Characterized by their metamorphosis [Beck, 2017], current Western societies, impregnated with information and structured by knowledge, pose multiple challenges to institutions and individuals, at various levels, from economic to educational. People are required constant learning and adaptation - lifelong and lifewide - but the skills and dispositions that enable them are unequally distributed, resulting in the increase of the social exclusion of the population that remains at the margins of these processes (Enguita, 2007; Costa, Machado and Ávila, 2007). In Portugal, not having completed a level of education can represent a significant barrier to returning to the formal education system (Valente, 2014). Studies on adults' participation in lifelong learning [LLL] activities (Aníbal and Ávila, 2019; Alves,2010) have confirmed the presence of an unequal relation marked by the Mateus effect: those with fewer qualifications have been the ones who access it less. This communication proposal results from a research that intends to extend the knowledge about the Portuguese low educated population that has remained outside formal education, despite the national policies on adult education and training of the last 20 years. The mapping of the phenomenon, carried out through secondary analysis of 'microdata' from the Adult Education Survey (INE, 2016), revealed that we are facing a diverse group, of expressive size and transversal presence in Portuguese society. By mobilising social characterisation indicators, we sought to capture its diversity by identifying type profiles, portraying practices and dispositions on LLL, contributing to the production of sociological knowledge on this phenomenon.

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• Sociologia - Ciências Sociais