John Tibbitt, PASCAL Vice-chair for policy engagement, contributed to a recent study visit to Glasgow by Mayors from the cities around Tampere in Finland.  The focus for much of the visit, hosted by the European Policies Research Centre (EPRC) at Strathclyde University, was on the effective use of European Structural Funds.  John's session looked at developing learning regions, and explored some of the issues which arise for policy-makers in pursuing this concept.

For example, there were interestng exchanges about the difficulties of moving from traditional concerns with formal education and training, to a more broadly based notion of developing a learning approach across a range of policies on 'smart' cities, 'green' cities, 'healthy cities' and so on.  Each focus tended to be pursued by its own interest groups, making it hard to recognise common learning issues.  Similarly, concentration was often on formal learning, policy-makers found it hard to embrace informal learning, even though this was recognised as an increasingly important aspect of learning in cities and communities.

We also exhanged some experience of the role of higher education in engageing with city and regional policy development, John pointing to the work of the Pascal PURE project.  There were interesting examples in Finland of local university campuses taking up very specific local -issue research for city agencies.

A third area touch on was over the development of reliable and responsive local labour market intelligence if learning opportunities locally were to be properly responsive to the needs of empoyers and the developng local economy.

John was able to introduce PASCAL's new research programme on learning cities and regions for the 21st century, and encouraged the mayors to consider participation in it.

This discussion linked with issues being explored in the PASCAL International Exchanges (PIE) programme, in the development of the EcCoWell city concept, and no doubt in the forthcoming PASCAL conference on Cities Learning Together later this year.