As the project was approaching its final phase, the world was struck by a global pandemic forcing the use of digital technologies as the only viable option for learning across the curriculum. The results of the initial endeavours varied widely, not just between countries but also on a local level with Education authorities in the UK offering varying levels of provision. In RCT where the coordinator is based, live video conferencing was initially banned entirely whereas in neighbouring Cardiff secondary school lessons utilised meeting platforms to connect with students.Member states are still adapting their existing ICT curriculum to include coding and computational thinking throughout compulsory schooling or implementing ambitious overarching digital competence frameworks, but understandably, the process is somewhat on hold in many places. The pandemic has created an additional major problem for those responsible for training teachers, in particular creating opportunities for continuing professional development. Much of the recent in-house training has focused on the basics of using platforms to deliver online learning and less on the content or pedagogy of the online learning. Just 6 months prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, the European Commission published a study which reported less than 1 in 5 students across EU28, Norway, Iceland and Turkey attended a school with access to high speed internet, that students overall, and particularly female students, rarely engage in coding/programming activities. The results also showed that most teachers engage in ICT training in their own time, with only only between 12% and 27% of European students being taught by teachers who participated in compulsory ICT training.Over the coming year, schools will gradually open back up and the situation relating to teachers' digital competencies will still remain an issue.Despite the so-called Digital Pivot and the increased use of technology platforms for delivering lessons there is still an unprecedented level of demand, the training of teachers still needs to get smarter and more efficient.Project Results1) A critical analysis of different strategic approaches together with tools to measure progression and quality to support those education professionals who are responsible for developing and implementing strategies for integrating digital technologies into the curriculum at all educational levels 2) A Trainers Handbook detailing and evaluating different modes and models of delivery and including guidelines for their implementation, examples of good practice, case studies etc3) A trainers tool kit of materials and resources, programme outlines, content and activity ideas.4) Recommendations and amendment to the above to allow the results to be transferrable to other education sectors, specifically VET and Adult Education.5) Establishing and facilitating a community of practice for those involved in helping teachers to deliver the new digital competences and helping them to integrate the use of technologies for learning in their classroom. The groups who benefit directly are staff development professionals, teacher trainers, institutional managers and those responsible for strategy at regional or consortia level. It is estimated that there are about 400 direct beneficiaries and 1200 indirect beneficiaries who are teachers and teaching support staff. The main project outputs are;A toolkit comprising a team-map planning chart, a digicompedu linked route map with in-built self reflection and evaluation questions, a review of policies and strategies, a mind map of policies and strategies, a detailed assessment and planning tool with incorporated quality assurance, and a self-assessment tool for educators, A handbook for teacher trainers and other staff with responsibility for providing CPD in digital learning technologies and related areas. A web based bank of downloadable open education resources (OERs) for teacher education.A series of five special reports to address the specific challenges and opportunities for promoting digital competences in the field of VET. Adaptations and comments on the outputs relating to the field of Adult Education The project team worked closely with regional and local staff and curriculum development agencies together with Local Advisory Groups. The immediate impact is the increased capacity to provide high quality staff development at local level and the longer term impact will be better integration of technology enhanced learning in the classroom.

Global Local looks to explore and challenge the idea that outward mobility is only accessible to a minority of young people from privileged backgrounds. Whilst many opportunities for mobility exist within Erasmus and HE, the problem is that these experiences are far too daunting for students who have never left their local area. Indeed many teachers working in disadvantaged areas simply dismiss participation in mobility programmes as unsuitable for their students, since even encouraging them to travel to the next city presents a major challenge. For many leaving the familiarity of their (often quite small) local area for any kind of learning or work opportunity is a stumbling block with multiple barriers (financial, emotional, social) to overcome. Such attitudes usurp any of the career development, confidence building and growth opportunities of mobility, failing to acknowledge it as a key part of transition for all students. This can have a particularly great impact on young people considering their options for further education and future careers. Part of preparing school students for FE/HE or work means developing their readiness to move away from home, so that the full range of training and employment opportunities are available to them when they reach key transition points. Teachers and career professionals in school need support in addressing the issue from an early stage so that they are able to inform both the young people and their main influencers (parents etc) of the personal and professional benefits of being able to thrive in another city, region or potentially another country. A step-by-step approach is needed to guide young people through different degrees of mobility, from going to the next city for an FE Open Day to eventually taking part in an Erasmus exchange. To achieve the project’s aims, Global Local looks to engage with two main target groups: education and career professionals and the young people they work with. At the very least 96 participants will be involved across the project’s research, 200 participants during piloting and a further 200 attending the launch events. In terms of young people, the project will develop resources for them to use independently which both provide a new, challenging dimension to their learning and helps them to better understand the potential career options open to them in the future. Alongside this, the project will look to develop support tools for education and guidance professionals which help to improve these practitioners’ skills and confidence when it comes to engaging with digital resources and promoting outward mobility (regionally, nationally and internationally). This will have a positive impact on the quality of teaching, helping to improve the impact of guidance sessions on students’ overall aspirations and learning outcomes.Partners will look to harness digital advancements, in particular, in the use of game-based learning, to develop an interactive tool which allows young people to immerse themselves in mobility in a way they never have before, all in the safety of the school environment. This will include engaging with different ways of overcoming barriers to mobility (e.g. finances, transportation, social/emotional). It will also offer a fresh perspective and an entry point into discussions around broadening horizons and raising aspirations more generally – either by understanding local, regional, national or international labour markets (e.g. how) or looking at the benefits of mobility in terms of self-confidence and personal development.Whilst the project looks to produce an approach that can be used in a variety of locations across Europe, each partner will use a local region as a test case. These interactive games will be complemented by a series of offline resources (e.g. case studies, best practices, lesson plans, media, guidelines for engaging with parents etc), which will both add value to the learning process and make sure that project resources can be used in a variety of contexts. The experiences of developing these tools will also feed into a teacher toolkit, which will be designed to allow education and career professionals from across Europe to both make the most of the project’s outputs in a blended learning approach with young people, and understand how they can develop similar resources in their own context.Thus, the focus of project outputs will be on positively engaging with the idea of travel and mobility as a key part of career transitions. The project will challenge stereotypes and attitudes (I/our students/child would never leave my/their postcode) and, as a result, young people will be both more confident about employment opportunities outside of their local areas and be better informed to make career and education decisions that may involve moving to another city, region or country.

Europe is becoming a learning society and citizens are required to constantly update their competences, not only with regard to the world of work but in an encompassing approach to participate in contemporary societies. Moreover, European societies face a rapid differentiation of educational pathways, opportunities and biographies. This increase in complexity from learners requires great effort into initiative taking, creativity, problem solving, risk assessment and decision taking, all of which requires learners to become stakeholders of their own learning process. It however has been demonstrated, that learner groups with a disadvantaged background or those remote from learning have great difficulties to take ownership of their learning, without being empowered. However, although a great deal of rhetoric about learner empowerment, adult education practice too often remains caught in traditional instruction methods, fixed curricula and pre-defined learning outcomes. It's in particular low achievers who suffer from this situation, because in the formal education system they often have made the experience that major parameters of their learning is out of their control, and thus never had the chance to develop a sense of ownership for their own learning. The PARTICIPATE partnership starts from the assumption that the impact on disadvantaged target groups can be greatly increased if education providers manage to adopt participatory approaches and methods, and this way support their learners to develop a sense of ownership of their learning and to become lifelong learners. The overall objective of the PARTICIPATE project is to promote participatory methods in adult education and, more specifically it will build a model for participatory design of learning outcomes. The PARTICIPATE project will identify and examine good practice in the field and, from them derive a generic model for the design of participatory evaluation and assessment of learning outcomes, whereby the adult learner is included in this process of setting their own outcomes and indicators. Instead of being initially presented with a final set of specific learning outcomes within an already agreed assessment framework, the learners are offered the opportunity to participate in determining how their course will be measured and evaluated. Complementary PARTICIPATE will promote participatory design of learning assessment, and support educators and practitioners on its implementation.The major target groups addressed in the framework of the PARTICIPATE project are migrants and refugees (Germany, Greece, Spain), traveller communities (Ireland) and Roma minorities (Romania) and adult education practitioners engaged with those target groups. A main result of the project will be the PARTICIPATE design model, which will reflect a) the elements and processes making a participatory approach, b) principles and guidelines for the participatory design of learning outcomes, c) recommendations on how the model can be integrated with existing adult education practice, as well as d) identification of capacities needed to effectively implement participatory design methods. The project will build a European community of practice, which shall help us a) to incubate the PARTICIPATE model in a collaborative setting and actively engage practitioners in the development process, b) to leverage the impact of the project through promotion and multiplying of project results, c) to continuously improve our work through critical debate with lifelong learning practitioners from outside the partnership, d) to identify and guide practitioners and organisations who would be interested in the application of our project results, and most importantly of all e) to ensure the sustainability of results. The partnership in all partner countries will organise focus groups, including adult learners from the different target groups. The purpose of the focus groups is to understand the perspective and needs of the target groups and involve them as stakeholders in the project design and implementation phase. The partnership in the course project will conduct 2 workshops, which will take place in Greece and Spain. The two workshops are described in detail, in Learning, Teaching, Training Activities.Last but not least the project will produce promotional materials and, promote the project and its results through a broad range of channels.The project is expected to have a significant impact on practices and attitudes of educational staff and practitioners. The participants in the course of the project will learn how to to include participatory approaches in course programmes for adults, and how to actively engage adult learners in the evaluation and assessment of learning outcomes. Moreover it is expected that the introduction of participatory methods positively affects the motivation of the target groups and, strengthens their sense of ownership for their learning.

"The aim of the CONNECT project was to apply the concept of connected learning to adult education and to test it in an urban context. Digital and urban learning resources should be linked in a blended learning approach. The target cities were Munich (Germany), Dublin (Ireland), Bucharest (Romania), Valencia (Spain) and Kallithea (Greece). During the development and testing phases, the partners worked together with local cooperation partners, including municipal and private educational institutions in the field of adult education, local action groups, migrant communities, non-governmental organizations and sports clubs. In the first phase of the project, a system model for the implementation of connected learning in the context of the city was developed, based on analyses of research publications and empirical field studies that were carried out in all participating cities and countries. The focus here was on informal learning. The results were summarized in a research report, which is available as an Open Educational Resource.In the next step, based on the model, the partners developed and tested urban platforms for self-organized, connected learning. The learning formats, activities and content differ in some cases significantly, as the initial situation in the participating cities or districts is very different and different target groups were addressed. In addition, tests have shown that connected learning can have different functions depending on the context in which it’s applied.In parallel to the piloting of the platforms, various learning topics were tested with regard to their suitability for networked learning. We started from 5 basic topics, which were then varied or supplemented on the basis of the test results. The results were summarized in ""Scenario Reports"". During piloting the facilitators played an important role. Their task was to support the learners in building personal networks and to accompany the learning activities of participants. The project partners for this purpose have developed a corresponding training concept and training materials and hereafter tested them with moderators. Finally, each partner institution created a good practice guide in which the good practices identified in the course of the project were documented. One assumption was that by expanding their networks and opportunities, learners not only acquire new knowledge, skills and competencies, but also identify themselves more strongly with the local community. It has shown that learners are ready to share their own experiences and knowledge if they have the impression that this knowledge also serves the common good. Learners from Kosovo, for example, who had acquired a coaching license in a sports club, spontaneously shared their experiences with others and, with the help of the “facilitators”, placed learning materials on the platform. Another example is the Irish platform, which has developed into a contact point for full-time and voluntary people in the NEIC district. The participants networked on the platform to exchange experiences and knowledge and to work together on upgrading their neighborhood. The CONNECT approach aims to change educational practice, from isolated forms of learning to learning in distributed networks. Teachers are at the same time moderators of personal learning projects and mediators of learning interests in and between learning networks. CONNECT has conducted “Facilitator” training courses for 32 people, equipping them with the skills needed to support adult learners in networked learning. For educational partners such as the state capital Munich and its affiliated educational institutions, but also for the Greek training provider IDEC, CONNECT serves as an experimental field to test connected learning and gradually integrate it into educational practice. According to the partner organizations, the CONNECT approach should also be used to attract new groups of learners who cannot be reached with conventional educational offers and forms. The department for education management in the education department of the city of Munich wants to take over the German platform as a permanent learning facility for its citizens. The Irish partner wants to use CONNECT as part of a national empowerment strategy, adressing uneducated target groups, such as ""Traveler Communities"". With the CONNECT approach, the Romanian partner has a new instrument with which informal learning communities in selected urban districts of Bucharest are to be addressed."

The STRENGTh project will focus on increasing Social and Emotional competence in career counsellors. Due to the ongoing deep economic crisis with sharply rising unemployment, the European labour markets are expected to change profoundly and in this respect, lifelong guidance is increasingly considered as pivotal in assisting individuals to shape and manage their careers throughout their lives. Therefore the preparation of career guidance practitioners for dealing sufficiently with highly demanding labour market issues is considered vital for providing quality and effective services in career guidance and counselling. As career counselling, is the interaction between a career/guidance counsellor and a person, and is mostly based on understanding clients’ requests, communicating effectively and empathizing easily with others, showing sensitivity to their moods, feelings, temperaments, motivations, understanding and managing other people and developing healthy personal relationships, it’s absolutely necessary for the counselor to have improved social and interpersonal skills, Social Intelligence Skills, in order to establish a successful professional relationship with the clients and be effective professionals.The STRENGTh project will examine, analyse and measure the factors that define and form Social Intelligence, with a special focus in the field of career guidance professionals, who face enormous current and future challenges in converting knowledge and ideas into products and tailor made services according to their client’s diverse needs, for social and economic benefit. The aim of the project is to propose concrete solutions to train a new generation of socially aware career guidance professionals, able to develop and use interpersonal and social intelligence skills, in order to successfully build professional relationships and navigate diverse social environments. So the specific aims include the development of innovative methods and tools that enable career guidance practitioners in being more effective and improving their competences. The participants of the project are mainly guidance practitioners and their supervisors (700 persons) and other 200 experts and stakeholders in Career Guidance.The STRENGTh project will foresee the development of 5 Intellectual Outputs.The first intellectual output is a toolkit for developing Social and Emotional Intelligence skills, which will be developed according to a revision of the state of the art in International scientific literature and especially focusing in the research produced in partner countries regarding Social and Emotional Skills, and on other hand, presenting the most effective methods used for the improvement of those skills. The second intellectual output is a Report on Training Needs of Career Counselors, which will conclude on the main Social and Emotional skills that the practitioners need to develop so as to improve their efficacy as professionals. Based on the findings and conclusions reached by the Intellectual Output 1 ( Toolkit for developing S.E.I.skills) and Intellectual Output 2 (Handbook on needs), a program with specific techniques focusing on communication, persuasion, networking and several other skills that will evoke from the IO2 will be developed and later tested to Career guidance practitioners. The fourth IO will include an online program based on several strategies, exercises for improving 3 main social intelligence skills and additional information for counsellors. Lastly, the partnership will produce as IO5 a useful guide for career counsellors and trainers to improve their Social Intelligence Skills and to use it with the persons to whom they offer their services. The guide will be a practical, “how-to-do” guide for guidance practitioners so that they can implement the developed methodology and train themselves how to evaluate the level of Social and Emotional Skills and how to improve those skills so as to increase their efficacy as counsellors. The Project Coordinator will adopt a methodology based on participatory management approach in order to empower each partner and to comply with the commitments on which partners agreed during the project design phase and at the following check points. Each Intellectual Output will foresee a coordinator of the IO and the involvement of all partners.The STRENGTh project results will lead at improving competences and skills of guidance practitioners, so as to further assist their clients in better career decisions and career planning. Through the results of the project, the impact will be double : on the one hand the improvement of the competences and efficacy of professional practitioners and on the other hand the improvement of the employability and decision making of their clients.Regarding the general results, the project's expected results are in line with the strategic framework for education and training (Education & Training 2020 - ET2020) and with reference to othe