Staff Involved: Mike Osborne, John Tibbitt, Pat Davies and Jose Gines Mora Ruiz

Main Contractor: Public Policy and Management Institute, Vilnius (Lithuania)

Subcontractors: Research voor Beleid (Netherlands); Centre for Strategy and Evaluation Services (UK); Institute for Education and Socio-Economic Research and Consulting (Germany) and PASCAL.

Funder: European Commission

Value: €741,150

Summary

By 2010, the current Lifelong Learning Programme of the EC will have run for three years. In order to improve the continuation of the programme, and to provide recommendations for the successor programme (2014–2019), the Commission has launched an interim evaluation.

The objective of this evaluation led by Public Policy and Management Institute in Vilnius is twofold, namely to provide a retrospective and a prospective analysis.

• The retrospective analysis will take the form of an interim evaluation of various aspects of the implementation of the LLP and the results achieved;
• The prospective analysis will examine the strengths and weaknesses of the Lifelong Learning Programme as well as providing recommendations on the continued programme implementation of the current programme and the programme design for the successor programme.

The interim evaluation will assess the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the implementation of the Lifelong Learning Programme and analyse the results achieved so far. By doing so, the evaluation will assess the strengths and weaknesses of the programme design and generate recommendations for the continuation of the programme and for the successor programme, for which the Commission will submit a draft proposal in the first semester of 2011. The evaluation covers the period from 2007-2009 and will include analysis of the overall programme as well as its sub-programmes.

The European Commission identified the following key evaluation issues:

• Relevance (including coherence and Community added value);
• Effectiveness (including contribution to global objectives);
• Efficiency (including cost-effectiveness).

Under each evaluation issue the technical specification listed a number of evaluation questions. These evaluation questions suggest that this interim evaluation should be seen in the light of the decision to integrate previous generations of the education and training programmes into one programme.

The framework for analysis is based on the logic of Kirkpatrick’s four levels of training evaluation. This model entails four levels, moving subsequently from the first to the fourth level as follows:

1. Reactions of the participants
2. Their knowledge, skills and competences
3. The application of this knowledge, skills and competences in civic, social and employment terms
4. Training results for an organisation.

PASCAL supplies a senior evaluator for the evaluation, Mike Osborne assisted by John Tibbitt, and specialist experts, our associates Pat Davies and Jose Gines Mora Ruiz. Pascal's work focuses on the Jean Monnet Programme and the Transversal Programmes.

Outputs

The output of this intensive work is

• An Inception Report laying out the logic for the Evaluation;
• Case Studies of the main parts of the LLL programme: Comenius, Leonardo, Grundtwig, Erasmus and Jean Monnet as well as the Transversal Programme;
• A final report.