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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
LF-NA-24960-EN-N
ISBN 978-92-79-21472-1
The Future of Learning:
Preparing for Change
EUR 24960 EN - 2011
9 789279 214721
Authors: Christine Redecker, Miriam Leis, Matthijs Leendertse,
Yves Punie, Govert Gijsbers, Paul Kirschner, Slavi Stoyanov
and Bert Hoogveld
The Future of Learning:
Preparing for Change
Authors:
Christine Redecker, Miriam Leis,
Matthijs Leendertse, Yves Punie, Govert Gijsbers,
Paul Kirschner, Slavi Stoyanov and Bert Hoogveld
2011
EUR 24960 EN
European Commission
Joint Research Centre
Institute for Prospective Technological Studies
Contact information
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JRC 66836
EUR 24960 EN
ISBN: 978-92-79-21472-1 (PDF)
ISBN: 978-92-79-21471-4 (print)
ISSN: 1018-5593 (print)
ISSN: 1831-9424 (online)
doi:10.2791/64117
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© European Union, 2011
Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged
Printed in Spain
The mission of the JRC-IPTS is to provide customer-driven support to the EU policy-making process by
developing science-based responses to policy challenges that have both a socio-economic as well as a
scientific/technological dimension.
3
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Table of contents
Executive Summary 9
Context and objectives of the study 9
The future of learning 9
Six major challenges for the future of learning 10
A vision for the future of initial Education and Training. 11
A vision for the future of lifelong learning 13
Policy implications 14
1 Introduction 15
1.1 Policy Background 15
1.2 Methodology 16
1.3 Outline of this Report 21
Part I. Envisaging the Future 23
2 Trends and Drivers 23
2.1 Demographic Trends: Ageing and De-greening 23
2.2 Globalisation 25
2.3 Immigration 25
2.4 Labour Market Trends 26
2.5 The Impact of Technology on Education and Training 27
2.6 Implications for the Future of Education and Training 29
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning 31
3.1 Brainstorming the Future of Learning 31
3.2 Group Concept Mapping Exercise 39
3.3 The Role of ICT for Future Learning Strategies 42
3.4 Key Insights: a Descriptive Vision of Future Learning 44
Part II. Challenges and Policy Options 47
4 Initial Education and Training 47
4.1 Introduction 47
4.2 Challenge 1: Multicultural Integration 48
4.3 Challenge 2: Early School Learning 52
4.4 Challenge 3: Fostering Talent 56
4.5 A Normative Vision of the Future of Initial E&T 61
4
Table of contents
5 Gaining and Retaining Employment 63
5.1 Introduction 63
5.2 Challenge 4: Transition from school to work 64
5.3 Challenge 5: Re-entering the Labour Market 67
5.4 Challenge 6: Re-skilling 71
5.5 Normative Vision for Future Lifelong Learning Strategies 75
6 Conclusions and Policy Implications 77
6.1 A Vision of the Future of Learning 77
6.2 Priority Areas 77
6.3 The Role of ICT 81
6.4 In Conclusion 81
7 References and Resources 83
7.1 Primary Data 83
7.2 Desk Research 83
5
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Acknowledgements
This report could not have been written without the input of the people who contributed to this study
in the different consultation events and exercises. We would therefore like to thank all stakeholders who
participated in the online consultations, the different workshop events and the GCM focus group for their
valuable contributions.
We would also like to thank our collaborators at Atticmedia for the beautiful visualisations and our
colleagues Lieve van den Brande (DG EAC) and Clara Centeno (DG JRC IPTS) for their valuable comments
and feedback, both in shaping the project and in revising its results. We are, as always, most indebted to
Patricia Farrer who edited and proofread successive versions of this report to prepare it for publication.
However, as ever, the views and conclusions expressed in the report, together with any errors or
omissions, are the responsibility of the authors.
7
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Preface
The Europe 2020 strategy acknowledges that a fundamental transformation of education and training
is needed to address the new skills and competences required if Europe is to remain competitive, overcome
the current economic crisis and grasp new opportunities. The strategic framework for European cooperation
in education and training (‘ET 2020’) recognizes that education and training have a crucial role to play
in meeting the many socio-economic, demographic, environmental and technological challenges facing
Europe and its citizens today and in the years ahead. However, to determine how education and training
policy can adequately prepare learners for life in the future society, there is a need to envisage what
competences will be relevant and how these will be acquired in 2020-2030.
To contribute to this vision-building process, JRC-IPTS on behalf of DG Education and Culture
launched a foresight study on “The Future of Learning: New Ways to Learn New Skills for Future Jobs”,
in 2009. This study continues and extends IPTS work done in 2006-2008 on “Future Learning Spaces”
(Punie et al., 2006, Punie & Ala-Mutka, 2007, Miller et al., 2008). It is made up of different vision
building exercises, involving different stakeholder groups ranging from policy makers, and scientists to
educators and learners. The majority of these stakeholder consultations were implemented on behalf of by
a consortium led by TNO of the Netherlands with partners at the Open University of the Netherlands and
Atticmedia, UK.
The detailed results of these stakeholder discussions have been published in dedicated reports (cf.
Ala-Mutka et al., 2010; Stoyanov et al., 2010; Redecker et al., 2010a).
This report synthesizes and discusses the insights collected. It identifies key factors for change that
emerge at the interface of the visions painted by different stakeholder groups and arranges them into a
descriptive vision of the future of learning in 2020-2030. In a second step, the report discusses future
solutions to pending challenges for European Education and Training systems and outlines policy options.
Based on the descriptive vision presented in the first part, a normative vision is developed of an ideal
learning future, in which all citizens are enabled to develop their talents to the best and to foster their own
wellbeing and prosperity as well as that of the society they live in as active citizens. Strategies fostering
such a vision and the policy implications supporting it are presented and discussed.
This final report and intermediate deliverables are available at the project website,
http://is.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pages/EAP/ForCiel.html
The site also contains links to multimedia visualisations of the main issues raised in this report.
9
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Executive Summary
Context and objectives of the study
To determine how education and training
policy can adequately prepare learners for life
in the future society, there is a need to envisage
which competences will be relevant and
how these will be acquired in 2020-2030. To
contribute to this vision-building, JRC-IPTS on
behalf of DG Education and Culture launched a
foresight study on “The Future of Learning: New
Ways to learn New Skills for Future Jobs” (http://
is.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pages /EAP/ForCiel.html). This
study aims to identify, understand and map how
learning strategies and trajectories are expected
to change, given current trends, thus creating a
descriptive vision of the future, and to develop a
normative vision outlining how future learning
opportunities should be developed to contribute
to social cohesion, socio-economic inclusion
and economic growth. These two objectives were
implemented by a series of extensive stakeholder
consultations, employing different formats
(workshops; online consultations; group concept
mapping) and including different stakeholder
groups (experts and practitioners; teachers;
policy makers) as well as a review of studies and
foresight activities.
The future of learning
The overall vision is that personalisation,
collaboration and informalisation (informal
learning) will be at the core of learning in the
Figure 1: Conceptual map of the future of learning
10
Executive Summary
future. These terms are not new in education and
training but they will become the central guiding
principle for organising learning and teaching. The
central learning paradigm is thus characterised
by lifelong and life-wide learning and shaped by
the ubiquity of Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT). At the same time, due to fast
advances in technology and structural changes to
European labour markets related to demographic
change, globalisation and immigration, generic
and transversal skills are becoming more
important. These skills should help citizens to
become lifelong learners who flexibly respond
to change, are able to pro-actively develop their
competences and thrive in collaborative learning
and working environments.
New skills. The increased pace of change will
bring new skills and competences to the fore, in
particular generic, transversal and cross-cutting
skills, which will enable citizens to flexibly and pro-
actively respond to change and to seize and benefit
from lifelong learning opportunities. Problem-
solving, reflection, creativity, critical thinking,
learning to learn, risk-taking, collaboration, and
entrepreneurship will become key competences
for a successful life in the European society of the
future. While mathematical, verbal, scientific and
digital literacy will remain key building blocks for
successful participation in society, it will become
increasingly important for citizens to have a better
understanding and awareness of the natural and
social environment in which they live, which will
lead to a new focus on nature and health on the
one hand, and on civic competences on the other.
New learning patterns. With the emergence
of lifelong and life-wide learning as the central
learning paradigm for the future, learning strategies
and pedagogical approaches will undergo drastic
changes. With the evolution of ICT, personalised
learning and individual mentoring will become
a reality and teachers/trainers will need to be
trained to exploit the available resources and tools
to support tailor-made learning pathways and
experiences which are motivating and engaging,
but also efficient, relevant and challenging. Along
with changing pedagogies, assessment strategies
and curricula will need to change, and, most
importantly, traditional E&T institutions – schools
and universities, vocational and adult training
providers – will need to reposition themselves in
the emerging learning landscape. They will need
to experiment with new formats and strategies for
learning and teaching to be able to offer relevant,
effective and high quality learning experiences in
the future. In particular, they will need to respond
more flexibly to individual learners’ needs and
changing labour market requirements.
Six major challenges for the future of
learning
This study has identified the following
major challenges for the future of learning. Initial
Education and Training institutions have to deal
with:
- multicultural integration to address
immigration and demographic change;
- reducing early school leaving to combat
unemployment and to promote a better
educated workforce for competitiveness
and economic growth;
- fostering talent to develop a ‘smart’
economy based on knowledge and
innovation and to let people develop
themselves as reflective and responsible
persons.
The challenges for lifelong learning are also
three-fold:
- promoting a rapid and more fluent
transition from school to work in order
to reduce the barriers between the
worlds of work and education;
- facilitating re-entrance to the labour
market, especially to tackle long-term
unemployment; and
- focussing on permanent re-skilling
to enable all citizens to keep their
competences updated and quickly
respond and adjust to possibly fast
changing work environments.
11
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
To better understand and discuss these
six challenges, a number of “persona” were
developed, which illustrate the key issues
involved for future learning strategies (Figure 2).
Various online and face-to-face stakeholder
consultations on viable future learning strategies
for the different persona were conducted,
independently of the descriptive vision
development. Expert opinion underlines and
confirms that in 15 years’ time learning strategies
will be personalised, tailor-made and targeted;
collaborative and networked; and informal and
flexible. For initial Education and Training (E&T)
this will signify a move towards learner-centred
and social learning strategies that are integrated
in their daily lives and into society. For continuing
professional development and learning strategies
for re-skilling and up-skilling, there is a trend
towards shorter-term, targeted and flexible
learning modules; to tapping the tacit knowledge
of a team and supporting intergenerational
learning and towards mechanisms that better
support the validation and recognition of
informally acquired skills.
A vision for the future of initial
Education and Training.
Initial Education and Training will need to
react more effectively and promptly to changing
job requirements and societal trends. They will
need to better address and narrow the current
gap between the world of education and the
world of work. In the future, learner-centred,
decentralised, and tailor-made learning strategies
will prevail, which will (need to) be accompanied
by corresponding pedagogies and teaching
strategies as well as flexible curricula, modified
assessment and validation mechanisms and
closer collaboration with other societal players,
including tertiary education providers and
prospective future employers.
Personalisation in initial E&T. The key for
unlocking the future of learning will be the
promotion of personalised learning plans and
tailor-made learning activities. Personalised
learning will facilitate the social and cultural
integration of migrant children and help them
to overcome language barriers; it will enable
teachers to detect students at risk of dropping out,
help them to diagnose the problems and learning
needs and to offer re-engagement strategies; and
Figure 2: Persona development
12
Executive Summary
it will help develop talent and foster excellence
by providing more engaging and challenging
learning opportunities. A mix of different
technologies will support personalisation, by
allowing for a diversity of learning activities, tools
and materials; by providing tools which support
continuous monitoring and support diagnostic,
formative and summative assessment strategies;
by making educational resources openly
available; by allowing for the implementation
of collaborative projects; by offering learning
opportunities that are motivating, engaging and
even playful; and by supporting multilingual
environments.
Collaboration in initial E&T. E&T institutions
need to re-connect with society to better align
learning objectives and societal needs. In the
future, European societies will be more inter-
cultural and flexible. Young people need advice
and guidance to come to terms with the increasing
rate of change and find their way in a complex
world. Schools must offer them the orientation
they need and promote mutual understanding
and active citizenship, in direct interaction with
society. Thus, collaboration not only within
the classroom, as it is (or should be) practiced
today, but with the community at large, and with
people from other social, cultural or age groups,
will become increasingly important to enable
younger learners to come to terms with life in
an increasingly diverse and uncertain world.
Virtual study exchange programmes, internet-
based intercultural exchange projects, online
massive multiplayer games, simulations and
other internet-based services can assist schools in
allowing learners to experience, understand and
reflect upon societal developments in a safe and
protected environment.
Informalisation of initial E&T. In the past,
one of the major roles of schools was to make
Figure 3: Overview of future Lifelong Learning strategies
13
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
knowledge accessible to all citizens. Today
information has become a commodity that
is available anytime and anywhere. Thus, the
future role of schools will be to guide students
in identifying and selecting the learning
opportunities that best fit their learning styles
and objectives; to monitor progress, realign
learning objectives and choices and intervene
when difficulties arise; and to implement viable
assessment, certification and accreditation
mechanisms. Schools will become learning hubs
which offer guidance and support for learner-
centred learning pathways, tailored to individual
learning needs, paces, modes and preferences.
Achieving this requires flexible curricula;
teachers who are trained to effectively guide
and coach students in their learning endeavours;
competence-based assessment strategies that are
to a certain extent independent of the concrete
learning content; and certification mechanisms
that allow alternative learning experiences to be
integrated into school education.
A vision for the future of lifelong
learning
In the future, people are likely to change
their professions more frequently throughout
their life and they are remaining longer within
the workforce due to demographic changes and
higher life expectancy. According to experts, it
will be common for all citizens – whether they
are at the beginning or end of their careers,
whether they are highly skilled or do not have any
relevant qualifications – to continuously update
their skills. Professional careers will become
more flexible and dynamic and all citizens, no
matter how highly qualified, will need to pro-
actively design and promote their careers by
seizing relevant training opportunities. ICT will
play an important role in facilitating lifelong
learning opportunities, as, in the future, a range
of sophisticated and adaptive learning tools and
programmes will be available which will make it
easy for people to upgrade their skills and drive
their professional careers.
Personalisation. Due to increased labour
market dynamics, people will have to assume
responsibility for their qualifications and take
initiative in developing their professional careers.
However, to improve the match of skill supply and
demand and to make training targeted, effective
and efficient, industry will also need to get more
involved in shaping training and encouraging
workers to participate in lifelong learning. In
the interests of both employers and (prospective)
employees, training opportunities will become
targeted and tailor-made. Technological advances
will allow people to effectively and efficiently (re-)
qualify for jobs of their choosing, by identifying
and addressing their particular training needs
and offering learning strategies that are tailored
to their level of competence, their (future) job
requirements, their time constraints, and their
learning styles and objectives, thus making
effective and efficient lifelong learning far easier
than it is today.
Collaboration. Professional relationships
will increasingly be characterised by an open
knowledge exchange, not only between
colleagues and peers with similar professional
profiles and learning needs, but also
between older and younger, experienced and
inexperienced workers. To enable citizens to
quickly and effectively upgrade their professional
and practical skills, ICT-based peer learning
networks and communities, which allow workers
to mutually benefit from each others’ specific
knowledge and experiences, will become an
important tool for lifelong learning. Furthermore,
intergenerational learning will facilitate continuing
professional development, as it allows younger
workers to tap the tacit knowledge of more senior
workers whose professional experiences will
become better recognised as a valuable source of
knowledge in a fast-changing work environment,
while, at the same time, allowing more senior
workers to continuously update themselves on the
fresh knowledge younger people bring into the
workplace. ICT supports these developments by
providing environments that scaffold, document
and archive this learning process and thus convert
14
Executive Summary
knowledge exchange into an accessible learning
resource that is available anywhere and anytime.
Informalisation. In 2025, it is expected that
there will be abundant learning opportunities
that assist people in converting professional
experiences and personal skills into competences
that are relevant for (new) job profiles. However,
not all of these training opportunities will
lead to formally recognised qualifications.
Similarly, professional experiences acquired
in previous jobs will give rise to a number of
diverse competences that are seldom officially
acknowledged or recognised. Thus, the experts
repeatedly and almost unanimously underline that
in view of increasing labour market dynamics,
informally acquired skills need to become better
recognised and mechanisms will have to be
put in place that allow people to obtain formal
recognition for their experiences and skills. ICT
can support the documentation and validation
for informally acquired skills. However,
accreditation frameworks and mechanisms need
to be developed to make individuals’ learning
portfolios relevant and valuable for their career
development.
Policy implications
The visions presented in this report are not
necessarily new or radical. Many of the changes
depicted have been foreseen for some time but
they have now come together in such a way
that policymakers must urgently consider them
and propose and implement a fundamental shift
in the learning paradigm for the 21
st
century
digital world and economy. To reach the goals
of personalised, collaborative and informalised
learning, holistic changes need to be made
(including, among others: curricula, pedagogies,
assessment, teacher training, leadership) and
mechanisms need to be put in place which
make flexible and targeted lifelong learning a
reality and support the recognition of informally
acquired skills.
15
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
1 Introduction
1.1 Policy Background
Europe is currently facing a number of
changes and challenges which will profoundly
affect the way in which people live, work and
learn in 10 to 20 years’ time. By 2020, 16 million
more jobs will require high qualifications, while
the demand for low skills will drop by 12 million
jobs.
1
However, Europe has a lower share of
university graduates than other leading industrial
nations like the USA or Japan, and is struggling to
offer viable lifelong learning options to 80 million
people who have low or basic skills. 25% of the
current generation of students have poor reading
skills and 1 in 7 young people leave school early.
These learners are ill prepared for life in a society
that will require, on the whole, higher skills
than today. Also on the social and demographic
level, profound changes will manifest themselves
which will pose additional challenges to social
cohesion and to the sustainability of European
social systems, requiring policy makers to take
measures to ensure that all citizens can actively
participate in society.
The Europe 2020 strategy
2
acknowledges
that, to remain competitive, overcome the current
economic crisis and grasp new opportunities,
Europe has to concentrate on smart, sustainable
and inclusive growth. One way to achieve these
overall goals is to develop and invest in citizens’
skills and competences. Consequently, one of
the five targets for measuring the success of the
Europe 2020 strategy is the modernisation of
European Education and Training systems and
1 http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/president/
news/statements/pdf/20102010_2_en.pdf.
2 Europe 2020. A European strategy for smart, sustainable
and inclusive growth. Commission Communication.
COM(2010) 2020. http://ec.europa.eu/eu2020/pdf/
COMPLET%20EN%20BARROSO%20%20%20007%20
-%20Europe%202020%20-%20EN%20version.pdf.
institutions by reducing early school leaving and
increasing tertiary education attainment. Also to
meet other targets, such as increasing the overall
employment rate as well as the share of women,
older workers and migrants in the work force, and
to reduce poverty, it is of paramount importance to
develop citizens’ occupational skills and relevant
competences. The importance of competence
development is further emphasized by three
of the ten Broad Economic Policy Guidelines
adopted by the Council in July 2010
3
and by
the fact that six of the seven flagship initiatives
address, among others, appropriate and adequate
skill training and competence development.
However, with the speed of technological
and socio-economic change, learning strategies
and trajectories are becoming similarly volatile.
Considering that knowledge generation and
organisation have changed substantially over the
last 10 to 20 years, giving rise not only to new
communication and working patterns, but also to
new learning approaches and competence needs,
it is vital to have a clearer understanding of how
learning opportunities may change over the next
10 to 20 years in order to better advise policy
makers.
Thus, to determine how education and
training policy can adequately prepare learners
for life in the future society, there is a need to
envisage which competences will be relevant
and how these will be acquired in 2020-2030.
To contribute to this vision-building, JRC-IPTS
in collaboration with DG Education and Culture
launched a foresight study on “The Future of
Learning: New Ways to Learn New Skills for
Future Jobs” (http://is.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pages/EAP/
ForCiel.html). This study aims to provide evidence
3 http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/10/st11/st11646.
en10.pdf.
16
1 Introduction
on how competences and occupational skills will
and can be acquired in the future, in order to
support priority setting for education, training and
skilling policies. It does not intend to correctly
predict or model the future. Rather, it employs a
number and variety of stakeholder consultation
exercises to come up with imaginative visions
and scenarios of the future of learning, which
provide valuable insights into current trends and
their possible development in the future.
This report presents a synthesis of the
results of this project, which was conducted
jointly by IPTS, TNO, the Open University in
the Netherlands and Atticmedia, on behalf of
the European Commission (DG Education and
Culture).
1.2 Methodology
The main objectives of the Future of
Learning study are twofold. On the one hand,
it aims to identify, understand and map how
learning strategies and trajectories are expected
to change, given current trends, thus creating a
descriptive vision of the future. On the other
hand, based on the projection of current socio-
economic trends and challenges into the future,
the study sets out to develop a normative vision of
the future by identifying strategies which ensure
that future learning opportunities contribute to
social cohesion, socio-economic inclusion and
economic growth.
In order to achieve these two objectives, a
series of extensive stakeholder consultations,
employing different formats (workshops; online
consultations; group concept mapping) and
including different stakeholder groups (experts
and practitioners; teachers; policy makers) were
set up. The different consultations were designed
to jointly reinforce and cross-validate one
another. Both research lines were developed on
the basis of extensive desk research, including
other foresight studies and policy documents,
and intensive discussion and planning activities
among the consortium members and IPTS to
ensure the significance and validity of the results
obtained.
Figure 4: Overview of the methodological approach
17
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
1.2.1 Towards a descriptive vision of the future
of learning
The key question for this line of the research
was: “What will learning look like in the future?”
Variants of this question were put to experts (May
2010, 16 experts), teachers (February 2010, 13
teachers) and policy makers (May 2010, 15 policy
makers) in dedicated workshop brainstorming
and discussion sessions, leading to three different,
though vastly overlapping and coinciding maps
of the landscape of future learning.
Additionally, a selected group of experts
were involved in a more targeted and intensive
consultation process, employing the Group
Concept Mapping Methodology (GCM). This
intensive process involved a focus group of 13
experts at three stages, i.e. in (1) gathering, (2)
clustering and (3) rating insights on major changes
to education in 20 years’ time. The experts came
up with a total of 203 ways to complete the trigger
statement “One specific change in education
in 20 years’ time will be that: …”. Each expert
then arranged the changes foreseen in different
thematic clusters and rated them for importance
and feasibility.
The vast amount of data thus generated
was subsequently aggregated and analysed.
To depict the emerging structure in the data,
multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster
analysis were applied. Based on the experts’
sorting activity, each statement was placed on a
map, reflecting its proximity or distance to the
other statements. Based on the position of the
statements and the clusters proposed by experts,
the statements were subsequently clustered
into 12 groups, which were labelled using titles
suggested by the experts.
1.2.2 Towards a normative vision: identifying
challenges and their solutions
Based on literature research, the findings
of the GCM mapping exercise and in intensive
consultation with policy makers, a number of
challenges were identified that are expected to
have a pronounced effect on the socio-economic
future of Europe. Each of these challenges
was illustrated by the use of a “persona”, a
stereotypical character, outlining the main
problem at hand. Subsequently the persona
descriptions and illustrations were subjected to a
series of stakeholder consultations with experts,
teachers and policy makers, both online and face
to face.
Persona development
In total, nine different persona were
developed, which address the two key questions
for the normative vision development: 1. How
can education and training institutions and
systems address future learning needs?, and 2.
How can demand and supply of skills be better
matched? (Figure 4).
While contributing to the two overall
questions, each persona addresses a particular
challenge for future education and training or
employment and labour market strategies (or both,
as in the case of Joshua and Frank), namely:
1. How will E&T meet future learning
needs, e.g.:
• How can an increasing number of
children from multicultural backgrounds
be integrated and be enabled to fully
develop their talents (Chanta)?
• How can early school leaving be
prevented and effectively dealt with
(Bruno)?
• How can all students be enabled to fully
develop their individual talents, i.e. how
can learning pathways and trajectories
be adapted to individual learning needs
(Emma)?
• How can the learning objectives and
strategies in vocational and higher
education better be aligned with labour
market needs?
• What will the future role of teachers
be? (Frank)
18
1 Introduction
2. How can demand and supply of skills be
matched, e.g.:
• How can people, who do not have directly
relevant qualifications, be enabled to re-
enter the labour market after a longer
period of unemployment? (Sven)
• How can people with low qualifications
be enabled to develop a professional
career that enables them to remain in
employment throughout their lives?
(Ingrid)
• How can (possibly highly qualified)
people who are faced with unexpected
labour market shifts which make their
expertise obsolete, qualify for a job in a
different field? (Martina)
• How can people effectively update their
professional skills to actively develop
their career? (Slavi)
• How can experts effectively pass on their
professional knowledge and experience
to younger generations? (Frank)
• How can the transition from vocational
and higher education to the labour
market be improved and skill
mismatches be addressed? (Joshua)
Online stakeholder consultations
Based on these character descriptions and
illustrations, a series of stakeholder consultations
were conducted, both face to face and online.
For the full results and transcripts of the online
consultations, including a more detailed
description of the methodology, see Redecker et
al., 2010a.
Phase 1: Preparation
In a first phase a network of experts and
stakeholders interested in the research was set
up on different online platforms, on LinkedIn,
Facebook and YouTube. The LinkedIn group on
“The Future of Learning”, with its over 1,100
members currently (September 2011), proved to
be by far the most valuable resource for expert
input.
Phase 2: Experimentation
Based on the personas, a forum-like
discussion about the specific questions and
topics represented by the personas was set up. A
discussion site was set up on the website (
www.
futureoflearning.eu
) where in weekly rounds,
three personas with corresponding challenges
Figure 5: Overview of the personas developed
19
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
were presented. For this, a set of open-ended
questions were posed, that users could comment
on in a forum-like environment. The topics
discussed were:
• The future role of teachers (illustrated by
Frank, 23 comments)
• The school of the future (illustrated by
Emma, 20 comments)
• Inclusion (illustrated by Chanta, 8
comments)
While the discussions were interesting,
some comments proved difficult to interpret and
integrate into a coherent set of ideas.
Phase 3: Piloting
To consolidate and validate the findings of
the previous stage, three statements per persona
were selected among those provided by the
experts in the initial open online consultation. A
survey was set up, asking respondents to express
their agreement or disagreement (on a range from
1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree) and
encouraging them, for each statement, to justify
and explain their agreement or disagreement. This
pilot survey (PS) was launched on 20 April and
closed on 20 June 2010, generating responses by
111 stakeholders.
Phase 4: Implementation
Based on reflection on the results of the
pilot survey, a series of three quantitative
surveys was developed, each consulting
stakeholders on three personas grouped
according to a common theme. The surveys
were drafted around the following three topics,
taking into account multiple personas and their
related questions and topics:
• Lifelong Learning (132 completed
surveys) – Online Consultation I (OC I)
• Future Challenges (101 completed
surveys) – Online Consultation II (OC II)
• The Future of School Education in
Europe (90 completed surveys) – OC III
All three quantitative surveys were designed
along the same lines: providing an introduction
based on the personas and listing several
Figure 6: Example of the first open consultation on the personas of Emma and Chanta
20
1 Introduction
statements to which respondents could rate on a 1
to 5 scale with “1” representing “strongly disagree”
and “5” = “strongly agree”, i.e. a 5-level Likert
scale. The results were analysed using standard
descriptive statistics, assessing the percentage of
responses on each scale. In the analysis, special
attention was paid to statements that received
considerable variation (i.e. a considerable share
of agreement as well as disagreement).
Based on the information voluntarily
provided by about half the participants,
respondents’ profiles range from academics,
researchers, consultants and practitioners
(most of these have expertise in education and
training, pedagogy, technology, foresight and/
or innovation) to educational policymakers and
advisors. The majority of respondents come from
Europe covering at least 15 different European
countries. None of the surveys can be regarded
as representative however.
1.2.3 Face-to-face consultations
To validate initial findings on the online
stakeholder discussion, a series of workshops
with different stakeholder groups was
implemented.
Teachers were consulted in two workshop
session at the eTwinning conference in Seville
in February 2010. The focus of the workshop
sessions was on the personas of Chanta (albeit
represented as “Max”), Emma and Frank (a
teacher, re-named “Daniel”) and on the questions
of (a) how schools will be able to best develop
the potential of their students and teachers, and
(b) which should be the key learning objectives
for each of these persona in the future.
A workshop with 16 external experts and
four European Commission members, involved
in the research, and six further project members
was organised and took place in Amsterdam on
15-16 May 2010. Here, the results of the online
consultations were presented and discussed
and the challenges represented by the different
personas were debated.
Furthermore, on two occasions, in May
and in November 2010, the findings of the
online stakeholder consultations were discussed
by staff from a range of different European
Commission Directorate Generals. On the first
event, discussion focussed on validating the
overall (preliminary) results, whereas in the
second workshop policy recommendations
Figure 7: Key personas and the challenges they illustrate
21
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
were developed for some of the key challenges
and themes, namely (1) how education and
training institutions and systems should develop
strategies to address multiculturalism, implement
personalised learning strategies, adapt assessment,
and use ICT effectively, and (2) how changing job
requirements can be addressed, self-responsibility
and flexible training opportunities can be fostered
and informal learning can be better recognized.
Considering the findings of the consultations
and the focus of the overall study, for the
purposes of this report, a set of six personas was
further developed to represent the most urgent
and pressing challenges for education and
employment in the future (
Figure 7).
4
Thus, the personas illustrating the changing
role of teachers (Frank); challenges faced by
workers with low formal qualifications (Ingrid)
and strategies for up-skilling (Slavi) will not be
explicitly presented in this report. Instead, relevant
findings will be integrated in the discussion of
the presented personas as follows. The changing
role of teachers (originally illustrated by Frank)
will be reflected in the discussion of the personas
representing primary (Chanta) and secondary
(Bruno, Emma) education. Challenges for lowly
qualified workers (originally represented by
Ingrid) are reflected in the discussion of the
persona of Sven, which illustrates the similar
problem of re-entering the labour market without
relevant qualifications. Finally, the problem of
up-skilling (Slavi) is addressed in the discussion
of Martina, who is a highly qualified senior
specialist who faces the more severe problem of
changing professional profile.
1.3 Outline of this Report
The report is divided in two parts, the first
of which is devoted to the development of a
(descriptive) vision of the future of learning. The
4 For a full presentation of all personas see Redecker et al.,
2010.
second part focuses on future challenges for E&T
and on future strategies and supporting policy
options for making the best of all possible futures
a reality.
In Chapter 2, a series of trends and drivers
impacting the future of learning are outlined,
which form the basis and background for the
stakeholder consultations conducted in this study,
the findings of which are outlined in Chapter 3.
Chapter 3 discusses and summarizes the major
changes to learning in the future, and develops a
vision of the future of learning on the basis of the
different stakeholder consultation exercises.
Chapters 4 and 5 present and discuss six
challenges for the future of learning which
are illustrated and represented by six different
persona. Chapter 4 focuses on E&T systems
and institutions, by considering how increasing
multiculturality and heterogeneity in European
classrooms can be addressed adequately early in
primary school (Chanta, 4.2); how early school
leaving can be effectively prevented or dealt with
when it happens (Bruno, 4.3); and how schools
will be able to develop all students’ talents and
foster excellence, thus preparing students for
tertiary education and assisting them in their
career choices (Emma, 4.4).
Chapter 5 exploits lifelong learning
opportunities which assist in matching labour
market skill supply and demand. It discusses how
the transition between tertiary and vocational
E&T and the labour market can be smoothed
(Joshua, 5.2); how people who have been out of
employment for a longer period of time can be re-
integrated into the labour market (Sven, 5.3) and
how highly qualified people can be enabled to
re-skill if their specialist skills become obsolete,
due to technological advances, labour market
shifts or unexpected labour market disruptions
(Martina, 5.4).
Chapter 6 draws conclusions from the
findings in all parts and sections and discusses
policy implications. These could help to pave the
22
1 Introduction
way to an efficient and effective European E&T
system that responds adequately to the changes
ahead and contributes to competitiveness and
sustainability by driving excellence and equity.
23
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Part I. Envisaging the Future
2 Trends and Drivers
A variety of demographic, societal,
economic and technological factors is expected
to influence and impact on the future of learning
and education. This chapter will provide a brief
overview over the main trends and drivers which
affect the future of learning and will present some
of the more salient consequences for employment
and Education and Training.
2.1 Demographic Trends: Ageing and
De-greening
Across Europe there is a growing
awareness that our societies are going through
an unprecedented demographic transition,
based on the combined effects of decreasing
fertility rates and rising life expectancy.
5
Both demographic extremes, ageing and de-
greening (i.e. the decline in the number and
share of younger people), will impact future
jobs, employment, work-biographies and skills
and competences.
Individual life expectancy has risen
substantially over the last 50 years and is expected
to continue so for the next decades. Over the past
45 years, life expectancy at birth has increased by
about eight years for men and women.
6
In most
EU Member States, life expectancy - currently 75
5 EENEE & NESSE, 2008; Reflection Group, 2010.
6 Schlotter et al., 2008.
Figure 8: Share of European population by age groups in the geographical region of Europe
Source: UN population statistics, http://esa.un.org/unpp/index.asp
24
2 Trends and Drivers
years for men and 82 for women on average – is
set to increase by an additional 15 to 20 years in
the course of this century.
7
Whereas back in 1950
only 13% of the European population was over
60 years of age, this share has increased to 22%
in 2010 and is expected to reach 34% in 2050.
8
While the population aged 60 and above
will increase by about 42 million between 2010
and 2030, the number of young people under the
age of 30 will decrease by about 12 million in
the EU27 (Figure 9). The population aged above
80 years is expected to double from 23 million
in 2010 to 46 million in 2040 in the EU 27.
9
The
share of old people in the population will be
significantly higher in Europe than in other world
regions such as Asia and Africa.
10
7 Reflection Group, 2010.
8 UN population statistics: http://esa.un.org/unpp/index.asp
9 Eurostat EUROPOP 2008 data.
10 Schlotter et al., 2008.
In parallel, the fertility rate in Europe has
decreased steadily, from 2.7 children per family
in 1964 to 1.4 in 1999, a trend that is expected
to continue. In Europe, the number of children
and teenagers under the age of 19 is expected to
decline from 160 million in 1980 to 110 million in
2025.
11
With women giving birth to 1.5 children
on average, and more and more women foregoing
children altogether, Europe’s population is ageing
and its native-born labour force declining.
12
The combined demographic extremes of
very high life expectancy and very low fertility
will exert enormous pressure on Europe’s social
welfare systems. Europe has to come to terms with
the reduction in the working age population and
a higher share of people of retirement age.
13
In an
ageing society with almost twice as many people
11 UN population statistics http://esa.un.org/unpp/index.
asp?panel=2
12 Reflection Group, 2010.
13 Schlotter et al., 2008.
Figure 9: EU 27 population projection by age group, 2010-2030
Source: Eurostat Population projections, EUROPOP2008.
25
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
over 65 per worker as today, EU Member States
will have to make considerable efforts to finance
their social support regimes and to retain older
people in the workforce.
14
Employers will need to
change their recruitment and retention policies
to attract and retain qualified staff.
15
The future
workforce of Europe will need to be recruited
increasingly from the older population, which
raises the need for an improved training system
especially for this group because economic
growth in Europe will heavily depend on their
performance in the labour market.
16
2.2 Globalisation
A new multi-polar world is emerging where
power is more diffuse and international dynamics
more complex.
17
Between 2005 and 2050, the
working-age population of emerging economies
is expected to increase by 1.7 billion, compared
with a decline of 9 million in the developed
economies.
18
As new global competitors with
innovation capacity like China and India emerge,
it will be increasingly challenging for Europe to
keep its competitive edge.
By 2030, China could be the biggest global
economy and India the fourth largest.
19
China
and India contributed 58% of all global growth
in 2007 and it is estimated that BRIC economies
could be delivering 40% of all global growth by
2018.
20
Over the past 15 years, trade volume grew
by over 50% as a proportion of GDP in Russia,
nearly doubled in China and more than doubled
in Brazil and India.
21
Forecasts by some leading
economists suggest that China in particular
may increase its share of world GDP from 11%
today to 40% in 2040, whereas the EU15 GDP
is projected to decline from 21% today to 5% in
14 Reflection Group, 2010.
15 Wilson, 2009.
16 Schlotter et al., 2008.
17 Reflection Group, 2010.
18 Talwar & Hancock, 2010.
19 Talwar & Hancock, 2010.
20 Talwar & Hancock, 2010.
21 Eurostat, 2007.
2040.
22
China’s GDP could overtake that of the
US as early as 2015
23
and within the next 40-
50 years, the overall GDP of the BRIC countries
could exceed those of the largest EU countries,
the US and Japan.
24
Although the assumptions underlying
some of the forecasts have been challenged,
25
the figures are indicative of the speed at which
the global economic balance is tilting in favour
of China. By 2030, Asia is expected to be at
the forefront of scientific and technological
developments, producing high-value goods
capable of transforming production and overall
quality of life.
26
With slower growth than its main
competitors, the EU’s share of global wealth is
inevitably declining.
27
Europe will increasingly
compete with much younger societies whose
pools of young “digitally-empowered talent”
will eventually out-number Europe’s under any
demographic scenario.
28
The power of these
emerging economies will challenge European
societies and call for targeted measures to ensure
that, through innovation and excellence, Europe
is able to maintain its prosperity and defend its
social welfare states.
29
2.3 Immigration
The UN projects that up to two million people
will migrate from poor to rich countries every
year until 2050, with around 1.6 million coming
to Europe.
30
As the domestic supply of labour and
skills declines, Europe will need to attract more
migrant workers, with consequences for our
22 Fogel, 2007.
23 Maddison, 2007.
24 OECD, 2007.
25 Cf. EENEE & NESSE, 2008.
26 Reflection Group, 2010.
27 Reflection Group, 2010.
28 Linton & Schuchhard, 2009.
29 Hofheinz, 2009; Linton & Schuchhard, 2009; Fingar,
2008.
30 http://www.un.org/esa/population/unpop.htm.
26
2 Trends and Drivers
ability to manage societal integration. Without
migration, the EU will not be able to meet future
labour and skills shortages.
31
According to a 2007
study by the Hamburgisches Weltwirtschafts
Institut (Germany), in the absence of immigration,
the size of Western and Central Europe’s labour
force would shrink from 227 to 201 million in
2025 and to 160 million in 2050. To maintain the
labour force constant, a net inflow of 66 million
labour migrants would be necessary.
32
However, currently third-country nationals
show low employment and high unemployment
rates,
33
the reasons for which are not only rooted
in education and qualifications. Thus, it is already
recognized that measures need to be adopted
to make education and training accessible
to immigrants to facilitate their transition to
the labour market which contributes to social
cohesion.
34
To tap the potential of the current
generation of young migrants, efforts in formal
education need to be increased, addressing the
specific needs of immigrant children and youth
at an early stage, to empower them to become
active participants in society.
35
This is particularly
important, considering that many children
of migrants have significantly lower levels of
educational attainment than their peers.
36
2.4 Labour Market Trends
The jobs of tomorrow, whatever they look
like, will, on the whole, require new and higher
levels of skills.
37
The foresight report “Changing
professions in 2015 and beyond” identifies
three main drivers that are expected to impact
the skills requirements even by 2015: the shelf-
life of knowledge is decreasing; the amount
of information is increasing; and concurrent
31 Reflection Group, 2010.
32 http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/15/38295272.pdf
33 http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/15/38295272.pdf
34 European Commission, 2009c.
35 European Commission, 2007a.
36 European Commission 2008b; 2008c.
37 http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=568&langId=en;
Cedefop, 2010a.
pressures of generalisation and specialisation of
the workforce will persist/increase.
38
European economies are witnessing a
general trend towards an increased demand
in knowledge- and skill-intensive occupations
related to technical and managerial activities.
39
For example, by 2015, there will be a shortage of
ICT practitioners estimated at 384 000 to 700 000
jobs; by 2020 an additional 1 million researchers
will be needed and the health sector will face a
shortage of about 1 million professionals.
40
The
share of jobs requiring high-level qualifications
will rise from 29% in 2010 to about 35% in
2020, while the number of jobs employing those
with low qualifications will fall from 20% to 15%
(Cedefop, 2010b).
On the whole, the occupational structure of
Europe is moving towards knowledge and skills-
intensive jobs, and most new jobs are expected
to emerge in knowledge- and skills-intensive
occupations. (Cedefop, 2010b). This trend towards
more knowledge-intensive jobs is reinforced by
another general trend: Already, 65% of Europeans,
who are or have previously been in employment,
have changed employer at least once in their
lives.
41
The majority of Europeans feel that one’s
level of professional experience (54%) and one’s
qualifications (52%) are the two most important
assets which one should emphasise in order to
find a job easily today.
42
Given the growing importance of
qualifications and skills, a chronic skills shortage
is expected in Europe’s labour markets, as
currently one in three Europeans of working
age have few or no formal qualifications and
nearly a third of Europe’s population aged 25-
38 European Commission, 2006.
39 Cedefop, 2010b.
40 European Commission, 2010b.
41 Eurobarometer 261, 2006; http://ec.europa.eu/public_
opinion/archives/ebs/ebs261_en.pdf
42 Eurobarometer 316, 2009; http://ec.europa.eu/public_
opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_316_sum_en.pdf
27
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
64 have no, or only low, formal qualifications.
43
Expected future decreases in the demand for
unskilled labour in the EU will aggravate societal
inequality. Currently, however, people who need
training most, i.e. those with low or irrelevant
skills, tend to be those who use training the least.
Workers who already have a tertiary degree are
50% more likely to receive post formal education
training than those with only a secondary
degree.
44
Hence, increasing the educational level
of low-skilled workers, who face a substantially
higher risk of being unemployed than medium-
and high-skilled workers, as well as improving
the equity of the educational system are major
challenges for educational policies in the 21st
century.
45
43 Euractiv 2010; http://www.euractiv.com/en/enterprise-
jobs/unemployment-soars-due-to-skills-shortage, referring
to: http://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=4508&la
ngId=en
44 Schleicher, 2006.
45 Schlotter et al., 2008; Hofheinz, 2010.
2.5 The Impact of Technology on
Education and Training
Technological developments and changes
have had significant impact on society, not only
in ICT but also in biotechnology, medicine,
materials and nano-sciences. In the future, it is
expected that technological developments will
continue to advance at unprecedented speeds.
Trends include increases in computing power
accompanied by decreases in cost; a shift from
networked to ubiquitous computing; computing
based on bioscience; smart drugs and cognitive
enhancement; brain-machine interfaces; 3D
printing and plastic electronics; complex and
intertwined socio-technical systems.
46
Furthermore, digital technology could
become the single biggest lever for productivity
and competitiveness, underpinning the majority
of future job creation in Western economies
46 Facer, 2010.
Figure 10: Cedefop jobs forecast (2010)
Source: Cedefop 2010a.
28
2 Trends and Drivers
– at least, if these manage to foster a “vibrant,
growing, highly skilled workforce of technology
professionals, create an increasingly large pool
of technology-capable business people, and
encourage every individual to develop their IT
user skills to secure employment, to interact
socially and to access government services”.
47
Technology will be one of the main drivers
for changing job structures and requirements,
and will thus determine which skills people need
to acquire. We can already see that technology
changes job requirements and profiles, when
we observe, for example, nurses now routinely
performing minor operations, builders and
mechanics working with digital maps, and
farmers using advanced knowledge of remote
animal health monitoring or precision farming.
48
This trend is expected to become more
pronounced. For example, it already is expected
that there will not be enough experts who are
able to interpret genetic data, although genetic
sequencing as such will become even cheaper.
49
The e-skills UK (2009) report predicts that, in the
UK alone, 550 000 new technology professionals
will be needed by 2015. The strongest growth
will continue to be in high skill areas, but hybrid
skills (technical, business, creative, interpersonal)
will also be increasingly important.
A study on the “shape of jobs to come”
50
argues that advances in science and technology
will give rise to new career opportunities, both
in existing disciplines and in newly created
fields. The list of 110 possible future job profiles
generated in this study ranges from “old age
wellness manager”, over “memory augmentation
surgeon”, “vertical farmer”, “waste data
manager”, “virtual clutter organiser” and “social
networking workers” to “virtual lawyers” and
“virtual teachers”, to mention just a few. All of
47 e-skills UK, 2009.
48 ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/foresight/docs/21966.pdf
49 http://jahresthema.bbaw.de/kalender/leben-3-0-und-die-
zukunft-der-evolution
50 Talwar & Hancock, 2010.
these job profiles will require skills that have not
even been identified yet, although it is clear that
all of them will require some degree of ICT skills.
However, technology does not only affect
what we will need to learn, but also how we
will learn in the future. A range of (foresight)
studies underline the impact of technological
change on education and training. According to
the European Internet Foundation, for example,
the key to adequately preparing learners for
life in a digital world is to “redesign education
itself around participative, digitally-enabled
collaboration within and beyond the individual
educational institution”. They predict that by 2025
this will have become the dominant worldwide
educational paradigm.
51
In a similar vein, a study commissioned
by the MacArthur Foundation envisages that,
in the future, learning in E&T institutions will
be based on the principles of self-learning,
networked learning, connectivity and interactivity
and collective credibility. Pedagogy will use
inductive and de-centred methods for knowledge
generation and open source education will
prevail. Learning institutions will be characterised
by horizontal structures, mobilizing networks
and flexible scalability.
52
Collins and Halverson
(2010) envisage that, with the advent and
increasing impact of technologies, a new era of
education – the lifelong learning era – will begin,
which will differ substantially from the current
“schooling era” and will to a certain extent reflect
a return to the pre-industrial “apprenticeship
era”. In the lifelong learning era, learning will
take place across a number of different “venues”
and will involve mixed-age groups in different
constellations. On the whole, flexibility and
diversity will increase.
In line with these studies, the Beyond Current
Horizons (BCH) project (Facer, 2009; 2010)
explores from a socio-technical perspective
51 Linton & Schuchhard, 2009.
52 Davidson & Goldberg, 2009.
29
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
how education (in the UK) will (need to) change
up until 2030. Key socio-technological trends
as identified by the BCH study include the
increasingly important participation in networks
comprising both technical and social elements
and the expectation that formal and informal
learning will take place across a wide range of
different sites and institutions. Consequently,
according to BCH projections, the future of
learning will be characterised by networked
learners, networked workers, networked E&T
institutions, and information forums promoting
public debate. A second thread running across all
scenarios is the expectation that informal learning
strategies will become an integral part of learning
and will also (need to) be embedded in E&T.
The DELPHI study conducted by the
Learnovation project identifies technological
progress (4.2)
53
and social networking on line (3.8)
as the two most important factors for changing the
way in which people learn, followed by cuts in
public funding for education (3.8), globalisation
(3.7) and multiculturalism (3.3). Thus, the vision
developed by the Learnovation project for 2025
is characterised by technology-enabled lifelong
learning opportunities:
“Being a lifelong learner becomes a condition
of life. Technologies, due to their massive
and common use in everyday life, acquire an
emancipating power on people’s opportunity and
ability to learn, favouring a spontaneous tendency
towards metacognition and ownership of their
learning process”.
A study by IBM Global Education (2009)
identifies five interrelated “signposts” for the
future of education, indicating a number
of challenges and/or opportunities for E&T.
These signposts are technological immersion;
personalized learning paths; knowledge skills
for service-based economies; global integration
of systems, resources, and cultures; and aligning
53 On a Likert scale from 1=very little impact to 5= very
significant impact.
E&T with economic needs and demands. Again,
technology is identified as the main driver of
change, promoting technologically-enhanced
learning opportunities that are immersive, tailor
made and globally networked.
2.6 Implications for the Future of
Education and Training
2.6.1 Lifelong learning
A common thread identified by studies on
the future of E&T is the emergence of lifelong
learning as the new central learning paradigm.
Lifelong learning is seen as an important
ingredient for Europe’s response to demographic
change, globalisation and increased labour
market dynamics. Thus the key insight for the
future is that all citizens will need to continuously
update and enhance their skills throughout their
lives, from the cradle to the grave.
Technology will play a key role in levering the
potential of lifelong learning. With the ubiquity of
technology and with its increasing adaptability,
learning “anywhere, anytime and anyplace” can,
in the future, become a reality. Furthermore the
increased adaptability of computer programmes
and environments will contribute to making
targeted and tailor-made learning opportunities
feasible, thus raising the attractiveness of
professional training courses. Furthermore,
technology can contribute to making learning
and training more accessible and attractive to
those who need it most, including those with low
skill levels.
2.6.2 Shift from institutions to individuals
Several emerging technologies, in particular
open source technologies, cloud computing
and mobile technology will enable a seamless
education continuum that is centred on the
30
2 Trends and Drivers
student, not the institutions.
54
Thus, education
institutions will cease to be exclusive agents
of coordination, service provision, quality
assurance, performance assessment, or support.
They will need to re-create themselves as resilient
systems with flexible, open, and adaptive
infrastructures, which engage all citizens and
re-connect with society; schools will become
dynamic, community-wide systems and networks
that have the capacity to renew themselves in the
context of change.
55
As a consequence, the responsibility for the
provision of individual education will increasingly
move from the state to the individual and family
groups.
56
While state involvement in early years’
educational provision will remain central, the
influence of the private sector on curriculum and
policy will continue to grow.
57
Assessment will, on the one hand, becomes
embedded in the learning process and pedagogy
will rely increasingly on interaction, including the
interaction with rich technological environments,
which will be responsive to learners’ progress and
needs.
58
Thus, assessment will continue to move
towards technologically-supported automation,
while peer production will remain marginal.
On the other hand, however, content, teaching
and accreditation will become disaggregated.
54 IBM, 2009.
55 KnowledgeWorks, 2008.
56 Collins & Halverson, 2010; KnowledgeWorks, 2008.
57 Sandford, 2009.
58 Collins & Halverson, 2010.
Different forms of accreditation should be
developed to recognise informal know-how and
practice-based competences.
59
2.6.3 The increasing importance of generic and
transversal skills
The widespread use of technology in society is
expected to give rise to new skills and increase the
pressure on E&T systems to respond to economic
demands.
60
Furthermore, the digital economy of
2025 will demand a flexible workforce, with a
mindset of continual change and the capacity to
change and adapt in response to the complexity
of the global economy. This flexibility will need
to be developed and nurtured.
61
Generic and
transversal skills – sometimes also labelled soft
skills – such as problem solving, communication
in different media,
62
team working and ICT
skills, management and leadership, multicultural
openness, adaptability, innovation and creativity
and learning-to-learn are increasingly valued in
modern economies and labour markets, along
with basic skills such as reading and writing,
academic skills, technical skills, managerial and
entrepreneurial skills (Wilson, 2009; Green,
2008).
63
In particular at the post-secondary and
professional learning level, people will need to
develop skills that facilitate going back and forth
between learning and work.
64
59 Sandford, 2009.
60 IBM, 2009.
61 Linton & Schuchhard, 2009.
62 Collins & Halverson, 2010.
63 OECD, 2011; Collins & Halverson, 2010.
64 Collins & Halverson, 2010.
31
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning
How will we learn in 10-20 years’ time?
This was the key question put to experts in the
education and technology field, to teachers and
to policy actors at the European Commission in
dedicated face-to-face workshop sessions over
the course of the year 2010. As a result, a series
of “maps” visualising the key future changes
to learning strategies and responses of the
education and training systems were generated.
Additionally, this question formed the basis of
an extensive brainstorming, sorting and rating
exercise, involving 13 experts and employing the
GCM methodology.
Though each of the visions developed
collaboratively on these different occasions is
distinct in focus and scope, together they provide
a detailed picture of a diverse and changing
landscape, in which technological trends together
with socio-economic dynamics impact learning
strategies and trajectories and call for a profound
change of E&T systems and institutions.
3.1 Brainstorming the Future of
Learning
3.1.1 Teachers’ views of the future of school
education
In a first session, teachers were asked which
will be the major changes to (school) education over
the next 10-20 years. The answers gathered can be
grouped into three main clusters, each including
several types of topics, as illustrated in Figure 10.
The main types of changes expected are:
More active ways of learning. Learning will
become more active, focusing on learning by doing,
experiencing, touching. At the same time, it will
become more social and collaborative with each
learner constructing his/her knowledge in interaction
with others in the context of practical applications
and tasks. Student-centred learning approaches,
where each learner’s individual needs and progress
are taken into account, will come to the fore. The
traditional roles of teachers and students will
change to support this development, and teachers
will become moderators and guides for students’
personalised and collaborative knowledge creation.
Revised learning objectives. More active
and constructive ways of learning will arise from
a shift in the balance between knowledge and
skills, and the emergence of new competences.
In a world that is characterised by information
overload, “knowing how” will become more
important than “knowing what”. Furthermore,
values, like respect, tolerance, responsibility and
cultural awareness and diversity will become
important learning objectives.
New learning settings and contexts. Changing
learning objectives and ways of reaching them
will be accompanied by the emergence of new
learning settings and their connections to various
contexts. Learning will be supported by flexible
and dynamic virtual environments and by a range
of tools and applications to facilitate individual
and collaborative learning processes inside
schools, outside school, and with connections to
various contexts. Physical or virtual boundaries
will become obsolete. From pre-school onwards,
learning will take place in versatile environments
that are smoothly integrated into life. Learning
environments will be motivating, social and
connected to nature and to the local community
and global society. In particular, learning will
become more holistic, embedded in the societal
context and the local community. Parents will be
respected as partners in the learning process.
In a second brainstorming session,
participating teachers were asked to identify the
32
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning
Figure 11: Teachers’ views on future changes to school education
33
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
key competences students will be required to
acquire in the future, i.e. in 10 or 20 years’ time.
Subsequently, their answers were juxtaposed to
the key competences laid down by the European
Key Competences Recommendation of 2006,
65
of
which teachers were unaware.
Interestingly, all competences currently
defined as key competences and as important
cross-cutting skills in Europe were mentioned
in the brainstorming session as being important
for the future, thereby confirming their
continuing importance and relevance. However,
the discussion and the suggestions from the
participants transcended and refined the
current set of key competences, indicating how
they could be modified to better meet future
needs. For example, the description of Digital
Competence was enriched by the proposal to
include new communication patterns, such as
65 Council of the European Union, 2006.
being constantly online and coming to terms with
using different identities and communication
tools in parallel.
Furthermore, workshop participants
emphasized the increasing importance of
transversal skills, such as problem-solving,
analytical thinking, critical skills and effective
communication; attitudes such as flexibility,
openness and self-management; personal skills
such as self-confidence and independence, and
societal awareness, as expressed in the need to
respect nature and the environment.
3.1.2 Experts’ vision of the future of learning
In May 2010, a two day workshop with experts
from a range of related fields (education, foresight,
technology) was conducted in Amsterdam, at which
a mix of brainstorming and targeted discussion
exercises was employed to generate insights on
current and future trends and tendencies and their
effect on learning in the future. The initial post-it
Figure 12: Key competences as defined now and as suggested by the audience for the future
34
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning
brainstorming exercise focused on generating a
general and comprehensive vision in response to
the question: “What will be the major changes
to education and training over the course of the
next 10-20 years?” The responses were collected,
discussed and subsequently sorted by the experts.
Figure 12 visualises the emerging map of the future
of learning.
Comparing experts’ findings with those of the
teachers, who had been asked to concentrate on
school education rather than the whole picture
of societal change, what is striking is the degree
of coincidence and overlap. Experts and teachers
both underline that technological change will be
one of the main drivers for change in education
and training. At the core of both maps are the
ensuing changes to learning strategies and
pathways: new competences and associated
assessment procedures which focus on skills
and attitudes rather than knowledge; learning
strategies that put the learner at the centre of the
learning process; personalised learning pathways,
adapted to learners’ individual learning needs and
objectives; the prevalence of collaborative learning
processes which also modify the relationship
between learners and teachers; and new learning
environments integrated into life and work.
The picture the experts paint is one of
a rapidly changing world where integration,
coordination, collaboration and personalisation
are key strategies for equipping citizens with
the skills and attitudes necessary to participate
actively in society. Additionally, the experts
expect that E&T institutions will become learning
Figure 13: Experts’ views on changes the E&T over the next 10-20 years
35
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Figure 14: Experts’ vision of a desirable future
36
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning
Figure 15: Experts’ view on future skills requirements
37
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
communities that collaborate with employers on
identifying skill needs and adapt the abundance
of learning and teaching materials to serve the
individual learning needs of each of their students.
Skills and attitudes, such as problem-solving,
flexibility, creativity and reflection will become
more important than knowledge. Scientific
research will assist teachers and learning in
making learning more efficient. Learning will be
playful and inquiry-based.
In the discussions, experts underlined that
some of these developments should be seen
critically. For example, it was stressed that
although curricula need to be adapted to better
address labour market requirements, E&T should
not completely submit to market demands and
mechanisms.
Towards the end of the workshop, to
summarize the interesting and diverse discussions
and draw conclusion, participants were asked
to list the key elements of a desirable future
of learning. Figure 13 gives an overview of
the findings of the group. Technology related
contributions are marked in green.
When comparing this map to the initial
map, what sticks out is the need for (policy)
mechanisms that ensure that all citizens can
benefit from the wealth of learning opportunities
expected to be available in the future. The
desirable future that experts describe is thus one
in which everybody has access to a range of free
and open learning opportunities that flexibly
respond to the learner’s learning needs and
preferences. Learning will be integrated in life
and work, tailor-made, enjoyable, networked
and collaborative and adaptable. Skills rather
than knowledge will come to the fore and
there will be new assessment and certification
mechanisms that make relevant skills visible.
Experts were also asked to identify the key
competences and critical civic skills that citizens
will need to acquire to successfully participate in
the future European society.
When comparing experts’ responses on
future skill needs to those of teachers and
policy actors, interesting differences arise which
indicate that experts think more “out of the box”
than those directly involved in either teaching or
educational policy-making. For experts, it is clear
that skills and attitudes are the decisive factors for
a successful future contribution to society. They
underline that personal and social responsibility
as well as inter-personal skills such as team-
working and networking form the basis for
successful participation in society. Personal skills
that will enable citizens to seize learning and
employment opportunities include risk-awareness
and risk-taking, which is also expressed in a sense
of entrepreneurship, experimentation, looking for
challenge and ‘failing forward’; creativity and
critical thinking; and resilience, compassion,
alertness and competitiveness. Experts also
underline that some knowledge-based skills and
a sound general education will remain important.
History, ecology and aesthetics are fields in
which they think individuals will need to develop
awareness and understanding in the future.
3.1.3 Policymakers’ visions of the future
Policy actors at the European Commission
have contributed to the study on three occasions,
in September 2009, May 2010 and November
2010. At the May workshop, 16 participants from
different Directorate Generals and other European
institutions (EAC, INFSO, EMPL; EACEA, ETF)
participated in a brainstorming exercise, similar
to the ones conducted with experts and teachers,
on the major changes expected for E&T over the
course of the next 10-20 years.
In line with the observations expressed by
teachers and experts, policy actors emphasize
that technology will be one of the main drivers
for change in education and training. They also
expect personalised and collaborative learning
processes to prevail and teachers and learners
to be empowered to design learning processes
that are better fitted to individual needs on the
one hand and societal changes on the other.
38
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning
Figure 16: Policy actors’ view on future changes to E&T
39
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Correspondingly they underline, while the current
set of key competences will also remain important
in the future, their focus will change towards
skills and attitudes rather than knowledge, which
will be acquired and complemented in a lifelong
learning perspective.
As a general tendency, E&T will (have to)
become more responsive to labour market needs
and better align curricula, content and learning
objectives, particularly in higher education
and vocational training. Also, industry should
be more closely involved in shaping and re-
aligning curricula to ease the transition from
E&T to work. E&T institutions on the whole
will need to become more transparent and
accountable, open to society and the needs
of their learners. Informal learning activities
need to become better recognised. The main
challenge for E&T in the future is, according
to policy actors, overcoming the current
“implementation gap” and putting into practice
what have long been recognised as necessary
and needed transformations. This is perceived
to be particularly difficult in view of expected
or persisting budget cuts and continuing
technological and demographic change.
Barriers that hinder the take up of promising
learning strategies, such as new ethical issues
arising from privacy concerns or a lack of
adequate and targeted teacher training, also
need to be adequately addressed for change to
happen.
3.2 Group Concept Mapping Exercise
The Group Concept Methodology (GCM)
was employed to evaluate the findings of a focus
group of 13 experts which was involved at three
stages, i.e. in (1) gathering, (2) clustering and (3)
rating insights on major changes to education
in 20 years. The experts came up with a total of
203 ways to complete the trigger statement “One
specific change in education in 20 years will be
that: …” Each expert then arranged the changes
foreseen in different thematic clusters and rated
them for importance and feasibility.
The vast amount of data thus generated
was subsequently aggregated and analysed.
To depict the emerging structure in the data,
Figure 17: GCM Cluster Map
40
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning
multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster
analysis were applied. Based on the experts’
sorting activity, each statement was placed on a
map, reflecting its proximity or distance to the
other statements. Based on the position of the
statements and the clusters proposed by experts,
the statements were subsequently clustered into
12 groups (Figure 16).
Looking at the content of the different
clusters, four general themes or trends emerge.
The first set of clusters (in blue in Figure 188)
address changes that are expected to happen to
formal education and training. Experts underline
the fact that, in this respect, institutions will
change to become enablers and connectors in a
globalised education market. Informally acquired
skills will be better recognised and integrated
in qualification frameworks. These clusters also
suggest a shift in the responsibility for acquiring
competences from the institutional to the
individual level.
Teachers will become mentors rather than
instructors, in line with the general tendency,
expressed by the second set of clusters (in red),
towards learning strategies that are targeted
towards individual and professional needs and
respond to individual learning preferences
and needs. The central position of the lifelong
learning cluster on the map indicates not only its
central role for future learning, but also that this
cluster is a connection point for all other clusters,
suggesting that many of the envisaged changes
to learning strategies and pathways are related
to the fact that, according to the experts, in the
future, skills and competences will be acquired
in a life-long learning perspective.
Information and communication technology
(ICT) plays an important role for the future of
learning. While statements across all clusters
reflect changing learning patterns due to the
opportunities offered by ICT, there are three
clusters that explicitly address how emerging
technologies will give rise to new learning
strategies (in green).
Looking at the 203 individual statements
and their ratings in detail, some of the expected
Figure 18: GCM landscape of changes to E&T in 2020-2030
41
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
changes stick out as being of particular
importance. These include:
• The nature of learning will become more
learner-centred, individual and social;
• Personalised and tailor-made learning
opportunities will address individual
and professional training needs;
• Innovative pedagogical concepts will be
developed and implemented in order
to address, for example, experiential
and immersive learning and social and
cognitive processes;
• Formal education institutions will need
to flexibly and dynamically react to
changes and offer learning opportunities
that are integrated in daily life; and
• Education and training must be made
available and accessible for all citizens.
Considering the rating of the statements
in these clusters with respect to feasibility and
importance, as an absolute score, the average
score of each of the 12 clusters ranges above
3 (on a Likert scale from 1 to 5), indicating
that all 12 major themes can be considered
important and feasible. In relative terms, some
differences emerge. The technology-oriented
clusters score higher on feasibility and slightly
lower on importance when compared to other
clusters, while the clusters addressing flexible,
targeted and personalised learning strategies rate
higher on importance and lower on feasibility.
Thus, while experts are optimistic concerning
the development of technology-enhanced
learning opportunities, they are sceptical about
the feasibility of implementing learner-centred
approaches in formal education and, in general,
the ability of formal education systems and
institutions to keep pace with change and become
more flexible and dynamic.
This general tendency is confirmed and
further specified by a detailed look across clusters
at the 57 statements that score higher than average
on importance and, at the same time, lower than
average on feasibility, thus indicating issues that
will need particular attention by policy-makers.
The most prominent of these include:
• the need to ensure appropriate,
accessible and affordable education that
Figure 19: GCM cluster ratings on importance and feasibility
42
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning
caters for the learning needs of every
citizen, irrespective of age;
• the importance of implementing
pedagogies that focus on transversal
competences, such as strategic,
problem-oriented, situational thinking,
creativity and learning to learn;
• the need to align technology and
pedagogy to create participative learning
environments which enable high
quality learning experiences that keep
participants interested and motivated;
• ways to integrate learning into the
workplace, community and home;
• ways to adapt assessment strategies
meaningfully to the manifold ways in
which people actually learn; and
• the need to address the changing role
of teachers as learning mediators and
guides, enabling them to become
lifelong learners themselves.
3.3 The Role of ICT for Future Learning
Strategies
One of the most salient and important
findings, which emerged in all the different
stakeholder consultation exercises, is the
impact of Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) on future learning
strategies and trajectories. It is therefore worth
considering more in depth the role(s) of ICT in
the future learning landscape.
First of all, as pointed out by all stakeholders,
ICT is one of the driving forces for socio-economic
change. On the technological side, trends towards
high-quality, converging, mobile and accessible
technologies, together with more sophisticated,
user-friendly, adaptable and safe applications and
services will integrate technology more and more
into everyday life. Eventually more advanced
technologies, such as ambient technologies,
immersive 3D environments and strong AI, may
become a reality. As a consequence, technology
will be more smoothly integrated into our daily
lives and become a basic commodity.
With the emergence of more integrated,
adapted and adaptable technological solutions,
new skills come to the fore. As a consequence
of changed communication and interaction
patterns, interpersonal skills – communication,
collaboration, negotiation and networking skills
– will become more important. At the same
time, the ubiquity and abundance of information
will require individuals to improve their meta-
cognitive skills – reflection, critical thinking,
problem-solving, managing and organising. For
people to actively manage their personal and
professional lives and find their way around
Figure 20: The role of ICT for future learning strategies
43
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
in an interconnected maze of interactions,
determination, resilience, experimentation,
risk-taking, creativity and entrepreneurship will
become key competences.
However, ICT not only affects what people
need to learn, but also how they will learn. Due
to the ubiquity of technology and its power to
facilitate highly dynamic, adaptable and engaging
virtual learning environments, personalised
lifelong learning opportunities will become
feasible. According to experts, in the future a vast
variety of learning modules, courses and packages
will become available which offer targeted and
tailor-made training opportunities for all learning
and training needs, in all life stages and for
all qualification levels. Different formats and
combinations thereof will be available, including
programmes that adapt to individual learning
pace and progress, self- and peer-assessment
tools, serious games, virtual reality, immersion
and simulation. Thus learning programmes will be
responsive to individual learning styles, specific
learning objectives, needs and preferences. Virtual
learning networks, communities and groups will
offer (peer) support and online collaboration
will lever individual progress. Learning will
become smoothly integrated into everyday life,
accompanying individuals wherever they are and
whatever they do and allowing them to study
more efficiently and effectively.
Within formal education and training, i.e.
in schools, universities and vocational training
institutions, ICT will contribute to transforming
pedagogical strategies and re-shaping curricula.
Mobile devices, immersive environments and
serious games will contribute to embedding
real life experiences into formal education and
training and to better aligning demand and supply
of skills. While face-to-face learning will prevail
for students in primary and secondary education,
ICT will enable teachers to better respond to
diversity and heterogeneity in the classroom
Figure 21: Conceptual map of the future of learning
44
3 The Landscape of the Future of Learning
and to adapt learning material and objectives to
individual students’ learning needs. Technology
will allow teachers to compile personalised
sets of learning materials; to constantly monitor
progress without having to interfere in the
learning process; to re-align learning objectives
and strategies in response to progress made; and
to use a vast variety of engaging and interesting
learning materials that more effectively facilitate
learning.
However, all stakeholders underline that
to realise the potential of ICT in promoting
tailor-made collaborative learning opportunities
that are adaptable, challenging, relevant and
enjoyable, open access and basic digital skills
need to be fostered. Policy makers need to ensure
that all citizens will be able to benefit from the
opportunities offered and that more vulnerable
groups are equipped with the necessary skills
to participate in learning activities that are more
and more technology-based. Similarly, E&T
institutions will need to be provided with the
necessary ICT infrastructure and tools to become
e-mature. Teachers and trainers need to receive
targeted training, enabling them to align pedagogy
and technology to the benefit of their learners.
Guidance is needed for educators, learners and
parents alike on how to best use technology.
3.4 Key Insights: a Descriptive Vision of
Future Learning
The overall vision of the future of learning
emerging from the expert consultations highlights
the importance of new skills and new learning
patterns that are characterised by a tendency
towards personalisation, collaboration and more
informal learning settings, the latter dubbed as
“informalisation” in Figure 19 above for lack of
an appropriate term.
The key drivers for these tendencies are
socio-economic trends and their impact on labour
markets. Future jobs call for targeted and tailor-
made training opportunities, support working
patterns that are increasingly collaborative
and require flexible and accessible learning
opportunities. Because of increased labour market
dynamics, personal, social and learning skills
will become increasingly important. Another key
driver for these changes is ICT, which is also an
enabler to address the arising changes.
Reflecting more in detail on the insights
collected, a number of key trends emerge, that
were repeatedly and consistently highlighted
across all consultations exercises.
First of all, the pre-dominant role of ICT
in driving change, its impact on society and
economy and on education and training,
coupled with its potential for facilitating learning
strategies and opportunities that more adequately
respond to societal change and labour market
requirements, make it a key element in the future
learning landscape. ICT will change what we will
need to learn and how we will learn in 2020-
2030.
Secondly, the role of education and training
institutions will change significantly. With the
emergence of lifelong and life-wide learning
as the central learning paradigm for the future,
traditional E&T institutions will need to reposition
themselves in the emerging learning landscape
of the future. They will need to experiment with
new formats and strategies for learning and
teaching to be able to offer relevant, effective and
high quality learning experiences in the future. In
particular, they will need to more flexibly respond
to individual learners’ needs and changing labour
market requirements. They will need bridge and
mediate between skill demand and supply and
seize the opportunities offered by ICT to better
align the two.
Moreover, learning strategies and
pedagogical approaches will undergo drastic
changes. With the evolution of ICT, constructive
and learner-centred pedagogies will see a revival.
Personalised learning and individual mentoring
will become a reality and teachers will need to be
45
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
trained to exploit the available resources and tools
to support tailor-made learning pathways and
experiences which are motivating and engaging,
but also efficient, relevant and challenging. Along
with changing pedagogies, assessment strategies
and curricula will need to change.
Furthermore, the increased pace of change
will bring new skills and competences to the fore,
in particular generic, transversal and cross-cutting
skills, which will enable citizens to flexibly and pro-
actively respond to change and to seize and benefit
from lifelong learning opportunities. Problem-
solving, reflection, creativity, critical thinking,
learning to learn, risk-taking, collaboration, and
entrepreneurship will become key competences
for a successful life in the European society of the
future. While mathematical, verbal, scientific and
digital literacy will remain key building blocks for
successful participation in society, it will become
increasingly important for citizens to have a better
understanding and awareness of the natural and
social environment, in which they live, which leads
to a new focus on nature and health, on the one
hand, and on civic competences, on the other.
Finally, it needs to be emphasized that the
expected changes induce profound challenges
for equity and social cohesion. While ICT
bears a significant potential for making learning
more equitable and accessible in the future,
not all citizens will automatically benefit from
personalised, collaborative and informal learning
pathways. Policy action will certainly be needed
to ensure that all citizens – and in particular the
more vulnerable – will be able to benefit from the
ICT enhanced learning opportunities of the future
and that all citizens have access to adequate and
effective learning and training opportunities.
While there is strong agreement on these
central pillars of the future learning landscape,
there is lack evidence on how the potential
of ICT can best be developed and realised
and what policy can do to ensure that, in the
future, everybody will receive the learning
and training they need. If lifelong learning is to
become a reality, how will learning and training
opportunities blend into individual people’s lives
to make “informalised” learning a reality? How
can the newly emerging personalised learning
strategies be practically used to, for example,
enable people to qualify or re-qualify for a job,
to develop their individual talents or to simply
not be left on the wayside? How can networking
and collaboration effectively lever knowledge
gain? These, among others, are questions that the
second part of this report aims to answer.
47
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Part II. Challenges and Policy Options
4 Initial Education and Training
4.1 Introduction
Schools as a central institution for teaching
groups of (young) people date back to the
classical era and are historically documented in
a variety of cultures and continents.
66
Although
there are currently many different school concepts
within most European countries, their main goal
remains the same: they provide initial education
for children and young adults to prepare them
for their working lives and to help them develop
into responsible and reflective adult citizens.
However, today schools and initial training
institutions are faced with a number of challenges
that will continue to be relevant in the future. This
section deals with three selected challenges for
schools that have been addressed in the Future
of Learning project and have been discussed by
experts and stakeholders in online surveys, in
dedicated (online) groups, in a workshop, and in
a targeted stakeholder consultation exercise.
These challenges address:
• Multiculturalintegration: While immigration
can contribute to ameliorating the effects of
demographic change, the integration of a
growing immigrant population remains a
long-term challenge for European societies.
67
Language skills, in particular, are an important
pre-requisite for social participation.
68
However, successful socio-economic
inclusion will also heavily depend on the
ability of European Education & Training
systems to help young migrants to develop
66 http://history-world.org/history_of_education.htm
67 European Commission, 2009a.
68 http://ec.europa.eu/education/school21/com423_en.pdf
their talents and become active citizens of
their host society and to prepare all young
people for life in a multicultural society.
• Early school leaving: Early school leaving
(ESL) has been increasingly recognised
as one of the main challenges faced by
European societies. In 2009, 14.4% of EU
citizens between 18 and 24 years had left
school without having completed secondary
education.
69
Early school leavers face
increased risks of unemployment, poverty
and social exclusion.
70
Recently, a number
of policy measures have been initiated to
fight early school leaving
71
at the European
level. However, more research is needed
on how effective prevention, intervention
and compensation mechanisms can be
implemented in the future.
• Fostering talent: To develop a ‘smart’
economy based on knowledge and
innovation, the Europe 2020 strategy sets the
benchmark of at least 40% of the younger
generation to have a tertiary degree.
72
However, if more young people are to
successfully complete tertiary education,
more needs to be done in secondary (and
primary) education to enable teachers and
learners to identify and develop hidden
talents, exploit each learner’s strengths, to
effectively respond to learning needs and
deficits, and to jointly develop and anticipate
career choices.
69 Eurostat Labour Force Survey 2010.
70 European Commission, 2011a.
71 Cf. European Commission, 2011a-c.
72 European Commission, 2010a.
48
4 Initial Education and Training
4.2 Challenge 1: Multicultural
Integration
4.2.1 Persona presentation
Chanta is the
(6 year old) child of
Cambodian immigrants
who came to Poitiers
(France) in 2023.
The transition from
Cambodia to France
was quite shocking
to Chanta, especially
as she immediately
started school without
speaking a word of
French. This of course made it difficult –
even nearly impossible - for her to follow the
curricula.
Although the family is not poor, they can
not afford personalized private lessons and
Chanta requires more support than her school
can offer – not only with regard to language,
but also with regard to what she misses in
school due to her lack of language skills.
Her teachers have discussed this situation
with her parents, who are unable to help much
since their French is also minimal, as language
skills are not of primary importance for their
jobs in maintenance and cooking.
Key Policy Documents:
• European Commission (2008b). Green
Paper: Migration & Mobility: challenges
and opportunities for EU education
systems. http://ec.europa.eu/education/
school21/com423_en.pdf.
• European Commission (2009b). Results
of the consultation on the education of
children from a migrant background.
Commission staff working document.
SEC(2009) 1115 nal. http://ec.europa.eu/
education/news/doc/sec1115_en.pdf.
According to Eurostat data (2009), in 2008,
19.5 million third-country nationals were residing
in the EU, 3.9% of the overall population. Net
migration, ranging between 0.5 and 1 million per
year for most of the 1990s, has increased to levels
ranging between 1.5 and 2 million since 2002 and
is the main factor accounting for EU demographic
growth.
73
Also, mobility among European Member
States leads to increasing numbers of EU citizens
living in other EU Member States. In 2008, 11.3
million EU citizens, i.e. 2.7% of the total EU27
population, were living in EU Member States that
they were not nationals of. Thus, according to
Eurostat estimates, more than 30 million people
in total were living as foreigners in the EU27 in
2008.
While immigration can significantly
contribute to employment, growth and prosperity
in Europe,
74
the integration of a growing immigrant
population remains a long-term challenge for
Europe.
75
Responding to the importance and
significance of (third-country) immigration,
the Council of the European Union (2004) and
Commission (2003; 2005a) called on the EU
Member States to step up their efforts to integrate
immigrants and encouraged them to develop
comprehensive national integration strategies.
The Hague Programme and the Common Basic
Principles adopted by the Council of the European
Union (2004a; 2004b) in November 2004
acknowledged the need for greater co-ordination
of national integration policies and EU initiatives
in the field of immigration and underlined the
importance of a holistic approach to integration.
A common framework, which aimed to integrate a
wide range of EU policies, was set up and further
developed
76
with mechanisms for monitoring
policy developments and exchanging information
and good practice.
77
73 European Commission 2007a.
74 European Commission 2008a.
75 European Commission 2009a.
76 European Commission 2005a; 2007a.
77 cf. European Commission, 2007b.
49
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
The European Commission (2007a)
emphasizes the following factors, among others,
as the key to successful integration and social
participation of immigrants in society: the need
to increase efforts in formal education, to address
the specific needs of immigrant children and
youth at an early stage, and to empower them to
become active participants in society.
The impact of immigration on school
education in particular is significant. PISA
2006 data show that at least 10% of the school
population aged 15 (within the old Member
States) was either born abroad or has both parents
born in another country. This figure increases
to almost 15% at the fourth grade of primary
school.
78
Furthermore, in some metropolitan areas
the share of migrant pupils in public primary
schools is substantially higher.
79
Education is the
key to ensuring that these pupils are equipped
to become integrated, successful and productive
citizens of their host country.
80
There is clear and consistent evidence that
many children of migrants have lower levels
of educational attainment than their peers.
81
Migrant students are disadvantaged in terms of
enrolment in type of school, duration of attending
school, indicators of achievement, drop-out rates
and types of school diploma reached.
82
The EU
average early school leaving rate for migrant first
generation youth is double that of natives: in
some countries more than 40% of migrant youth
are early school leavers.
83
There are many different factors accounting
for the current educational disadvantage –
among them, most prominently, socio-economic
conditions and language barriers. However, the
performance of migrant students of the same origin
varies between European countries, even where
78 OECD, 2007.
79 European Commission 2008c.
80 European Commission, 2008b.
81 European Commission 2008b; 2008c.
82 NESSE, 2008.
83 European Commission, 2011a.
patterns of migration are similar,
84
indicating that
policies and educational approaches can have an
impact on educational attainment.
85
Responding to these findings, the European
Commission (2008b) published a Green Paper
on “Migration and Mobility: Challenges and
Opportunities for EU Education Systems”, to
open the debate on how education policies
could better address the challenges posed by
immigration and internal EU mobility flows. The
Green Paper is part of a package of measures
accompanying the Renewed Social Agenda,
which intends to reinforce access, opportunities
and solidarity among all EU citizens.
86
The Green
Paper and the contributions to the ensuing public
consultation
87
emphasized a need for schools to
be inclusive and multicultural, to update the skills
and competencies of teachers and to strengthen
contacts with parents and communities.
The Council of the European Union (2009b)
conclusions on the education of children with a
migrant background called upon Member States
to take appropriate measures to increase the
permeability of education pathways and remove
barriers within school systems.
Furthermore, the Council Resolution on
new skills for new jobs (2007) argues that to
equip people for new jobs within the knowledge
society, attention has to be paid to raising
the skills levels of those at risk of economic
and social exclusion, including, in particular,
migrants. The 2011 Council Recommendation
on Early School Leaving explicitly encourages
Member States to help children with different
mother tongues to improve their proficiency
in the teaching language. This would improve
the educational achievements of children with
migrant background and reduce the risk of early
school leaving. In particular, it underlines the
fact that providing high quality early childhood
84 OECD, 2006.
85 European Commission, 2008b.
86 European Commission, 2008.
87 European Commission 2009b.
50
4 Initial Education and Training
education and care is especially relevant for those
from migrant backgrounds.
4.2.2 Future challenges and their implications
Due to declining birth rates and an ageing
society, Europe’s economy and prosperity
will increasingly depend on immigration.
Most European countries are still welcoming
foreigners, but tolerance towards immigration has
been declining for a number of years.
88
European
countries have also become more demanding as
far as integration is concerned. Immigration comes
with challenges and schools will increasingly
have children from migrant backgrounds that
may not have sufficient language skills to follow
the curricula in their new country’s language.
A majority (71%) of experts believe that, in
the future, multicultural classrooms will have
become the norm, thus requiring new strategies
for teaching and learning. As a consequence
of this, 70% of the experts believe that cultural
awareness and inter-cultural communication
will become an important subject in school
education. Furthermore, 64% believe that schools
will have to substantially improve their efforts to
accommodate the needs of children from foreign
origins, by offering language support.
Thus, in the future,
• There will be a higher proportion of migrant
children in increasingly multicultural
and heterogeneous classrooms. Thus,
multicultural classrooms will become the
norm, which requires new strategies for
teaching and learning.
• E&T will have to support primary language
acquisition and offer targeted support for
migrants to enable them to overcome
language barriers and develop their talents;
• E&T will need to actively address and
promote integration and make multicultural
education part of the curriculum.
88 http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTIO
N=D&SESSION=&RCN=27170
4.2.3 A desirable future for Chanta
In a perfect future world, the school would
pool all available resources that could benefit
Chanta to (1) enable her to become an active and
responsible member of the host society, furthering
her wellbeing and progress and that of society
(integration); (2) to fully develop her talents and
attain a high level of educational achievement;
and (3) to develop her personal cultural identity
in a globalised, multicultural world, which
respects different cultural origins and outlooks on
life (multiculturality).
Initially, in the adaptation period, E&T will
encourage and enable Chanta to participate
actively in class, make friends and feel at home
in her new environment. A personalised learning
programme will furthermore enable her to quickly
and effectively acquire basic language skills in a
playful and engaging way. All learning material
offered in class will be accompanied with dedicated
support that will enable her to overcome language
barriers and perform well in subjects that are not
primarily language related. In this way, she will
receive personalised attention and assistance
while participating in normal class activities and
developing further her language and cultural skills
in interaction with her peers, who will also receive
personalised support for common activities.
In the longer term, Chanta will be offered
opportunities to keep in contact with her host
culture and language, while living in the new
cultural environment. Thus, certain dedicated
learning projects and materials will focus on
Cambodia’s history and lifestyle. Virtual (and real
life) study exchanges and field trips together with
collaborative learning projects with Cambodian
children in virtual networks and online communities
will enable her to develop her cultural identity at
the crossroads of the two cultures she belongs to.
Eventually, she would also be given the opportunity
to improve her language skills in Khmer, to ensure
that she will also command her native language in
reading and writing. This, in a globalized world, will
be an asset for her further professional development.
51
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Ideally her two mother tongues will jointly reinforce
one another; learning advances in one of the two
languages will be accompanied by strategies that
will also lever the other language to a higher level.
Integration would also go the other way.
All pupils would benefit from the presence of
migrant children like Chanta in their classrooms.
Chanta’s biography would become a learning
opportunity for her peers, who would learn that
they live in a globalised and diverse world with
different languages and cultures which deserve
their respect. Thus heterogeneity would become
an asset and a learning opportunity fostering
the acquisition of important civic and cultural
competences.
4.2.4 Priority areas
Effective learning strategies for
heterogeneous learning groups. Learning
groups will become increasingly diverse in the
future, with respect to the language abilities and
requirements of students, their cultural roots and
civic attitudes, and also their attitudes to learning,
their behaviour and their educational needs.
Pedagogical strategies will need to respond to
the specific needs of each individual student,
while at the same time encouraging collaboration
and peer learning. ICT will be a key ingredient
enabling teachers to reconcile these two opposing
strategies.
Language learning. Despite the availability
of real time translation technologies like Babelfish
and Google translate, the overwhelming majority
of experts consulted believe that language skills
will still be important in 2025. Technologies are
expected to lever the potential of the following
learning strategies:
Multicultural education. To improve the
social integration and inclusion of migrants, it is
necessary not only to accommodate a wider range
of mother tongues, cultural perspectives and
attainments in the classroom; but also to include
intercultural education in curricula and to foster
all students’ intercultural competences.
89
ICT
tools constitute a very versatile means of making
learning and teaching material on intercultural
themes generally and openly available. Teachers
and education institutions can be directly
addressed and assisted in including intercultural
education in their curriculum.
4.2.5 The potential of ICT
Personalised and interconnected electronic
learning environments. ICT will enable the
setting up of personalised learning plans that will
allow for diagnostic and formative assessment
and align learning strategies and assignments
to student progress. These will be integrated in
interactive learning environments with electronic
tutors - available in different languages and
personalities - which guide learners through
their assignments, offer feedback and select
appropriate learning tasks for each individual
learner, thus complementing support offered by
teachers. These individual learning environments
will be interconnected, allowing for collaborative
projects to be implemented.
Translation technologies can be a useful tool
for overcoming language barriers that impede the
participation of migrant children in normal class
activities and progress in other subjects. Together
with iconographic representations and technological
applications that convey knowledge in a non-
language-based way, such as (interactive) games
and self-explanatory learning materials, they allow
teachers to make learning material understandable to
students who are not yet able to grasp new concepts
and tasks in the host country’s language. They also
allow students to collaborate on a project while
offering each student specific language support to
facilitate interaction.
Tandem methods and networked learning.
As a consequence of globalisation, some, like
Chanta and her family, need to learn the language
89 European Commission 2008b; 2009b.
52
4 Initial Education and Training
of their host countries, while others need to learn
Chanta’s native language as a foreign language,
especially since Cambodia’s economy, like other
emerging Asian economies, is projected to grow.
90
Thus, tandem methods and peer learning can be a
valuable source for language learning in a practical,
cultural context, which is also highlighted by the
great majority of experts who advocate collaborative
learning strategies for Chanta. Although language
“tandem” methods are not new, modern
technologies can improve their effectiveness and
scale. Especially translation technologies – and by
2025 perhaps even augmented reality systems that
provide real-time translation assistance – can make
the start easier. Social networks, skype and other
communication and collaboration tools that will be
available in the future can support communication
across geographical barriers and embed language
learning in a real life context.
Virtual worlds and simulations, online games
and multicultural communities. Today there are
a number of collaborative virtual reality games
that allow for language learning, simulation of
intercultural conflicts and global and geo-political
phenomena.
91
Virtual worlds allow learners to
assume different (cultural) personalities and create
new living environments. The personal feel of the
virtual environment will increase the empathy and
understanding of other cultures, life-styles and
outlooks on life. Online learning communities
and international knowledge exchange networks
will enable children and young adults to interact
with people their age from different socio-cultural
backgrounds. They can thus train their intercultural
and language skills and develop their social,
90 http://www.unescap.org/unis/press/2010/jun/g30.asp
91 “The Tower of Babel” is an alternate reality game
for language learning (cf. http://arg.paisley.ac.uk/
index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19
&Itemid=51); the “PeaceMaker Game” (http://www.
peacemakergame.com/game.php) is designed to teach
concepts in diplomacy and foreign relations; Mass
Extinction (http://shass.mit.edu/research/cms_game)
deals with the consequences of climate change; “World
Without Oil” (http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/) is a
collaborative and social imagining of the first 32 weeks of
a global oil crisis; “Superstruct” similarly puts players in a
future world facing daunting environmental, political, and
health challenges (http://archive.superstructgame.net/).
interpersonal, critical and reflective skills. Group
debates, multiplayer games and encounters in virtual
worlds further develop their ability assume different
roles and perspectives and to understand and
sympathise with different opinions and positions.
4.3 Challenge 2: Early School Learning
4.3.1 Persona presentation
Bruno is in the 9
th
grade of a public school in
Milan. He is living with his
mother and his two sisters,
aged 17 and 11. His parents
separated a year ago and his
father just had a baby with
his new partner. Bruno’s
mother is trying hard to
support her family. She finds
it difficult to give all three
children the attention they
need and, because of her
long working hours, has to leave the children
more to themselves than she would like to.
Bruno always used to be an introverted
child who found it difficult to link with others.
He never really enjoyed school, but didn’t
have any learning difficulties. He used to be an
average, normal pupil. Lately, however, he has
taken a negative attitude towards learning and
his grades have dropped. He has withdrawn
into himself more and more, away from his
teachers and peers and has started skipping
lessons.
Key Policy Documents
• European Commission (2011a). Proposal
for a Council Recommendation: On
policies to reduce early school leaving.
• European Commission (2011b).
Commission staff working document:
Reducing Early School Leaving.
53
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Early school leaving (ESL) has been
increasingly recognised as one of the main
challenges faced by European societies. Reducing
ESL to less than 10% by 2020 is a headline
target for achieving a number of key objectives
in the Europe 2020 strategy and one of the
five benchmarks of the strategic framework for
European cooperation in education and training
(ET 2020).
92
At EU level ESL rates are defined by the
proportion of the population aged 18-24 with only
lower secondary education or less and no longer
in education
or training.
93
Currently, around 6
million young people in the EU leave school with
only lower secondary education or less,
94
thus, in
2009, 14.4% of EU citizens between 18 and 24
years had left school without having completed
secondary education.
95
There are many and diverse reasons – often
highly individual – why some young people give
up education and training prematurely, such as
learning difficulties, social problems or a lack
of motivation, guidance or support”.
96
Although
ESLers are not a homogeneous group, they are
more likely to come from workless households;
be male rather than female; come from vulnerable
groups, and to be concentrated in particular
areas.
97
In many cases, more than one of these
risks is present, and multiple disadvantages
increase significantly the likelihood of negative
outcomes.
Early school leavers are more likely to be
unemployed, to be in precarious and low-paid
jobs, and to draw on welfare and other social
programmes throughout their lives.
98
They thus
92 Council of the European Union, 2009a; European
Commission, 2010a.
93 Council of the European Union, 2003. The OECD defines
early school leavers as 20-24 year olds with education
below upper secondary level.
94 European Commission, 2011a.
95 Eurostat Labour Force Survey 2010.
96 http://ec.europa.eu/education/school-education/
doc2268_en.htm
97 NESSE, 2009a.
98 NESSE, 2009a.
face increased risks of unemployment, poverty
and social exclusion.
99
Additionally there are
indications that early school leavers have a
significantly reduced life expectancy and higher
rates of cardiovascular illnesses, diabetes and
other ailments.
100
Considering that nine out of
ten new jobs in Europe will require medium or
high level qualifications,
101
it will become even
more difficult for people who left education pre-
maturely to find a job.
The European Agenda for New Skills and
Jobs underlines the need to raise overall skill
levels and to give priority to the education and
training of those at risk of economic and social
exclusion, in particular early school leavers.
102
High rates of ESL are perceived as “a bottleneck
for smart and inclusive growth” and drastically
reducing the numbers of ESLers is considered a
key investment in the future prosperity and social
cohesion of the EU.
103
The recent proposal for a Council
Recommendation
104
follows a comprehensive
approach towards reducing ESL, proposing
a series of prevention, intervention and
compensation mechanisms. The prevention
policies outlined in the document range from
adapting early childhood education to increasing
the flexibility and permeability of educational
pathways. The intervention policies proposed
comprise suggestions on how to react to early
warning signs and to provide targeted support
to pupils or groups of pupils at risk of dropping
out. At the institutional level, it is suggested that
institutional strategies for ESL be developed,
involving parents, increasing networking with
the local community, empowering teachers, and
investing in extra-curricular activities. At the
individual level, it is suggested that mentoring,
guidance, counselling, and personalised learning
99 European Commission, 2011a.
100 NESSE, 2010b.
101 Cedefop, 2010d.
102 European Commission, 2010c.
103 European Commission, 2011a.
104 European Commission, 2011a.
54
4 Initial Education and Training
be fostered – and that financial incentives could
possibly given for attending school. Compensatory
measures include offering a variety of tailor-made
second chance programmes, targeted individual
support (including financial incentives) and
recognising informally and non-formally attained
competences.
4.3.2 Future challenges and their implications
In the future, even more jobs will require a
medium or high level of qualifications, making it
even more difficult for ESLer to actively contribute
to society. It is estimated that, in 2020, 31.5%
of all jobs will need tertiary-level qualifications
and 18.5% of jobs will need no or only low level
qualifications.
105
Thus, low-skilled workers and
especially people who dropped out of school
without degrees will find it hard to compete in
the global low-skilled labour markets and will be
increasingly faced with unemployment.
106
Especially at the lower end of the employment
ladder, job profiles and requirements will change
and higher skills levels will be needed.
107
Thus,
all citizens, and in particular those with low
qualifications, will need to become lifelong
learners who continuously update their skills
and flexibly respond to new job requirements.
However, early school leavers are less likely to be
‘active citizens’ and much less likely to become
involved in lifelong learning.
108
Apart from lacking
relevant qualifications, they tend to experience
learning less positively, enjoyable and enriching
and are therefore ill-equipped for life in the 21
st
century knowledge-based society.
With a view to the future, the following
challenges emerge:
• Paving the way for a new learning culture:
To enable all citizens to become lifelong
learners and avoid some learners becoming
105 Cedefop, 2010c.
106 Schlotter et al., 2008.
107 Cedefop, 2010b.
108 NESSE, 2010b.
disengaged at a crucial time in their life when
they develop their personality and lay the
groundwork for their future outlooks on life,
the learning culture in (secondary) schools
needs to change. Learning needs to be re-
discovered as an engaging, enjoyable and
enriching activity. It should be understood
as an opportunity and a way of participating
in society and developing personal interests
and talents in interaction with others.
• Resourcesandstrategiesforpreventionand
early intervention: Schools currently lack the
resources and expertise to diagnose students
at risk and to effectively promote their re-
engagement in learning. With increasing
heterogeneity in European schools in the
future, it could become even more difficult
for educators to give students at risk the
personal attention and support they need not
to drop out.
• Breakingtheviciouscircleofdisengagement:
Attending school is not only a way of
acquiring knowledge and skills and the main
entry point into the labour market, but also
a playing field for social interaction that
mirrors society. Once students drop out,
they also tend to become disengaged from
society al large and risk creating a life on
the margins of society. Re-engaging those
who have dropped out and enabling them
to become active citizens will also remain a
key challenge in the future.
4.3.3 A desirable future for Bruno
Since early school leaving can have very
different and very individual reasons,
109
and needs
to be tackled individually, on a case-by-case
basis, personalised education and learner-centred
learning, coupled with teaching strategies that focus
on mentoring and guiding students in self-regulated
learning endeavours, will be important elements for
re-engaging Bruno in school activities. In parallel to
109 http://ec.europa.eu/education/school-education/
doc2268_en.htm
55
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
making learning enjoyable and relevant to Bruno
again, teachers, (school) psychiatrists and social
workers will work together with Bruno and his
family to help Bruno understand and overcome his
frustration and de-motivation.
A personal learning plan will be set up
which will take Bruno’s interests and talents as
a starting point for personalised assignments.
Once Bruno has regained self-confidence and
interest in learning, more challenging tasks
will be added to his portfolio and his personal
learning objectives will be aligned with the
general learning objectives for his age group.
His learning plan will be revised and adapted
regularly and on a collaborative basis, respecting
Bruno’s preferences and encouraging him to take
responsibility for his learning journey.
If all efforts fail to reintegrate Bruno in the
school environment, his counsellors will together
with him and his family select the most adequate
alternative learning pathway, among the many
and diverse training courses and learning
opportunities available, which will also include
practical modules, volunteering work, work
experience and apprenticeships. He will be able
to build up a learning portfolio based on small
modules which he can select with a certain
degree of freedom and which will, once he has
completed the assignments in his own time and
with personalised guidance and assistance from
trained teachers and from his peers, be formally
recognised and accredited to allow him to pass
on to further training or enter the labour market.
The choice of learning modules and strategies
will be based on Bruno’s preferences and needs,
based on diagnostic tests and accompanied
by continuous monitoring and guiding. At the
same time, the strategy will be learner-centred
in the sense that Bruno will be responsible and
accountable for his progress.
4.3.4 Priority areas
A new learning culture. To enable young
people to become lifelong learners who actively
update their skills and develop their professional
profiles over the full course of their lifetimes,
and not get disengaged at an early age already,
learning has to be experienced as being enjoyable,
relevant and enriching. Young people need to
be empowered through learning and working
relationships that value them as resourceful
individuals.
110
Tailor-made learning trajectories
can contribute to making school education more
interesting, aligning the learning content with the
individual’s skills, interests and learning needs,
and thus prevent early school leaving.
Re-connecting Education and Employment.
Partnerships with the industry and increased
collaboration between schools and employers
can make learning experiences and activities
more relevant and interesting for learners.
Embedded work experiences, excursions,
dedicated assignments with practical modules etc
can raise student interest in learning and can help
them identify career opportunities. In particular,
students at risk can profit from a dedicated time
away from school in a work environment that
brings new skills to the fore and allows them to
build up self-confidence. ICT can facilitate the
transition between the different working and
learning environments and the integration of their
work experiences into their learning portfolios.
New learning opportunities outside E&T
institutions. Not all early school leaving can be
prevented. To support dropouts at a later stage
in their work and life situation it is important
to provide and recognise informal learning
opportunities and related qualifications. The Youth
on the Move flagship initiative acknowledges
that Europe needs to develop more flexible
learning pathways that to allow people to move
between different education levels, attracting
non-traditional learners. It must also extend and
broaden learning opportunities for young people,
including supporting the acquisition of skills
through non-formal educational activities.
111
110 Cedefop, 2010d.
111 European Commission, 2010d.
56
4 Initial Education and Training
According to experts, informal learning will (need
to) be better recognised in the future and practical
experiences will become more important as
job qualifications. These are opportunities,
particularly for early school leavers.
4.3.5 The potential of ICT
Immersive 3D environments and (serious)
games. Especially for adolescent boys, who have
a higher incidence of dropping out of school than
girls,
112
computer games and 3D animations exert
a high attraction and are a natural “learning”
environment. In the near future, a greater variety
of increasingly sophisticated and interesting
computer games will be available for educational
purposes.
113
Thus, computer games can assist in
offering students at risk a learning environment
that catches their interest and gets them engaged
in learning activities.
Web 2.0 tools: social networking, (micro-)
blogging, messaging and chatting. These
technologies are being used widely by adolescents
and are for them a natural way of communicating
and interacting. At the same time, technology-
based interaction and collaboration is the basis
of many knowledge-based jobs. These tools
therefore allow students to acquire relevant skills
for their future professional lives in a way that is
natural and attractive for them.
Personalised electronic learning
environments. As in the case of Chanta, ICT
will enable the setting up of personalised
learning plans, which, apart from responding
to individual learning needs, will, in the case
of secondary school education, allow students
to assume responsibility for their individual
progress. While performance will be closely
monitored by the system, allowing teachers to
intervene whenever necessary and to early detect
student disengagement and react appropriately,
students will be given room for experimentation
112 European Commission, 2008f.
113 Johnson et al., 2011.
and choice. They will be able to use the system
to identify their learning needs and most
appropriate learning strategies and will be
offered a choice between different interactive and
engaging learning contexts which adapt to the
speed of their progress and challenge them in an
entertaining way. Data mining technologies will
allow teachers to immediately detect and react
to disengagement, inappropriate use and under-
performance.
Informal learning opportunities. Experts
believe that in 10-20 years’ time, there will be a
variety of ways in which degrees can be obtained
and students with different needs and interests
will more easily find a learning option that suits
them. Electronic tutors, collaborative learning
environments and sophisticated autodidactic
training programmes and tools will make it easier
for students acquire knowledge in a chosen field
without the direct support of a teacher. Alternative
grading and certification systems and (e-)Portfolio
based learning opportunities, will allow students
to qualify for a job without necessarily having to
follow a formal course. Virtual simulations and
games will allow the acquisition of knowledge
and skills in an entertaining and engaging way
and data mining technologies will support the
assessment of tacit knowledge and generic skills
acquired in these environments.
4.4 Challenge 3: Fostering Talent
4.4.1 Persona presentation
Emma is a 17-year-old
girl who lives in Munich,
Germany and is in her last
year of high school (German
Gymnasium). Lately, Emma
has found herself disliking
school, as she is bored and
finds her school curriculum
not challenging enough. Her
change of attitude has been
recognised and her parents
57
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
and teachers are getting worried that she might
lose interest in school altogether if she is not
sufficiently stimulated.
Her teachers see her as a very talented
student, but are a little worried about her social
skills. Being an overachiever, Emma has found
it difficult to connect to her fellow pupils at
school. And whereas her Gymnasium has
provided her with the skills to master complex
problem solving and gain factual knowledge,
she lacks social and self-management skills,
which has prevented her from being proactive.
Key Policy Documents:
• European Commission (2010d). Youth
on the Move. An initiative to unleash the
potential of young people to achieve
smart, sustainable and inclusive growth in
the European Union.
• Council of the European Union (2009a)
Council conclusions of 12 May 2009
on a strategic framework for European
cooperation in education and training (‘ET
2020’).
Research suggests that different people learn
in different ways to achieve their best performance
and possess individual preferences which influence
their motivation and engagement in learning.
116
In
the past, however, school education has been limited
to offering a one-size-fits-all approach to learning,
which made it unavoidable that some students
performed below their abilities. If the talents of these
students are not identified and fostered, European
societies will fail to make the best of the human
resources available.
If more young people are to successfully
complete tertiary education, more needs to be
done in secondary and primary schools to enable
teachers and learners to identify and develop hidden
talents, exploit each learner’s strengths, to effectively
respond to learning needs and deficits, and to jointly
develop and anticipate career choices. To compete
with emerging nations like China who have a vast
pool of human resources from which to develop
excellence, Europe has to invest in developing talent
on a broad basis, by implementing mechanisms that
cherish innovation and foster excellence throughout
formal E&T.
4.4.2 Future challenges and their implications
Labour market shifts. By 2020, it is estimated
that 35% of all jobs will require high-level
qualifications, compared to 29% today. This
means 15 million more jobs requiring high-
level qualifications.
117
However, in Europe only
31% of the population have a higher education
degree, compared to 40% in the US and over
50% in Japan. Europe also has a lower share of
researchers.
118
Global power shifts. Globally, economic
power is shifting from developed to emerging
economies.
119
Europe will be increasingly
competing with much younger societies whose
116 http://www.learning-styles-online.com/overview/
117 Cedefop, 2010a.
118 European Comission, 2010a.
119 Talwar & Hancock, 2010.
It is generally acknowledged that high quality
education and training systems which are both
efficient and equitable are crucial for Europe’s
success and for enhancing employability.
114
The Europe 2020 strategy emphasises that
education, innovation, and creativity are the key
ingredients for future growth. In order to develop
a ‘smart’ economy based on knowledge and
innovation, it calls for more investment in R&D
and sets the benchmark of at least 40% of the
younger generation to have a tertiary degree.
115
To
increase the number – and also the performance
– of university graduates, it is important that
young people are encouraged and enabled to
successfully follow a relevant tertiary education
pathway.
114 Council of the European Union, 2009a.
115 European Commission, 2010a.
58
4 Initial Education and Training
vast pools of young talent out-number Europe’s.
120
By some estimates, China already has more
engineers graduating now than the rest of the world
combined.
121
It has increased R&D investment
by 10% each year for the last 10 years, and,
according to recent estimates,
122
will invest $154
billion in R&D in 2011, surpassing Japan (at $144)
and increasing its global share of R&D investment
from 11% in 2009 to 13% in 2011.
123
Currently,
only 27 European universities, rank among the
best 100 universities worldwide, compared to 57
in the US.
124
Though nearly a million Chinese and
Indian students will be studying abroad by 2025,
bringing a wealth of talent and experience back
to their Asian homelands, few European students
are internationally mobile.
125
To remain competitive and respond to these
challenges, European societies must take targeted
measures to ensure that through innovation and
excellence Europe will be able to maintain its
prosperity and defend its social welfare states.
126
.
4.4.3 A desirable future for Emma
Emma is already at an age where she can and
should take responsibility for her own learning
journey. Her mentors will therefore encourage
her to identify the cause of her frustration and
decide which subjects and subject areas she is
most interested in and can perform best in. A
series of diagnostic tools will enable Emma to
better recognize her strengths and weaknesses
and to understand why certain (soft) skills that
she might consider irrelevant for her individual
progress will be important for her in the future
and are therefore worth investing in. Based on
these insights, she will together with her mentors
120 Linton & Schuchhard, 2009.
121 Talwar & Hancock, 2010.
122 Battelle, 2010.
123 http://theenergycollective.com/
breakthroughinstitut/51021/china-rd-investment-grow-
faster-us
124 Relfection Group, 2010.
125 Reflection Group, 2010.
126 Hofheinz, 2009; Linton & Schuchhard, 2009; Fingar,
2008.
decide on her learning objectives and draw up
a learning plan that is not constrained by the
learning opportunities offered at her local school,
but aims to reach higher in areas in which she
wants to press ahead and looks for innovative
ways of developing her more weaker areas.
Based on her academic career plan and her
individual learning plan, Emma will together with
her mentors select a number of university modules
or courses offered by a local or online university
that she will take instead of following the school
curriculum in the corresponding subject. This
strategy is covered by an agreement between
secondary and tertiary education institutions that
allows high achieving secondary school students to
enrol in university courses, which will be counted
towards her secondary school certificate and her
university degree. This way, Emma can already get
a glimpse of university study, which will allow her
to re-consider her study plans and speed up her
career, if she decides to continue this career path.
Furthermore, she will be encouraged to improve
her language and intercultural skills by joining a
virtual Erasmus programme that offers discussion
groups and learning communities on different topics
and encourages learners from different countries all
over the world to exchange their knowledge and
views and learn from each others experiences.
Additionally, her mentors will suggest that
Emma engages in voluntary work, possibly related
to her future career choice, to encourage her to
collaborate in a team with others in a context that is
not related to individual achievement. The different
learning contexts and activities will all contribute
to her learning portfolio. Mechanisms will be put
in place that encourage Emma to reflect on her
progress, help her in experimenting with different
communication, collaboration and learning
strategies, and in re-aligning her learning objectives.
4.4.4 Priority areas
Improved diagnostics on individual learners’
training needs and preferences will become
59
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
available in the future, but schools will not
necessarily have the resources, facilities, materials
and innovative teaching methodologies that would
allow them to put personalised learning into
practice. However, due to the availability of diverse
and dynamic ICT tools and solutions, personalised
learning could become a reality in the future.
To develop all students’ talents and foster
excellence, E&T has to allow for different
learning paces, contents, strategies and styles
(personalised learning); seek collaboration with
universities, research institutions and industry; be
free to follow innovative strategies that contribute
to the personal development of the learner and
can trigger innovation, creativity and social
engagement; implement suitable certification
and accreditation mechanisms that allow for the
integration of different (kind of) learning modules;
and provide qualified support and guidance.
Personalised learning. As we have seen in the
cases of Chanta and Bruno, individual learning
needs must be accompanied by individual learning
plans. There is an overwhelming agreement among
surveyed experts that personalised learning plans
are the way forward and that by 2025 they will
have become a feasible option for schools. With
78% agreement, a vast majority of respondents
to the pilot survey expect personal learning
plans to be implemented by 2025 and that these
will take into account individual needs, interests
and preferences. An even higher percentage of
85% thinks that technology will allow schools
and educators to create tailor-made learning
experiences which will increase learning outcomes.
To allow for genuinely tailor-made learning
experiences that foster excellence and innovation,
learning plans must be open and flexible, allowing
for the integration of different learning sources
and resources, of different learning communities,
interactions and learning styles.
Collaboration between different learning
providers. Excellence can only be fostered if
talented students can seize learning opportunities
that transcend the remit of secondary education.
Thus, 76% of experts consulted online believe
that, in the future, talented students will be able
to design their own learning trajectory, combining
face-to-face tuition at school with online university
courses and online learning communities. In
particular, collaboration between secondary
schools and universities on school subjects and
choices will make it easier for schools to select
adequate tertiary level learning material and
courses for talented students. This collaboration
could take different shapes. Perhaps, students will
not be enrolled at a single school, but combine
courses and resources from different educational
institutions and decide themselves which local
and virtual learning communities to join, as
affirmed by almost half of the experts consulted
online. Perhaps decentralised accreditation
bodies will help E&T institutions, who will remain
the central learning coordinator, in identifying the
right level of course for each individual student
at different local or remote E&T organisations, as
suggested at the expert workshop.
Opening up schools to society. Especially
talented students often tend to be more “absorbed”
in educational activities than socialising, and may
not be that well accepted by peers or even risk
health problems which could persist if their general
attitudes continue.
127
It is therefore important that
students like Emma are not only supported in their
academic progress, but also in their personal and
inter-personal development. For each individual
case, a creative individual solution has to be
developed, therefore schools must become open
and flexible to these, sometimes unorthodox, ways
of fostering social and civic skills.
Among the experts consulted online, there
was a high agreement (90%) that schools have to
increase their efforts to open up to society and
integrate real life experiences into their teaching
practices. As future strategies for teenagers like
Emma who want to go beyond the boundaries
of conventional school education, participation
127 http://health.usf.edu/NR/rdonlyres/10EABB4A-FE44-
4C9A-AED3-335F1E23DF97/0/HELPS_200810.pdf
60
4 Initial Education and Training
and wider engagement in extra-curricular and
voluntary activities was advocated by over 70%
of respondents. Work experience, team sports or
a study exchange abroad were equally mentioned
as ways of getting Emma engaged in society and
developing her soft skills.
Certification and accreditation. While a
majority of 61% of respondents to the online
consultation think that standardised degrees and
testing will not disappear, all experts consulted
emphasise that assessment and certification
schemes will change and will have to change
to allow for personalised learning strategies.
However, with the integration of extra-curricula
learning courses and experiences into learning
pathways, the validation and accreditation of
courses with respect to a certain learning and
performance level will become a challenge.
Support and guidance. Personalised
learning is only possible if there are sufficient
and adequate mechanisms for detecting and
diagnosing learning needs and corresponding
mechanisms for responding to these needs. At
the moment this is not the case, as confirmed by
88% of the experts consulted online who think
that education and training institutions have to
implement better monitoring and assessment
mechanisms which detect individual learning
needs. However, personalised learning also
requires guidance and support concerning the
selection of adequate learning opportunities and
assessment strategies.
4.4.5 The potential of ICT
Personalised learning spaces. An
overwhelming majority of 92% thinks that
technological possibilities need to be exploited
better to enable more personalisation in schools.
ICT can support access to diverse learning
opportunities and the integration of different
and diverse learning elements into a coherent
learning portfolio. Self- and peer-assessment
tools, interactive tests supporting formative
and diagnostic assessment and facilitating the
choice of most adequate learning modules and
levels, electronic tutors, feedback loops and
data-mining tools detecting disengagement and
under-performance will be integrated to allow
students to freely choose their preferred learning
opportunities from a wide variety of options,
while ensuring that these correspond to their
learning needs.
Online courses, learning modules and
educational resources. Today, the internet
already makes it easy for interested students
to access university material or other relevant
material while still at school. Even courses from
prestigious universities are already accessible,
e.g. via YouTube, and some universities also
offer live streaming of lectures. In the future,
this development is likely to continue and make
learning material at all levels and for all needs
and purposes available to interested students.
Data-mining technologies. Data mining
tools will allow for the categorisation of learning
activities; self-assessment tools and peer-
assessment will support formative assessment;
diagnostic tests will allow students to determine
their level of competence and actively work
towards raising it. Thus students will be enabled
to monitor and adjust their own learning journeys,
in collaboration with peers and teachers.
ePortfolios. (e-)Portfolios are one means
of allowing diverse learning experiences to be
considered for a standardised degree. In the
future, ePortfolios will be far more the virtual
archives for showcasing work. They will be
interactive, collaborative, dynamic and highly
personal learning spaces which will allow learners
to access and integrate different and diverse
learning communities and environments from
a central place. In the case of highly formalised
study, such as in secondary school education,
mechanisms can be put in place to ensure that
students can choose from a wide variety of
learning opportunities while respecting the study
requirements, so that their learning gains become
recognised and accredited.
61
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Open curricula. Currently, the challenge for
E&T institutions lies in integrating different resources
into curricula and training plans and validating their
adequacy and relevance. In the future, alternative
certification schemes will be available to allow for
flexible and personalised learning. As experts at the
workshop pointed out, international qualification
frameworks and accreditation standards could be
developed that allow for the integration of different
learning modules into flexible and personalised
learning plans. Rather than prescribing learning
contents, curricula would then provide indications
for the selection of appropriate learning modules
that are eligible for recognition for entering tertiary
education.
Teachers as mentors and guides. A very
high majority of 86% of experts doubts that, in
2025, online resources and digital tools will be
so powerful that teachers are no longer needed.
However, a high majority (71%, with only 13%
disagreeing) believe that, in 2025, the role of
teachers will be different; they will be guides,
mentors, friends and partners in self-regulated,
personalised and collaborative learning processes.
Thus, while technologies will open up new
learning opportunities and allow for personalised
learning plans to be implemented, teachers acting
as mentors and guides will play an important role
in enabling students to use their freedom actively
and adequately to best develop their talents.
4.5 A Normative Vision of the Future of
Initial E&T
The major challenge for the future of initial
Education and Training will be for schools
to develop and implement new formats and
strategies for learning and teaching to be able
to continue to offer relevant, effective and high
quality learning experiences. At the same time,
schools will need to react more effectively and
promptly to changing job requirements and
societal trends. They will need to again become
bridges and mediators between the world of
education and the world of work.
The main objective of schools will not
change: like today, future schools will seek
to enable all students to actively, responsibly
and successfully participate in society, support
them in developing their talents and prepare
them for a professional career of their choice
and liking. However, because of changing
living, working and learning patterns, meeting
this objective will require new organisational
and pedagogical approaches and strategies.
In 2025, the main task of schools will be to
empower young people to become lifelong
learners who actively develop their learning
biographies. Administering pre-defined learning
content to student groups aggregated by age
will not serve this purpose. While curricula
will continue to guide teachers and learners
Figure 22: Conceptual map of the future of initial Education and Training
62
4 Initial Education and Training
in their choices, learning methods, tools and
strategies will respect individual learning needs
and changing societal demands.
Thus, learner-centred, decentralised, and
tailor-made learning strategies will prevail, which
will (need to) be accompanied by corresponding
pedagogies and teaching strategies as well as
flexible curricula, modified assessment and
validation mechanisms and closer collaboration
with other societal players, including tertiary
education providers and prospective future
employers.
Personalisation. The key for unlocking
the future of learning will be the promotion of
personalised learning plans and tailor-made
learning activities. Personalised learning will
facilitate the social and cultural integration of
migrant children and help them to overcome
language barriers. It will enable teachers to detect
students at risk of dropping out, help them in
diagnosing the problems and learning needs
and in offering a re-engagement strategy. It will
also help develop talent and foster excellence by
providing more engaging and challenging learning
opportunities. A mix of different technologies
will support personalisation, by allowing for a
diversity of learning activities, tools and materials;
by providing tools which support continuous
monitoring and support diagnostic, formative
and summative assessment strategies; by making
educational resources openly available; by
allowing for the implementation of collaborative
projects; by offering learning opportunities that
are motivating, engaging and even playful; and
by supporting multilingual environments.
Collaboration. E&T institutions need to re-
connect with society to better align learning
objectives and societal needs. In the future,
European societies will be more inter-cultural
and flexible. Young people need advice and
guidance to come to terms with the increasing
rate of change and find their way in a complex
world. Schools must offer them the orientation
they need and promote mutual understanding
and active citizenship, in direct interaction with
society. Thus, collaboration not only within
the classroom, as it is (or should be) practiced
today, but also with the community at large,
and with people from other social, cultural or
age groups, will become increasingly important
to enable learners to come to terms with life
in an ever more diverse and uncertain world.
Virtual study exchange programmes, internet-
based intercultural exchange projects, online
massive multiplayer games, simulations and
other internet-based services can assist schools in
allowing learners to experience, understand and
reflect upon societal developments in a safe and
protected environment.
Informalisation. In the past, one of the
major roles of schools was to make knowledge
accessible to all citizens. Information was
stored in dedicated places and restricted to
publications that not everybody had access to.
Today information has become a commodity
that is available anytime and anywhere. A range
of reliable education resources, courses, and
training materials is already available online,
some of it free of charge. In the future, a vast
amount and variety of adequate, effective and
interesting learning materials will be available.
Thus, the future role of schools will be to guide
students in identifying and selecting learning
opportunities that best fit their learning styles
and objectives; to monitor progress, realign
learning objectives and choices and intervene
when difficulties arise; and to implement viable
assessment, certification and accreditation
mechanisms. Schools will become learning hubs
which offer guidance and support for learner-
centred learning pathways, tailored to individual
learning needs, paces, modes and preferences.
Achieving this requires flexible curricula;
teachers who are trained to effectively guide
and coach students in their learning endeavours;
competence-based assessment strategies that are
to a certain extent independent of the concrete
learning content; and certification mechanisms
that allow alternative learning experiences to be
integrated into school education.
63
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
5 Gaining and Retaining Employment
5.1 Introduction
The Bruges Communiqué (2010) on
enhanced European Cooperation in Vocational
Education and Training (VET) acknowledges
that there will be an increased need for lifelong
learning which requires more flexible modes
of delivery, tailored training offers and well-
established systems of validation of non-formal
and informal learning. In the future, learning will
(need to) become a natural activity of all citizens
that accompanies them throughout their lives
and smoothly blends in with their lives. Looking
at 2020-2030, one can say that a paradigm shift
towards the full-scale implementation of lifelong
and life-wide learning is required across all areas
of society.
128
However, currently there are a number of
challenges that need to be overcome for lifelong
learning to become a reality and for lifelong
learning strategies to become targeted enough
to facilitate gaining and retaining employment.
These include the following:
• Transition from school to work: Currently,
young people, graduating from secondary,
tertiary and vocational education and
training, often lack the skills and competences
needed to make a rapid and successful
transition to employment. Existing barriers
between the worlds of work and education
need to be overcome to ensure that the
qualifications people obtain are actually of
value to them on the labour market.
129
While
it will be necessary to better align skills
developed in E&T and labour market needs,
given the speed of change of labour market
requirements, it will also be necessary to
envisage lifelong learning strategies for
128 European Commission, 2009a.
129 European Commission, 2010b.
young people to effectively supplement and
complement their qualifications to address
newly emerging skill needs and actively
facilitate their integration into the labour
market.
• Re-entering the labour market: The longer
the absence from the labour market the more
difficult it may be to re-enter workforce.
Especially the long-term unemployed face
more difficulties in finding a job.
130
This
applies in particular to fast changing areas
where constant knowledge updates are
necessary. Here the question arises as to how
these people can be re-integrated, especially
in the context of the ageing society, in which
it will become increasingly important to
pool human resources and make the best of
all talents available.
• Re-skilling: It is expected that by 2025 some
of today’s jobs may no longer exist, and that
totally new ones will be created.
131
One
important challenge will therefore be to
enable all citizens to keep their competences
updated and quickly respond and adjust to
possibly fast changing work environments.
The recent economic crisis has taught us
that no sector of society is immune to labour
market ruptures and that all workers, even
highly qualified ones, could be required
to look for a new field of employment,
changing and adapting their professional
profiles substantially.
130 http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/konjunktur-
nachrichten/studie-zur-jobkrise-nur-die-
langzeitarbeitslosen-sind-ein-problem;2544855
131 Cedefop, 2010a.
64
5 Gaining and Retaining Employment
5.2 Challenge 4: Transition from school
to work
5.2.1 Persona presentation
to employment.
132
Currently, however, there is
a pronounced need to improve transitions from
education and training to work, and between jobs,
and to foster career management skills, for both
young people and adults.
133
The labour market is
characterised by a mismatch between persistent
unemployment and difficulties in recruiting in
certain sectors.
134
In 2010, youth unemployment
at almost 21% was more than twice as high as
it was in overall unemployment,
135
i.e. one out
of every five young people in the labour force
was unemployed and looking and available for
work.
136
Furthermore, the growing globalisation
of trade and lengthening of the period of
active employment are increasingly requiring
individuals to adapt their skills, in order to remain
ahead of foreseeable or necessary changes and to
safeguard their career paths.
137
The enlargement
of the European Union has increased the potential
for mobility in education and training, as well as
in the labour market, thereby creating the need to
prepare EU citizens to develop their learning and
professional pathways in a broader geographical
context.
138
Increasingly, countries are recognising that
good initial vocational education and training
has a major contribution to make to economic
competitiveness.
139
As skills mismatches impede
productivity, growth and competitiveness, it is
necessary to anticipate skills needs and shortfalls
at all levels of qualification, and to transfer the
results into policy and practice, with a view to
improving the match between VET provision and
the needs of the economy, citizens and society
at large.
140
Thus, the Council (2010) proposes
132 European Commission, 2010b.
133 Bruges Communiqué, 2010.
134 Council of the European Union, 2008.
135 Eurostat data, June 2010, for young people under the
age of 25 years.
136 Eurostat (2011).
137 Council of the European Union, 2008.
138 Council of the European Union, 2008.
139 OECD, 2010a.
140 Council of the European Union, 2010.
Joshua lives in
suburban England. After
finishing secondary
school he finished a
three-year vocational
training programme
focusing on the hotel
industry. However,
when he graduated he
found that his training
was insufficient to meet
the demands of Britain’s
hospitality industry
in 2025. Robotics and new business models
had ensured that most hotels except those in
the luxury segment did not require staff with
Joshua’s skills.
Joshua has applied for various jobs at
high-end hotels but has been repeatedly
turned down because language skills and
competences in cultural etiquette and customs,
especially related to China, India and Arab
countries, are considered essential. He also
has to compete with English-speaking migrants
who are acquainted to Asian and Middle
Eastern customs.
Key Policy Documents:
• OECD (2010). Learning for Jobs.
• The Bruges Communiqué (2010) on
enhanced European Cooperation in
Vocational Education and Training for the
period 2011-2020.
It is generally acknowledged that E&T
institutions must ensure that young people,
graduating from secondary and tertiary
education, possess the skills and competences
needed to make a rapid and successful transition
65
The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
the enhancement of the labour market relevance
of VET and the employability of VET graduates
through partnerships between social partners,
enterprises, education and training provider and
VET curricula that are outcome-oriented and
more responsive to labour market needs.
Lifelong learning policies across Europe
aim to improve permeability between different
education and training systems, so that people
can progress vertically (raise the level of their
qualifications and competences) or horizontally
(broaden their achievements, re-qualify or
change learning pathways).
141
In order to ease
the transition from training to employment, the
Council (2010) considers it desirable to improve
this permeability and foster the continuity of
learning paths between VET, general education
and higher education; enhance labour market
integration; and improve guidance and
counselling services. Additionally, to support
young people and in particular those not in
employment, education or training, Member
States in cooperation with the social partners,
should set up schemes to help recent graduates
find initial employment or further education and
training opportunities, including apprenticeships,
and intervene rapidly when young people become
unemployed.
142
5.2.2 Future challenges and their implications
Increased labour market dynamics. It is
expected that the future will be characterised
by an increasing rate of change, forcing labour
markets to more flexibly react towards new
demands and developments. 88% of experts
consulted online think that it will be impossible
to anticipate all changes to jobs and markets and
that it will therefore be normal that people will
need to supplement their official qualifications
with additional on-the-job training.
141 Cedefop, 2010h.
142 European Commission, 2010f.
Collaboration between education and
employment. There is general agreement that
currently there is a gap between skill supply
and demand and that this gap will widen in the
future, if the competences developed in E&T
are not better aligned with labour market needs.
However, experts consulted in this project are
optimistic that by 2025 a growing number of
schools, universities and job training centres will
be closely cooperating with firms and industries
in order to design curricula and training
programmes that avoid skills mismatches and
enable a seamless transition from school to work.
Self-responsibility and key skills. Rapidly
changing developments in the labour markets
also requires that learners themselves take
responsibility for keeping abreast of them.
Basic and generic skills will come to the fore. A
majority of 66% of the respondents in the online
consultation thinks that more attention should be
paid to general competences and transversal skills
since job requirements will change so frequently
that special skills will be quickly outdated. A
slight majority (52%) of the respondents to the
online consultation believes that employers
will not expect recent graduates to possess job-
relevant competences. They will thus train their
staff themselves and select graduates on the basis
of their basic skills.
Job competition. In the future, young people
will increasingly compete globally for the most
attractive jobs. Their experiences and competences
will be compared with those of young people of
foreign origin, who speak several languages, have
international experience and are highly ambitious
and motivated to work in Europe. Today, learning
mobility is already recognised as an important
way in which young people can strengthen
their future employability.
143
In the future, it will
become more important for young people to invest
in language skills and intercultural competences
143 European Commission, 2010d.
66
5 Gaining and Retaining Employment
to be able to qualify for a job in an increasingly
interrelated and interconnected world.
5.2.3 A desirable future for Joshua
Ideally, Joshua should not be faced with
the situation he is in, because E&T should have
anticipated that in the hospitality sector language
and cultural skills will become more important
and should have trained him accordingly.
However, for the sake of argument, we will
assume that the trend to automated hotels had not
been foreseeable and that it led to an unexpected
market upheaval in that sector in early 2025,
which unfortunately coincided with Joshua’s
graduation.
There are several strategies Joshua could
follow to respond to the changed expectations.
He could start in a job below his qualifications
in order to gain work experience and at the same
time acquire the missing skills, as advocated by
49% of respondents to the online consultation.
Volunteering in a development aid programme
(in India or China) to gain practical insights was
appreciated by 47%, and 44% favoured virtual
reality trips to Asia and online games which
simulate cultural conflicts as a means of training
occupational skills.
Experts at the workshop pointed out that,
while all these and more options are feasible
ways in which Joshua can complement his
qualifications with relevant language and
intercultural skills, most importantly, Joshua will
need to assume responsibility for his professional
development and pro-actively seek out training
opportunities, which are expected to be widely
and freely available to him. Joshua will be able
to set up a portfolio, or add different professional
and personal experiences to his existing portfolio,
which documents his engagement in a variety
of training opportunities. This portfolio will
contain his engagement in an online tandem
learning community with Chinese students, his
performance in a self-learning course in Indian
etiquette, his progress in an online collaborative
game in which he interacted with different
international teams and represented the Muslim
community in a negotiation exercise and several
videos, essays and exercises documenting his
success in Mandarin.
5.2.4 Priority areas
Improved anticipation and closer
collaboration between education and industry.
There is high agreement (81%) among experts
responding to the online survey that education
and training institutions have to work more
closely together with industry to align learning
objectives. This process requires strong political
guidance and greater stakeholder involvement,
which may not be restricted to industries, but may
also include societal representatives. The experts
note that, as a result of this coordination process,
new educational concepts could arise that focus
more on transversal skills, such as learning how
to learn, entrepreneurship and initiative and on
“how to obtain and interpret or process relevant
information”, rather than on specific factual
information.
As a first step, vocational and tertiary
education and training institutions should take
more responsibility to avoid skills mismatches, by
better aligning their curricula with the job-reality;
by integrating collaboration projects with industry
into their syllabi; and by fostering students’
self-management, reflection and learning-to-
learn skills. However, experts consulted at the
workshop repeatedly emphasized that learning
objectives must not become “purely market-
driven”. Rather, educational reform should be
embedded in a reflective dialogue on social and
societal values. Learners should be enabled to
become active and responsible citizens, who not
only respond to labour market demands, but pro-
actively, critically and creatively drive change to
further innovation and competitiveness.
Individual flexibility and self-responsibility.
Almost 90% of the respondents to the online
consultation believe that it will be impossible
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
to anticipate all future changes to jobs and
markets. Keeping abreast of rapidly changing
developments in the labour markets will
therefore also require more self-responsibility on
the part of the learners. Here technologies can
play an important role in 2025, e.g. by allowing
for worldwide access to latest information as
well as simulations and training programmes
where learners can experience the state of the
art within their professions and online networks
and communities in which they can exchange
knowledge and ideas.
5.2.5 The potential of ICT
Networks fostering dialogue and
collaboration between education and industry.
ICT can contribute to establishing and maintaining
an intensive and extensive dialogue between
stakeholders from education and industry by
providing a range of online platforms, networks
and environments that can be used for targeted
consultation and collaboration with different
interest groups. ICT can thus enable a more
effective, timely and targeted exchange which
allows education and training providers to better
anticipate changing skill needs.
Context-aware simulation, virtual reality
and interactive games will allow young people
like Joshua to practice language and cultural
skills. Similarly, other practical skills relevant for a
given job profile can be trained using simulations
and interactive environments. Today, interactive
simulation tools are already used to train skills
in medical surgery
144
or legal practice.
145
In the
future, there will be many more virtual training
environments that replicate vocational practice
and thus facilitate the transition between
higher education and vocational training to the
workplace.
144 Cf. John, 2007.
145 Cf. http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/
synergy/synergycollaborations/teaching/
glasgowgraduateschooloflaw/.
Autodidactic training courses will enable
learners to quickly acquire the skills they lack
in an engaging and motivating environment that
dynamically adapts to their learning pace and
level. Future ICT-enabled training programmes
and modules will provide learners with a range
of tools that enable them to diagnose and
understand their training needs; to monitor their
progress, and to identify areas for improvement
and address them effectively.
Online learning communities will provide
learners with a social environment for their
individual learning endeavours that will help
them to remain motivated and stay focused.
International learning communities furthermore
enable learners to interact with people from
different cultural backgrounds and to improve
their inter-cultural and language skills.
5.3 Challenge 5: Re-entering the
Labour Market
5.3.1 Persona presentation
Sven is a 42-year-old
father who lives with his
wife and two children on
a beautiful and big old
farm, in the Swedish town
of Katrineholm. His only
education is the Grundskola
(comprehensive school),
which he finished at 16,
after which he started as
technician at the nearby
car factory. However, when
the factory closed in 2014,
he lost his job.
Since his wife had a well paid and secure
job in medical technology, he decided to stay
home and take care of the two children since
they always wanted to have at least one stay-
at-home parent.
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5 Gaining and Retaining Employment
Sven has done this with great pleasure
and raised the children well. But since they
started secondary education in September
2025, Sven decided that it was time to re-
enter the workforce. He discovered, however,
that it is difficult to re-enter the job market as
technician, after 12 years of absence from the
labour market. Also, through his engagement
as a father his interests have changed and he
would very much prefer to work in the social
sector.
Key Policy Documents
• The Bruges Communiqué (2010) on
enhanced European Cooperation in
Vocational Education and Training for the
period 2011-2020.
• Council of the European Union (2008).
Council Resolution on better integrating
lifelong guidance into lifelong learning
strategies.
The longer the (voluntary or involuntary)
absence from the labour market, the more
difficult it may get to re-enter the workforce.
146
In 2010, 9.6% of the EU27 working population
were unemployed; 3% of the labour force had
been without a job for longer than one year;
1.5% for more than two years.
147
Some people
choose to leave the active labour market for some
time, e.g. to raise children, which is reflected in
the fact that female employment rates (58.6%)
are substantially lower than male rates (70.7%) in
the EU-27 in 2009.
148
In the future, higher labour market
participation will be required to compensate
for demographic trends. For Europe to reach
its 2020 employment rate target of 75%, more
146 http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/konjunktur-
nachrichten/studie-zur-jobkrise-nur-die-
langzeitarbeitslosen-sind-ein-problem;2544855
147 Eurostat (2011): http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/
statistics_explained/index.php/Unemployment_
statistics.
148 http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/3-
04082010-BP/EN/3-04082010-BP-EN.PDF
people, particularly women and people with low
education levels, must find jobs. This will require
greater emphasis on continuing training and
adult learning.
149
However, the 76 million people
who currently have low level qualifications
150
will be facing difficulties in qualifying for a job,
as it is expected that, by 2025, 31.5% of all jobs
will need tertiary-level qualifications and only
18.5% of jobs will need no or only low level
qualifications.
151
Additionally, even occupations
that used to require mostly low-level skills are
increasingly requiring medium or even high-level
qualifications.
152
European policy acknowledges that, in the
future, VET has to become easily accessible for
people in different life situations, by offering
flexible, “à la carte” concepts coupled with
appropriate financial incentives; by offering
integrated guidance and counselling services
to facilitate transitions and learning and career
choices; and by providing a high degree of
validation of non-formal and informal learning.
153
Effective incentives for lifelong learning and
second-chance opportunities are needed,
coupled with systems for recognising acquired
competencies, and a focus on efforts supporting
those with low skills.
154
5.3.2 Future challenges and their implications
Increased labour market dynamics. In
general, it is expected that by 2025 people will
change their professions more frequently. 76% of
survey respondents think that, by then, it will be
common for citizens to change their professional
profiles completely, even repeatedly, over the
course of their lives. This evidence is in line with
Cedefop (2010a) findings that point towards more
rapidly changing job profiles, requirements and
skill needs.
149 Cedefop, 2010e.
150 European Commission, 2011d.
151 Cedefop, 2010a.
152 Bruges Communiqué, 2010.
153 European Commission, 2010e.
154 European Commission, 2010f.
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
More self-responsibility. The vast majority of
respondents to the online survey believe that, due
to labour market dynamics, in 2025, people will
need to become increasingly responsible for their
own qualifications.
Higher participation rates. Due to
demographic change, a higher share of the
working-age population will need to be employed
to ensure the sustainability of our social systems.
It will therefore become increasingly important
to also enable those who have been without a
job for an extended period of time to re-enter the
labour market. However, almost half of survey
participants think that people who are out of the
workforce for some time will find it even more
difficult to re-enter in 2025 than today.
Management of scarce human resources.
To better exploit the human capital available
and to better match demand and supply of
skills, it will become even more important that
European societies seek to enable the long-term
unemployed to understand their abilities and
preferences and to create incentives for workers
to remain employed and actively develop their
professional careers.
Learning begets learning. There is evidence
that those who have low levels of education
and training are less likely to engage in further
training and lifelong learning
155
and that, in the
future, an increasing number of jobs will require
medium to high qualifications.
156
For those with
low qualifications and a lack of professional work
experience it will therefore become even more
difficult than it is today to qualify for a job and
re-enter the labour market.
5.3.3 A desirable future for Sven
By 2025, public support programmes will
have been put in place to assist people like Sven
in identifying their career options and training
155 EENEE & NESSE, 2008.
156 Cedefop 2010a.
needs. Thus, Sven will be allocated a personal
job guide who will help him assess his skills and
competences and identify a suitable job profile.
Through a series of self-assessment tests and real
world simulations, in which Sven works with a
number of avatars on seemingly unrelated tasks,
he will be able to better understand his skills and
preferences and to identify potentially interesting
job profiles.
This skills audit indicates that Sven is
particularly skilled in financial bookkeeping,
having done this for years for his children’s judo
club. Furthermore, Sven’s high scores in child
development, dietary knowledge and hygiene
reflect his active engagement as a caring parent.
When discussing these outcomes with the job
guide, Sven shares his long-term wish of starting
his own small-scale child care centre. This would
allow him to combine his entrepreneurial spirit
with his love for children. In addition, he could
install the child care centre on his farm so he
could still be close to his own children when
they are home. Since there is a lack of childcare
services in his area, a government funded
programme for new entrepreneurs will assist
him with shouldering the financial burden of this
endeavour.
His job guide helps Sven identify the
required qualifications and compares these with
his current competences. The competences that
Sven scored high on can be certified by taking an
external examination at the national education
board. For the additional competences required, a
personal training plan is compiled that combines
different modules and courses and assists Sven in
integrating his learning schedule in his daily life.
The training plan combines open courseware,
interactive learning environments, self-assessment
tools and support at a local training centre in
such a way that in a years’ time Sven will be able
to open his day-care centre, on a preliminary
licence, subject to the subsequent successful
completion of the full training course. While he
is preparing for his own business, he will start
working part-time as an educational assistant in
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5 Gaining and Retaining Employment
a kindergarten, a professional experience that is
documented in his training portfolio and counted
towards his qualification as an integral part of the
training.
Additionally, Sven joins an online network
of social entrepreneurs, most of whom are in
similar situations to him, to better understand
the administrative and legal requirements
for his planned enterprise and to exchange
experiences and tips. He also uses the interactive
administration tool to submit and manage his
business plan and quite enjoys playing the
officially recommended online entrepreneur-
game, in which he already had to file for
bankruptcy several times. Now at least he knows
better what the pitfalls of opening your own
business are and how to avoid them.
5.3.4 Priority areas
Targeted and tailor-made training. In
general, skill mismatches and over- or under-
qualification are detrimental to job satisfaction
and can negatively affect performance and
engagement.
157
In the case of people who have
been unemployed for an extended period of
time, it is particularly important to ensure that
skills, interests and preferences are respected
and addressed to keep these people motivated
and engaged in employment. Equally important
is to understand that these people, because of
their patchy learning biographies, need more
support and guidance in reaching their learning
goals. Alongside the more traditional face-to-
face guidance services offered in education and
employment, recently Internet-based information,
advice and guidance provision is increasing in
Europe.
158
In the future, ICT together with direct
personal support, local face-to-face training and
(online) peer support networks can lever the
dormant talents of people like Sven and assist
them in self-confidently setting and reaching their
own training goals.
157 Cedefop, 2010g.
158 Cedefop, 2010f.
Validation of informally acquired skills.
More self-responsibility also requires adjustments
in certification systems. Learners who will
increasingly need to complement and supplement
their formally acquired qualifications with special
vocational skill training need to receive some
kind of validation and recognition of the skills
they have acquired for them to become relevant
for prospective employers. In all the consultation
exercises, there was a strong agreement that, in
the future, skills and competences obtained in
non-formal ways need to be better recognised.
Experts underlined repeatedly that, while
informal learning opportunities will increase,
formal certification of skills will remain important
and will become more difficult to obtain for
these more fluid competences. This impression is
further undermined by the strong belief of experts
that, while practical experiences will become
more important than formal qualifications,
there is a need to receive formal certification or
accreditation for these skills.
Recognition of non-formal and informal
learning outcomes is already on policy agendas.
159
Recently, EU Member States have started offering
support to validate and recognise formal,
non-formal and informal learning outcomes,
and to upgrade and recognise employee
skills.
160
However, in many cases, recognition
processes remain marginal, small-scale and
even precarious.
161
The European Inventory on
validation of non-formal and informal learning
shows that while great strides are being made
in developing validation processes, overall take
up is low and the low skilled, older workers and
migrants targeted by the Action Plan are not their
primary beneficiaries.
162
According to findings
of an exhaustive assessment undertaken by the
OECD (2010b), there is scope to simplify and
strengthen the procedures for recognition; for
159 OECD, 2010b.
160 Cedefop, 2010f.
161 OECD, 2010b.
162 European Commission, 2011d.
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
enlarging the range of competences that can be
assessed through recognition processes and for
integrating recognition processes within existing
qualification standards.
5.3.5 The potential of ICT
Interactive games and real-life simulations
can provide learners with practical situations
that require them to react appropriately and
develop their practical vocational skills in
an engaging and motivating way and without
recourse to higher level reading skills.
Especially with learners with low qualifications
and patchy learning biographies, these
environments are an effective way of building
up self-esteem and motivation, thus allowing
them to perceive learning and training as
something meaningful and interesting, as
something they want to do and are good at.
Online peer networks allow learners to
share experiences and tips and to slowly build
up expertise in their newly chosen field of
knowledge, without being subjected to test
situations or feeling the pressure of having to
perform well. Passing on their newly acquired
knowledge to others and helping each other
out can further boost self-esteem and allow
learners to reflect upon their learning journey.
Autodidactic training courses allow
learners to follow formal courses - that might
be pre-requisite for their career choice - at their
own speed and with frequent feedback loops
that build up their self-confidence. Responsive
and adaptive training systems employing
learning materials and media that respect
prior knowledge and learning styles will make
learning more effective and efficient. Self-
assessment tools allow them to keep control of
their learning journey and to feel well-prepared
when going into obligatory exams.
5.4 Challenge 6: Re-skilling
5.4.1 Persona presentation
Martina, now 59,
is a highly qualified and
specialized programmer
who lives in the Czech
capital of Prague. At the
end of 2024, her company
had to file for bankruptcy
as they failed to foresee
the rapid rise of quantum
computing and neural
self-correcting networks
that made their applied
programming methods and
software concepts obsolete
within less than a year.
The sudden loss of her job came quite
as a shock to Martina who had believed that
her expertise would always be needed. Since
her work required her to continuously update
and develop her specialised skills, she never
developed a profile or interest in the newly
emerging techniques. She is now worried that
she might not be able to find an adequate job
again, especially since she is almost 60.
Key Policy Documents
• The Bruges Communiqué (2010) on
enhanced European Cooperation in
Vocational Education and Training for the
period 2011-2020.
• European Commission (2011d). Action Plan
on Adult Learning: Achievements and results
2008-2010.
There is general agreement that the rapid
and accelerating pace of change of labour market
needs may overtake the skills of Europe’s ageing
workforce, requiring people to update, upgrade
and broaden their competences in order to
perform well in jobs which are likely to become
more skill intensive and demanding at all
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5 Gaining and Retaining Employment
levels.
163
The number of people aged 60 or above
will increase to 25% of the population by 2013
and to 30% by 2027, while the overall working
population will shrink.
164
Thus, older workers
will increasingly be called upon to engage in
continuing VET.
165
However, while senior citizens need to
continue learning in order to master social
changes, to prevent an ever growing gap between
generations, to remain actively involved in the
fast changing knowledge society and to remain
active citizens,
166
training incidence declines
substantially with age.
167
According to a study
undertaken by Cedefop (2009), policies to increase
silver workers’ labour market participation should
have a dual focus: remove barriers preventing
older people from successfully engaging in
working longer; and promote ageing workers’
employability, by focusing on opportunities to
acquire or update skills and competences.
The Bruges Communiqué (2010) recognizes
that, to enable workers to up-date their
competences and adapt to changing skill needs
and to promote access to training in different
life situations, tailored training offers supporting
flexible learning pathways and training
arrangements are needed, including flexible
and modularised training courses, work-based
learning and e-learning.
5.4.2 Future challenges and their implications
Unexpected labour market disturbances. In
the face of advancing and changing technologies
and rapidly developing social movements,
jobs that require specialised high qualifications
and expert knowledge may suddenly and
unexpectedly become obsolete, as has recently
happened in the financial, construction and
nuclear energy sectors. Thus, a large majority
163 Cedefop, 2010e.
164 European Commission, 2011d.
165 Council of the European Union, 2010.
166 European Commission, 2011d.
167 EENEE & NESSE, 2008.
(78%) of the survey respondents believes that in
2025 an increasing number of today’s jobs will
become obsolete and an increasing number of
totally new jobs will be created.
Lifelong learning. 59% of survey respondents
think that, in the future, all workers will re-skill
and re-invent themselves several times over the
course of their lives. 75% agree that by 2025
there will be abundant training and employment
opportunities that assist specialists who suddenly
find themselves without a job in converting
experiences and personal skills into competences
that are relevant for new job profiles.
Self-responsibility. While 58% of survey
respondents think that employers and employees
need to anticipate technological and societal
developments to keep up and change strategy, just
as in the case of Joshua, there is a strong belief that
not all changes are foreseeable and that therefore
workers will have to assume responsibility for
their own learning and training to prevent and
respond to changing skill requirements.
Silver workers. Due to demographic change,
European societies will increasingly depend on
older workers remaining active in the labour
market as long as possible. While changing job
and career profile at a later stage in life is almost
impossible currently, in the future silver workers
will need to be kept on board. Thus, a high share
(44%) of the survey respondents believe in the
possibility to qualify for a new job and basically
‘start from scratch’ at the age of 59, as in Martina’s
case. However 33% consider this rather difficult
and 23% are not inclined either way.
5.4.3 A desirable future for Martina
At the age of 59, Martina has at least 13
more years of work ahead of her before she
can retire. For her, the main question is not
how she will manage financially (although this
is also important), but how she wants to spend
these years. She needs to find a job that she is
capable of doing; that she will still be able to do
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
physically in 10-13 years’ time; and, ideally, a
job that reflects what she knows and what she is
competent in, so that she will enjoy doing it and
will do it well.
As part of the insolvency plan, Martina’s
company contracts a private consulting firm
specialising in career guidance to advise all
former staff on future career options and jointly
develop and implement individual career and
training plans with them, enabling them to
find adequate new employment opportunities
as quickly as possible. The training managers
compile a set of training materials that allow all
staff to better understand the labour market and
recent developments within their sector, which
also includes a two week intensive training
course on quantum computing and neural self-
correcting networks, based on open educational
resources, and two-day practical workshop in one
of the new enterprises which are already using
and further refining these techniques.
Several of Martina’s younger colleagues
decide to re-qualify to enter this new job field
and some even find employers who agree to take
them on board, initially as advisors helping them
in making the transition from the old system to
the new one. Martina, however realises that,
while the new technologies are fascinating, she
is not prepared to spend three stressful years re-
qualifying and working in parallel. Rather, when
visiting the new company, she realises that these
firms are full of young, creative and dynamic
minds, but lack professional management,
thorough planning and strategic thinking –
competences that she has acquired through her
professional life. She starts to understand that she
has quite an extensive experience from which
younger people could benefit and learn.
The concept of intergenerational learning
has recently become more widely implemented,
giving rise to the new job profile of “business
trainer”, who in many sectors replaced the more
traditional strategic business consultant. Instead
of presenting ready-made business solutions,
business trainers aim to empower company staff
to find efficient, effective and innovative solutions
for the particular problems their company faces
themselves, thus laying the ground for sustainable
business innovation.
However, intergenerational learning has not
yet been used widely in high-tech sectors. This
is how Martina develops the idea of becoming
a business trainer for enterprises in the new IT
market: with her knowledge of the sector she
used to work in and with a basic understanding
of the new computing methods she will be the
ideal person for advising these inexperienced
companies and improving their business
strategies.
Realising what a rich human resource senior
workers from the high-tech sector are for strategic
business consultancy, the firm who had been
advising Martina and her colleagues in the course
of the insolvency is happy to take her and two
of her colleagues on board to be able to provide
services to the newly emerging market. Before
Martina can start as a business trainer, however,
she has to be trained herself on how to provide
targeted and tailor-made training that addresses
both, the specific business needs of the particular
enterprises which will be requiring her services,
but also the individual training needs of the
employees that she will need to train in hands-on
business strategy.
She is now following modules for
teacher training. In particular the interactive
communication training using a 3D environment
is very useful for her, as it enables her to reflect on
different teaching strategies and gives her instant
feedback on the effect different communication
strategies have on the learners. Participating in
the knowledge exchange on the corporate peer
learning network helps her to further understand
how she can best empower people to innovatively
drive their businesses forward. Additionally,
she decides to work her way into the basics of
quantum computing and neural self-correcting
networks as a basis for understanding the subject
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5 Gaining and Retaining Employment
matter of the sector she will be offering her
training services to, with the help of online peer
learning communities and open educational
resources.
5.4.4 Priority areas
Making lifelong learning a reality. Nearly
60% of respondents to the online survey think
that it will be normal by 2025 that workers
re-skill themselves over the course of their
life; 78% believe that an increasing number
of today’s jobs will become obsolete and
an increasing number of totally new jobs
will be created. Thus, in the future, effective
and efficient strategies for lifelong learning
must be put in place that not only enable all
citizens to continuously update and upgrade
their skills but also allow them to effectively
re-qualify for a new job profile, building
upon the professional experience they have
gained. As already acknowledged by the
Bruges Communiqué (2010), ICT can be used
to boost adult education and training through
distance learning. In the future, ICT will play
an increasingly important role in providing
effective and efficient training opportunities
that enable quick transitions between different
jobs.
Tapping into the tacit knowledge of senior
workers. For the knowledge-based society of
the 21st century it is of utmost importance that
the knowledge and professional expertise of
experienced workers is not lost, but passed
on to following generations. Thus, 87% of the
experts consulted online believe that, since older
as well as younger people have their specific
competences and knowledge, an open exchange
between both will become important. As
knowledge is expected to be outdated faster due
to shorter innovation circles, pure memorisation
of hard facts may become secondary to genuine
understanding of general principles and “how-
to” knowledge. In a society characterised by
accelerating change, where working procedures
will continually evolve, the living memory of
those who have experienced these changes, who
understand the patterns underlying them and are
aware of the factors that have remained constant
over time, is a valuable knowledge resource. In
this respect, demographic change can be turned
into an opportunity for European societies, if
effective mechanisms promoting intergenerational
learning are developed.
Enterprises will have increased
responsibility for providing training. While, in
the future, employees will increasingly become
self-responsible for their own qualifications, as
confirmed by 87% of respondents to the online
survey, experts and policy-makers participating
in the different workshops repeatedly and
consistently emphasise that industry in general
and employers in particular need to assume more
responsibility for the training of their workers.
Nearly 60% of respondents to the online
survey think that companies will be responsible
for keeping themselves and their employees
updated with regard to new knowledge, new
requirements and new technologies. In the
future, employers will realise that money
invested in training is well-spent and beneficial
for their enterprise. Consequently the number
and quality of different training services and
formats aimed at continuing professional
development will also rise, as will the societal
value attributed to lifelong learning.
Formalising lifelong learning. The increased
importance of lifelong learning not only brings
informal and non-formal learning opportunities
to the fore, calling for a better validation and
recognition of informal learning outcomes, but it
also requires the implementation of viable formal
learning and training strategies that are supported
by training professionals and competent training
services providers, which are accredited and
recognized. Today, the status of the adult learning
professional as an independent profession has
not yet been established in most countries
168
and
168 European Commission, 2011d.
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
updated in regard to new developments in special
areas as well as their general surrounding to help
with re-orientation, re- and up-skilling.
Simulations, 3D virtual worlds and
interactive games are particularly useful for
training social, communication and practical
skills. Simulating a real life situation in a virtual
environment in which the learner interacts with
other (electronic or real) players, they allow
learners to try different problem solving strategies
and thus enable them to enhance and amplify
communication strategies.
5.5 Normative Vision for Future
Lifelong Learning Strategies
In the future, people are likely to change
their professions more frequently throughout
their life and they are remaining longer within
the workforce due to demographic changes and
higher life expectancy. According to experts, it
will be common for all citizens – whether they are
at the beginning or end of their careers, whether
they are highly skilled or do not have any relevant
qualifications – to continuously update their skills.
Professional careers will become more flexible
and dynamic and all citizens, no matter how
highly qualified, will need to pro-actively design
and promote their careers by seizing relevant
training opportunities. ICT will play an important
Figure 23: Conceptual map of future lifelong learning strategies
while there are numerous learning opportunities
available on the market, there is a lack of quality
assurance and accreditation mechanisms. In
the future, with the rise of ubiquitous lifelong
learning, trainers will need to receive better
training and recognition of the value of the
services they deliver, which will also serve as a
means of quality assurance.
5.4.5 The potential of ICT
Online educational resources (OER) allow
people to quickly gain a basic understanding of
a certain subject area and allow those who are
interested in attaining a deeper understanding to
self-train themselves in this new field of study.
Online/ distance university and vocational
training courses allow workers to study a subject
in depth and attain formal qualification of their
competences in a way that is adapted to their
particular learning pace and allows them to
combine work and study and offers them targeted
support and guidance.
Online social networks allow workers who
are novices in a field to tap the tacit knowledge
of those who have been working in the field for
a longer time, thus speeding up their practical
knowledge and skills acquisition. Internet
mediated professional groups and professional
networking can also contribute to keeping oneself
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5 Gaining and Retaining Employment
role in facilitating lifelong learning opportunities,
as, in the future, a range of sophisticated and
adaptive learning tools and programmes will be
available which should make it easy for people
to upgrade their skills and pro-actively drive their
professional careers.
Personalisation. Due to increased labour
market dynamics, people will have to assume
responsibility for their qualifications and pro-
actively develop their professional careers.
However, to improve the match of skill supply and
demand and to make training targeted, effective
and efficient, industry will also need to get more
involved in shaping training and encouraging
workers to participate in lifelong learning. In
the interest of both, employers and (prospective)
employees, training opportunities will become
targeted and tailor-made. Technological advances
will contribute to making a great number and
variety of opportunities for re-skilling and
changing professional profile available, which will
make targeted and tailor-made lifelong learning
far easier than it is today, by allowing anybody to
learn effectively anywhere and anytime. Different
learning modules, tools and environments will
be combined to allow people to effectively and
efficiently (re-)qualify for a job of their choosing,
by identifying and addressing their particular
training needs and offering learning strategies
that are tailored to their level of competence,
their (future) job requirements, and their learning
styles and objectives.
Collaboration. Professional relationships
will increasingly be characterised by an open
knowledge exchange, not only between colleagues
and peers with similar professional profiles and
learning needs, but also between older and
younger, experienced and inexperienced workers.
To enable citizens to quickly and effectively
upgrade their professional and practical skills, ICT
based peer learning networks and communities,
which allow workers to mutual benefit from each
others’ specific knowledge and experiences, will
become an important tool for lifelong learning.
Furthermore, intergenerational learning will
become an important source for continuing
professional development, as it allows younger
workers to tap the tacit knowledge of more
senior workers whose professional experiences
will become better recognised as a valuable
source of knowledge in a fast-changing work
environment, while, at the same time, allowing
more senior workers to continuously update
themselves on the fresh knowledge younger
people bring into the workplace. ICT can support
these developments by providing environments
that scaffold, document and archive this learning
process and thus convert knowledge exchange
into an accessible learning resource that is
available anywhere and anytime.
Informalisation. 75% of experts consulted
online think that, in 2025, there will be abundant
training and employment opportunities that assist
people in converting professional experiences and
personal skills into competences that are relevant
for (new) job profiles. As concerns in particular
tertiary education and vocational training, a
vast majority of 87% of experts believe that it
will become normal for university graduates to
supplement their official qualifications to qualify
for a job. However, not all of these training
opportunities will lead to formally recognised
qualifications. Similarly, professional experiences
acquired in previous jobs give rise to a number
of diverse competences that are seldom officially
acknowledged or recognised. Thus, experts
repeatedly and almost unanimously (with only
6% opposing) underline that for meeting future
employment needs in view of increasing labour
market dynamics, informally acquired skills need
to become better recognised and mechanisms
will have to be put in place that allow people to
obtain formal recognition for their experiences
and skills. ICT can support the documentation and
validation of informally acquired skills. However,
accreditation frameworks and mechanisms need
to be developed to make individuals’ learning
portfolios relevant and valuable for their career
development.
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
6 Conclusions and Policy Implications
6.1 A Vision of the Future of Learning
This study aimed to identify, understand
and visualise major changes to learning in the
future. It developed a descriptive vision of the
future, based on existing trends and drivers, and
a normative vision outlining how future learning
opportunities should be developed to contribute
to social cohesion, socio-economic inclusion and
economic growth.
The overall vision is that personalisation,
collaboration and informalisation (informal
learning) are at the core of learning in the future.
These terms are not new in education and training
but will have to become the central guiding
principle for organising learning and teaching
in the future. The central learning paradigm is
characterised by lifelong and life-wide learning,
shaped by the ubiquity of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT). At the
same time, due to fast advances in technology
and structural changes to European labour
markets that are related to demographic change,
globalisation and immigration, generic and
transversal skills will become more important.
These skills will help citizens to become lifelong
learners who flexibly respond to change, are
able to pro-actively develop their competences
and thrive in collaborative learning and working
environments.
Along with changing pedagogies, assessment
strategies and curricula will also need to
change, and, most importantly, traditional E&T
institutions – schools and universities, vocational
and adult training providers – will need to
reposition themselves in the emerging future
learning landscape. They will need to experiment
with new formats and strategies for learning and
teaching to be able to offer relevant, effective and
high quality learning experiences in the future. In
particular, they will need to respond more flexibly
to individual learners’ needs and changing labour
market requirements.
Six major challenges for the future of
learning have been identified and discussed.
Initial Education and Training institutions
have to deal with multicultural integration to
address immigration and demographic change,
with reducing early school leaving to combat
unemployment and to promote a better educated
workforce for competitiveness and economic
growth, and with fostering talent to develop
a ‘smart’ economy based on knowledge and
innovation and to let people develop themselves
as reflective and responsible persons. The
challenges for lifelong learning are also three-
fold: promote a rapid and more fluent transition
from school to work in order to reduce the barriers
between the worlds of work and education;
facilitate re-entrance to the labour market,
especially to tackle long-term unemployment
and to focus on permanent re-skilling to enable
all citizens to keep their competences updated
and quickly respond and adjust to possibly fast
changing work environments.
6.2 Priority Areas
6.2.1 Initial Education and Training
Schools, universities and vocational education
institutions will need to react more effectively
and promptly to changing job requirements and
societal trends. The current gap between the world
of education and the world of work will need to
be better addressed and overcome. In the future,
learner-centred, decentralised, and tailor-made
learning strategies will prevail. These will (need
to) be accompanied by corresponding pedagogies
and teaching strategies and also flexible curricula,
78
6 Conclusions and Policy Implications
modified assessment and validation mechanisms
and closer collaboration with other societal
players, including tertiary education providers
and prospective future employers.
E&T has to allow for different learning paces,
contents, strategies and styles (personalised
learning); seek collaboration with universities,
research institutions and industry; be free to
follow innovative strategies that contribute to the
personal and professional development of learner
and teachers; can trigger innovation, creativity
and social engagement; implement suitable
certification and accreditation mechanisms that
allow for the integration of different (kind of)
learning modules; and provide qualified support
and guidance.
Priority areas for policy attention include the
following:
Personalisation
Personalised learning. Tailor-made learning
trajectories can contribute to making school
education more valuable to learners, by aligning
the learning content with the individual’s skills,
interests and learning needs, and thus prevent
early school leaving and foster excellence at the
same time. To allow for genuinely tailor-made
learning experiences that benefit all learner
groups, learning plans must be open and flexible,
allowing for the integration of different learning
sources and resources, of different learning
communities, interactions and learning styles.
A new learning culture. To enable young
people to become lifelong learners who actively
update their skills and develop their professional
profiles over the full course of their lifetime,
and not get disengaged at an early age already,
learning has to be experienced as being enjoyable,
relevant and enriching. Young people need to
be empowered through learning and working
relationships that value them as resourceful
individuals.
Effective learning strategies for
heterogeneous learning groups. Pedagogical
strategies will need to respond to the specific
needs of each individual student, while at the
same time encouraging collaboration and peer
learning. ICT will be a key ingredient enabling
teachers to reconcile these two opposing
strategies.
Language learning and multicultural
integration. To improve the social integration and
inclusion of an increasing number of migrants, it is
necessary to support (early) language acquisition;
to accommodate a wider range of mother
tongues, cultural perspectives and attainments
in the classroom; and to include intercultural
education in curricula and to foster all students’
intercultural competences.
The important role of teachers as mentors
and guides. Personalised learning requires
guidance and support. While ICT will improve
diagnostics and provide personalised learning
materials, teachers play an increasingly important
role in strategically developing individual learning
pathways and in supporting and guiding students
in their learning endeavours.
Collaboration
Re-connecting education and employment.
Partnerships with the industry and an increased
collaboration between schools and employers can
make learning experiences and activities more
relevant and interesting for learners. In particular,
students at risk can profit from a dedicated time
away from school in a work environment that
brings new skills to the fore and allows them to
build up self-confidence. ICT can facilitate the
transition between the different working and
learning environments.
Collaboration between different learning
providers. Excellence can only be fostered if
talented students can seize learning opportunities
that transcend the remit of secondary education.
In particular, collaboration between secondary
schools and universities on school subjects and
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
choices will make it easier for schools to select
adequate tertiary level learning material and
courses for talented students.
Teacher networks and collaboration. In the
future, teachers will need to continuously update
their skills to adapt to changing learning and
teaching patterns and strategies. ICT medicated
teacher networks fostering the informal exchange
of good practice will become an important source
for professional development. These networks
will enable teachers to collaboratively develop
their skills; offer each other support; tap the
tacit knowledge of their peers; and facilitate the
knowledge exchange between older and younger
teachers.
Informalisation
Learning opportunities outside E&T
institutions. More flexible learning pathways
need to be provided that allow people to move
between different education levels, attracting
also non-traditional learners, and to extend
and broaden learning opportunities for young
people. Informal learning opportunities, practical
experiences and informally acquired skills need
to be better recognised.
Opening up schools to society. Real life
experiences allow students to develop the generic
and transversal skills that are expected to become
increasingly important in the future. Schools
should therefore increase their efforts to open up
to society and integrate real life experiences into
their teaching practices to better prepare students
for their future life.
Certification and accreditation. Assessment
and certification schemes will need to change
to better reflect both, individual competences
and relevant competences for specific job
profiles. To implement personalised learning
strategies that integrate extra-curricula learning
courses and experiences and better align
students’ competences with future job demands,
new assessment, qualification, validation and
accreditation mechanisms must be developed.
6.2.2 Lifelong learning
Lifelong Learning will become even more
important in the future. People are likely to
change their professions more frequently
throughout their life and they are remaining
longer within the workforce due to demographic
changes and higher life expectancy. According
to experts, it will be common for all citizens –
whether they are at the beginning or end of their
careers, whether they are highly skilled or do not
have any relevant qualifications – to continuously
update their skills. Professional careers will
become more flexible and dynamic and all
citizens, no matter how highly qualified, will
need to pro-actively design and promote their
careers by seizing relevant training opportunities.
ICT will play an important role in facilitating
lifelong learning opportunities, as, in the future, a
range of sophisticated and adaptive learning tools
and programs will be available which will make
it easy for people to upgrade their skills and pro-
actively drive their professional careers.
Priority areas for policy attention include the
following:
Personalisation
Making lifelong learning a reality. In the
future, effective and efficient strategies for lifelong
learning must be put in place that not only enable
all citizens to continuously update and upgrade
their skills but also allow them to effectively
re-qualify for a new job profile, building upon
the professional experience they have gained.
Lifelong learning programmes have to become
more flexible, more responsive to individual
training needs and more targeted to specific job
profiles and employment opportunities.
Personalised guidance and support. For re-
skilling and up-skilling programmes in particular,
it is important to ensure that skills, interests and
preferences are respected and addressed to keep
learners motivated and engaged in employment.
Targeted and personalised support and guidance
is needed to improve employability.
80
6 Conclusions and Policy Implications
Individual flexibility and self-
responsibility. Keeping abreast of rapidly
changing developments in the labour markets
will require more self-responsibility on the part
of the learners. However, support and guidance
has to be offered to enable citizens to regularly
monitor their learning needs and progress, and
to identify suitable learning opportunities.
Collaboration
Improved anticipation and closer
collaboration between education and industry.
Education and Training institutions have to
work more closely together with industry
to align learning objectives. This process
requires strong political guidance and greater
stakeholder involvement, which may not be
restricted to industries, but may also include
societal representatives.
Increased responsibility of training
providers. Vocational and tertiary education
and training institutions should take more
responsibility to avoid skills mismatches, by
better aligning their curricula with the job-
reality; by integrating collaboration projects
with industry into their syllabi; and by
fostering students’ self-management, reflection
and learning-to-learn skills. Learners should
be enabled to become active and responsible
citizens, who not only respond to labour
market demands, but pro-actively, critically and
creatively drive change to further innovation
and competitiveness.
Increased responsibility of enterprises
for providing training. While, in the future,
employees will increasingly become self-
responsible for their own qualifications, the
industry in general and employers in particular
also need to assume more responsibility for the
training of their staff.
Informalisation
Validation of informally acquired skills.
Learners who will increasingly need to
complement and supplement their formally
acquired qualifications with special vocational
skill training need to receive some kind of
validation and recognition of the skills they
have acquired for these to become relevant
for prospective employers. Recognition of
non-formal and informal learning outcomes
is already on policy agendas.
169
However,
there is scope to simplify and strengthen the
procedures for recognition; for enlarging the
range of competences that can be assessed
through recognition processes; and for
integrating recognition processes within
existing qualification standards.
170
Fostering informal knowledge exchange. In
a society characterised by accelerating change,
where working procedures continually evolve,
the knowledge exchange between younger and
older, experienced staff and fresh minds, is a
valuable resource. Companies should therefore
encourage intergenerational learning, informal
knowledge exchange and collaboration among
their staff to better benefit from different
competences, profiles and experiences.
Training and recognising trainers. The
increased importance of lifelong learning does
not only bring informal and non-formal learning
opportunities to the fore, calling for a better
validation and recognition of informal learning
outcomes, it also requires the implementation
of viable formal learning and training strategies
that are supported by training professionals and
competent training services providers, which
are accredited and recognized. With the rise of
ubiquitous lifelong learning, trainers will need
to receive better training and recognition of
169 OECD, 2010b; Cedefop, 2010f; European Commission,
2011d
170 OECD, 2010b.
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
the value of the services they deliver, also as a
means of quality assurance.
6.3 The Role of ICT
ICT will change what, how, where and
when people learn. Due to the ubiquity of
technology and its power to facilitate highly
dynamic, adaptable and engaging virtual
learning environments, personalised lifelong
learning opportunities will become feasible.
ICT will enable teachers to better respond to
diversity and heterogeneity in the classroom
and to adapt learning material and objectives
to individual students’ learning needs. ICT
will furthermore support lifelong learning
opportunities that smoothly integrate into
people’s lives and allow them to adapt their
training objectives, schedule and pace to
individual needs and preferences.
However, to realise the potential of ICT in
promoting tailor-made collaborative learning
opportunities that are adaptable, challenging,
relevant and enjoyable, open access and basic
digital skills need to be fostered. Policy makers
need to ensure that all citizens will be able
to benefit from the opportunities offered and
that more vulnerable groups are equipped with
the necessary skills to participate in learning
activities that are more and more technology-
based. Similarly, E&T institutions will need to be
provided with the necessary ICT infrastructure
and tools to become e-mature. Teachers and
trainers need to receive targeted training, enabling
them to align pedagogy and technology to the
benefit of their learners. Guidance is needed for
educators, learners and parents alike on how to
best use technology.
6.4 In Conclusion
Many of the changes depicted have been
foreseen for some time but they now come
together in such a way that it becomes urgent and
pressing for policymakers to consider them and
to propose and implement a fundamental shift
in the learning paradigm for the 21
st
century
digital world and economy. To reach the goals
of personalised, collaborative and informalised
learning, holistic changes need to be made and
mechanisms need to be put in place which
make flexible and targeted lifelong learning a
reality, and support the recognition of informally
acquired skills.
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
7 References and Resources
7.1 Primary Data
Primary data for assessment:
• Online Consultation Survey I (OC I) N = 94 respondents
• Online Consultation Survey II (OC II) N = 151 respondents
• Online Consultation Survey III (OC III) N = 101 respondents
• Group Concept Mapping (GCM)
• Expert Workshop (EW)
Primary data for ideas generation:
• Qualitative scoping survey (QS)
• Qualitative Online Pilot Survey (PS)
• Internal literature review on foresight studies
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Abstract
This report aims to identify, understand and visualise major changes to learning in the future. It developed
a descriptive vision of the future, based on existing trends and drivers, and a normative vision outlining
how future learning opportunities should be developed to contribute to social cohesion, socio-economic
inclusion and economic growth.
The overall vision is that personalisation, collaboration and informalisation (informal learning) are at the
core of learning in the future. These terms are not new in education and training but will have to become
the central guiding principle for organising learning and teaching in the future. The central learning
paradigm is thereby characterised by lifelong and life-wide learning, shaped by the ubiquity of Information
and Communication Technologies (ICT). At the same time, due to fast advances in technology and
structural changes to European labour markets that are related to demographic change, globalisation and
immigration, generic and transversal skills become more important, which support citizens in becoming
lifelong learners who flexibly respond to change, are able to pro-actively develop their competences and
thrive in collaborative learning and working environments.
Many of the changes depicted have been foreseen for some time but they now come together in such a
way that is becomes urgent and pressing for policymakers to consider them and to propose and implement
a fundamental shift in the learning paradigm for the 21st century digital world and economy. To reach the
goals of personalised, collaborative and informalised learning, holistic changes need to be made (curricula,
pedagogies, assessment, leadership, teacher training, etc.) and mechanisms need to be put in place which
make flexible and targeted lifelong learning a reality and support the recognition of informally acquired
skills.
European Commission
EUR 24960 EN — Joint Research Centre — Institute for Prospective Technological Studies
Title: The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
Authors: Christine Redecker, Miriam Leis, Matthijs Leendertse, Yves Punie, Govert Gijsbers, Paul
Kirschner, Slavi Stoyanov and Bert Hoogveld
Editors: Christine Redecker & Yves Punie
Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union
2011
EUR — Scientific and Technical Research series — ISSN: 1018-5593 (print), ISSN: 1831-9424 (online)
ISBN: 978-92-79-21472-1 (PDF)
ISBN: 978-92-79-21471-4 (print)
doi:10.2791/64117
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the conception, development, implementation and monitoring of European Union policies. As a service
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technology for the Union. Close to the policy-making process, it serves the common interest of the Member
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The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change
LF-NA-24960-EN-N
ISBN 978-92-79-21472-1
The Future of Learning:
Preparing for Change
EUR 24960 EN - 2011
9 789279 214721
Authors: Christine Redecker, Miriam Leis, Matthijs Leendertse,
Yves Punie, Govert Gijsbers, Paul Kirschner, Slavi Stoyanov
and Bert Hoogveld
