The attached report written by Paolo Federighi, Professor of Adult Education at the University of Florence (Italy) is based on the review of several EU funded research projects under the 6^th and 7^th Framework Programmes for Research.

Referring to the work of institutions such as CEDEFOP, Eurofund, Eurostat and OECD related to lifelong leaning, as well as research by academics in the area, it proposes a number of policy and research priorities to support adult and continuing education.

In spite of the economic crisis, the report highlights that the demand for adult and continuing education has progressively grown between 2007 and 2011: with a small number of exceptions, the propensity for developing skills concerns all educational levels, when citizens enter the job market and for the rest of their life. Companies and families are the social actors who sustain most of the cost, while State plays a marginal role, concerning itselfonly narrow sections of the population (the disadvantaged ones). However, the city, the region and the country of residence are the factors that more than others determine the access to learning opportunities: “an individual in a poorly performing country can have a chance of accessing adult and continuing education as much as 30 times less than those living in top performance countries” (p. 25).

Considering the existence in Europe of a high number of low-skilled adults, the report suggests as main policy priorities to reduce the economic and social barriers that hamper access to training opportunities for various levels of the population, promoting:

• autonomous initiatives that increase the training potential of companies;
• expansion of the training market;
• the presence of all sizes of training provider;
• improvement of offer quality.

On the other side, research should be able to develop an “intelligent decision-support system” to facilitate the ex-ante impact assessment of policy strategies, focused on the following priorities:

• orientating the adult and continuing education market;
• developing learning potential and innovation ability in workplaces;
• guaranteeing the pertinence of learning opportunities with respect to the demand for skills;
• expanding the effectiveness of learning actions.