summarily only, and special analyses are not executed.

Employees of Statistics Norway have a duty of confidentiality.

Statistics Norway does not publish figures if there is a risk of the respondent’s contribution being identified. This means that, as a general rule, figures are not published if fewer than three units form the basis of a cell in a table or if the contribution of one or two respondents constitutes a very large part of the cell total.

Statistics Norway has published statistics on popular education organizations since 1997. The statistics for the period 1997-2009 includes courses of at least 12 lessons, but the statistics from 2010 includes courses of at least 8 lessons and is still comparable with the statistics of today.

Because of the corona pandemic,there was a temporary exception with regard to the number of instruction hours and courses lasting at least 4 hours were included in 2020. The new regulations regulating adult learning associations approved by the Ministry og Education and Research and the regulation regulating adult learning associations approved by the Ministry of Culture and Equality entered into force January 1st, 2021. They specify that from 2021, courses have to last at least 4 hours.

Until the reporting for the year of 2022, the adult learning associations reported the number of hours rounded to the nearest whole number, while hours are reported with decimals from the reporting year 2023.

Until 2010, one cours lesson lasted for 45 minutes. From 2010 and onwards, a course lesson is defined as 60 minutes, but breaks of up to 15 minutes per course lesson are included.

Mostly, errors can be traced back to data repported by the popular education organizations. Errors in coding of course completions might occur and it can be difficult to assign subject codes and level for the courses.

Statistics about popular education organizations include courses receiving grants only, and do not reflect the whole education activities.

Sampling errors and non-response errors are not relevant as the statistics are based on data from all popular education organizations.

A revision is a planned change to figures that have already been published, for example when releasing final figures as a follow-up to published preliminary figures. See also Statistics Norway’s principles for revisions. For these statistics, no preliminary figures are published.