🌐 GLAD Newsletter: September 2025
🔷 This issue spotlights the European Commission’s Investing in Education 2025 report, setting out EU priorities for strengthening education and training through the European Pillar of Social Rights.
🔷 We also share inspiring examples of how effective governance is shaping adult learning in Moldova and Ukraine.
🔷 From the research world, we highlight new findings on public-private partnerships in education and what policymakers should know.
European Pillar of Social Rights and Investing in Education
Investing in Education 2025, the annual report of the European Commission’sLearning Lab on Investing in Quality Education and Training, shows how the EU’srevised economic governance and the Union of Skills and its emphasis on stronggovernance strengthen education investment opportunities in response todemographic challenges. The report identifies key EU-wide priorities that memberstates’ reforms and investments in education should address in addition to countryspecific reforms.
These include: enhancing social and economic resilience through the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights whose first principle concerns the right for everyone to have a good education and training throughout their whole life. Other priorities concern supporting the digital transition, and promoting growth-enhancing reforms that boost productivity and increase labour market participation.
The engagement of national, regional and local authorities, social partners and civil society is essential to the implementation of the Pillar.
🆕 A new Action Plan on the Social Pillar will be released in 2026 following a public consultation and a call for evidence launched in June 2025.
Effective governance - a decisive factor in the success of adult learning initiatives in Moldova and Ukraine
Adult learning is growing in Chisinau, Moldova and Mykolaiv, Ukraine thanks tothe efforts and recognition of authorities, community representatives includinglocal level adult learning organisations, and citizens of the power of learning fortransforming lives and societies.
👉This was the message of a recent joint event organised by the ETF and DVVInternational, Adult Learning progress and development in candidate andneighbouring countries. A governance perspective.
🔗Full details of the event are available here.
Latest from academia
Adamson, F., Taneja, A., & Walker, J. (2025). Demystifying education public-private partnerships: What every policymaker should know.
Boulder, CO: International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization, National Education Policy Center.
Demystifying Education Public-Private Partnerships: What Every Policymaker Should Know
This insightful paper examines the rise of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in school management across the developing world often as market-based responses to state failure. Unfortunately, as the authors point out PPPs frequently underperform and cause harm. Their analysis explores how PPPs are negotiated, the risks involved, and how governments can exit ineffective arrangements with examples from Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. They show how PPPs may not always be the right choice and alternatives such as participatory governance, quality teacher training, teacher autonomy, and equitable funding might be more effective options.
The paper does not examine the VET sector, where public-private cooperation can be oriented to provision, e.g. joint course planning, work-based learning and equipment, and/or oriented to knowledge, e.g. skills needs assessment and skills anticipation. Some of the public-private cooperation in VET can take the form of PPPs, according to an ETF study.
👉 More information can be found here Thematic overview: Public–Private Partnerships For Skills Development a Governance Perspective | Open Space
🔗Read more here
KEY EVENTS
📅 The ETF and DVV International will co-host the High-Level Round Table on 18-19 November 2025, Turin, Italy on “A Framework To Drive Adult Learning Reforms. Advancing lifelong learning in the context of EU accession and neighbourhood.”
🔜 More details will follow soon on OpenSpace and the ETF website.
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