10 trends transforming education as we know it.
Date: 2019-11-20
Institutions: European Political Strategy Centre
Subjects: digital literacy, education policy, higher education, learning, school-industry relations

10 TRENDS
TRANSFORMING

EDUCATION AS WE

KNOW IT

2

From here

To there

Education frontloaded 
in early life

Learning 
throughout life 

Blackboard, 
books and papers

Whiteboard, digital and 
virtual reality supports

Academic literacy

New forms of literacy, 
including digital

Lecture-based, 
theoretical, 
passive learning

Experiential, immersive learning; 
interactive, participatory courses and 
seminars; labs and simulation games 
across all disciplines

Teachers as 
lecturers

Teachers as learning 
coaches and mentors

Standardised, mass 
approach to learning

Customised, 
individualised learning 

Discipline-based, focused 
on subjects and expertise

Competency-based, multi- 
disciplinary, project-based 
and digitally-enabled learning

Education mainly provided by 
a restricted set of state, 
religious or private actors

Diversiﬁcation of education 
providers and of training 
partnerships

Recruitment based 
on degrees 

Recruitment based on 
skills, talents and potential

Source: European Political Strategy Centre

3

TREND 1

•  Pre-school education boosts cognitive, character 

and social skills. The educational impact of 
early childhood education is already evident in 
teenagers: 15-year olds who attended pre-
school for one year or more score higher in the 
OECD’s Programme for International Student 
Assessment (PISA) than those who did not.
•  Early childhood education also has wider social 
benefits: it increases the likelihood of healthier 
lifestyles, lowers crime rates and reduces overall 
social costs of poverty and inequality. It enhances 
future incomes: full-time childcare and pre-school 
programmes from birth to age 5  have been shown to 
boost future earnings for children from lower-income 
families by as much as 26%.1

•  Early childhood education can ease inequality by 

enabling mothers to get back to work and support the 
household’s budget with a second income. In most 
countries, women’s participation in the labour market 
is clearly linked to the age of their children. Across 
Europe, 20% of women declare family responsibilities 
as the main reason for not working; lack of available 
care provision for young children is a primary reason.2

Early childhood education can lay the foundations for 
later success in life in terms of education, well-being, 
employability, and social integration. This is even more 
valid for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Investing in pre-school education is one of those 
rare policies that is both socially fair – as it 
increases equality of opportunity and social mobility 
– and economically efficient, as it fosters skills and 
productivity. But all these benefits are conditional on the 
quality of the education provided.

4

THE EARLIER
THE  BETTER
Education received in early childhood 
often shapes life prospects.

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

There are more than 32 million young children 
below the age of compulsory education who could 
access early childhood education in the EU but 
only about 15 million children have access.3

Across Europe, 1 in 4  children under the age 
of six is at risk of poverty or social exclusion 
and may need specific measures to support their 
educational needs.4

Investments in early education have the 
highest rate of return

Programs targeted towards 
the earliest years

Preschool programs

Schooling

Job training

l

a
t
i
p
a
c

n
a
m
u
h

n

i

t
n
e
m
t
s
e
v
n

i

o
t

n
r
u
t
e
r

f
o

e
t
a
R

0-3

4-5

School

Post-school

Source: Strong Start for America’s Children Act

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
GRADUATION
THE END OF
Learning how to learn is the most important skill of all.

IS NOT
LEARNING

2
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•  Most children entering primary school today are likely 

to work in jobs that do not yet exist. 

•  People change jobs – and even professions – much 
more often than a generation ago. The average 
European worker has gone from having a job 
for life to having more than 10 in a career. 

•  In an ageing society, with a workforce that is 
shrinking, Europeans will have to work longer. 
This means that those aged 40+ must be given 
substantial opportunities to update their skills. 

•  Less than 11% of Europeans aged between 
25 and 64 are engaged in lifelong learning. 
On average, only 6% of older workers (aged 55 to 
64 years old) currently participate in training and 
education schemes.5

A WORLD OF CHANGE  
Both younger and older workers stay less 
long with the same employer
Percentage of workers employed in the same company 
by number of years; breakdown by age

100 %
80 %
60 %
40 %
20 %
0 %

< 4 years
25-39 years old

5 to 9 years

>10 years
40-64 years old

29

28

42

18

29

53

1995

2015

67

13
20
1995

60

18
22
2015

Source: Eurofound

Demands for competences keep evolving. Investing in lifelong learning, including through more learning on the job, is 
the best promise to maximise future employability. Employers are already the biggest contributors to adult learning, 
accounting for roughly 50 % of all spending6, and workplace innovation is key to acquiring and updating skills. Education 
establishments also need to teach the advantages of continuous learning, and work out more attractive, open and 
inclusive ways to bring people in different phases of their life and professional cycles back into education.

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE

Towards universities that continue to educate beyond graduation and majors
A design team from Stanford University’s d.school7 worked with hundreds of students and administrators to 
explore how higher education could be reinvented to deal with the potential disruption posed by online learning, 
and respond to shifting needs and expectations of future employers and students. Their vision of the university 
of the future consisted of the following dimensions:
•  Open loop university: instead of limiting access to an academic setting in early adulthood, offer 
opportunities to prime-age adults to return, pivot careers and reconnect with the community. 

•  Paced education: rather than four-year courses structured around semesters and mainly based on lectures, 

offer phases of interactive learning, of varied length based on the needs of the students. 

•  Purpose learning: students would be asked to ‘declare a mission, not a major’ when starting their studies. 

For example, instead of saying that she is studying biology, a student would say that she is learning 
human biology to cure cancer, or drug addiction. Based on these, faculty and students would tackle societal 
challenges through ‘Impact labs’ around the world.

•  Competence hubs: Rather than separate academic departments and disciplinary-based teaching, the 
university would create multidisciplinary competency hubs mixing faculty, researchers and students in 
state-of-the art studio classrooms. Upon completion of their courses, graduates would receive a ‘Skill-Print’ 
summarising their skills, capabilities, talents, ability to learn and work on projects and with team-members, to 
be used with prospective employers, rather than a grade transcript.

1

 
3
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IS THE NEW

DIGITAL
LITERACY
Digital skills are becoming a core literacy.      
And young people are at an advantage.

A WORLD OF CHANGE 
Younger adults outperform older ones on 
digital problem-solving 

Basic digital 
problem-solving skills

Advanced digital 
problem-solving skills

Young adults 
(16-24 year-olds)

All adults 
(16-65 year-olds)

Sweden
Finland
Netherlands
Norway
Denmark
Australia
Canada
Germany
England/N.Ireland (UK)
Japan
Flanders (Belgium)
Average
Czech Republic
Austria
United States
Korea
Estonia
Slovak Republic
Ireland
Poland

60

40

20

0

20

40

60

Source: Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 2012 

•  Today, 93% of European workplaces use desktop 

computers and there is almost no job that does not 
require at least basic digital skills. To illustrate, in 
2016, half of European construction workers needed 
basic digital skills to perform their jobs.8

•  And yet, a vast majority of workplaces (88%) have 

not taken any action to tackle the lack of digital skills 
of their employees.9

•  For the first time in history, young people 
are more proficient at a sought-after skill 
than their older peers. This may have profound 
ramifications for labour markets that are still very 
much based on seniority and years of experience.
•  Unequal access to digital skills and technologies 

often overlaps with known cracks in social protection 
systems. And, with the rise of e-government, online 
shopping, banking and smart mobility, lack of basic 
digital skills may lock individuals not only out of 
work, but also out of society.

Just as numeracy and literacy skills are fundamental for 
every citizen, regardless of discipline and profession, so 
too are digital literacy skills. They will become necessary 
to succeed in today’s society and labour markets where 
ubiquitous connectivity is the new normal. 

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE

Poland’s digital natives

As part of its ‘Digital Poland’ strategy10, Poland has committed over 170 million euro by 2020 to develop and 
promote the digital skills of all Poles and all age groups. The strategy reaches out to people at risk of digital 
exclusion (people of 50+ age, from rural areas or with disabilities), while also supporting gifted ICT students/
programmers, through its e-Pionier programme that organises competitions to develop innovative solutions with 
wider value for society or public policy. In addition, all pupils starting from their first year of primary education 
already have compulsory coding lessons, while all Polish schools will be connected to fast broadband by the end 
of 2018. 

Poland has the fourth-largest pool of science graduates in the EU and a large workforce that is ‘digitally-
enabled’, or in other words able to perform digitally-related jobs. Poland’s IT sector has been growing fast in 
recent years, and the high availability of qualified professionals has drawn in multinational companies operating 
in the IT field. Estimates suggest that Poland could increase the economic value added of its economy by 13%-
22% by means of digitisation, so investing in its populations’ digital skills is the smart choice ahead. 

2

 
ARE NOT
HUMANS
THE ONLY ONES LEARNING
Humans will increasingly compete with 
machines to gain novel insights.

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THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE

Digital technologies are becoming ubiquitous 
even in the most traditional sectors
Intelligent devices, such as robots and drones, can 
help farmers to reduce crop losses caused by pests 
and diseases, while also decreasing agrichemical use, 
thanks to an earlier and more precise identification 
of crop enemies, enabling more precise chemical 
application or pest removal. Researchers predict 
drones, mounted with multispectral cameras, could 
take off every morning before farmers even get up, 
to identify pest problems so that the farmer could 
immediately address them. Similarly, wearable 
devices like those designed to track human health and 
fitness, are already being used to monitor cow fertility 
and detect early signs of illness, alerting the farmer 
via smartphone. As these technologies develop, so 
too will the role of the farmer, requiring new skills and 
certainly, digital competence.

Machine collaboration, human advantage
A recent comparison11 of the ability of expert doctors 
and AI software to diagnose cancer found that doctors 
continue to perform significantly better than software. 
However, it revealed that doctors performed better still 
when working with the software. This suggests that 
often AI does not replace human labour so much 
as it augments human capabilities.

Human-machine collaborations are also being 
investigated within the US Defence Advanced 
Research Projects Agency, which developed a ‘digital 
tutor’ system to train recruits for IT jobs in the US 
Navy. The digital tutor prioritises conceptual learning 
and thinking, only allowing students to move on 
after passing a review test. An assessment of the 
programme found that students assisted by the digital 
tutor outperformed classroom-based graduates – 
including some who trained for twice as long.12

•  Advances in high-performance computing are enabling 
an artificial intelligence revolution whereby machines 
can learn and take on ever more complex tasks.
•  As humans may increasingly find themselves 

competing with robots – and no longer only on 
routine tasks and low-skill jobs – educational 
systems need to refocus on the very skills and 
competences that have been central to the success of 
the human species in the first place: creativity, problem-
solving, negotiation, adaptability, critical thinking, 
working together, empathy and emotions, and cross-
cultural communication.

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS  
The skills that are easiest to teach are 
also easiest to digitise

Routine manual
Non-routine analytic

Non-routine manual

Routine cognitive

Non-routine interpersonal

70
65
60
55
50
45
40
35

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2006

2009

Source: OECD

High-performance computing enables 
machines to learn faster than ever
Time-to-
learn

Desktop 10-node 

Small 
GPU 
board

Large 
GPU 
cluster

Largest 
GPU 
cluster

spark 
cluster

Face 
recognition

Demand 
prediction

Machine 
translation

1 year

3 
weeks

20 
years

4 
months

4 
weeks

4-5 
days

12 
hours

4-5days 12 

hours

3 
hours

30 
minutes

2-4 
weeks

Notes: GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit. The computational 
power of GPUs allows for very fast calculations to be performed. 
Source: Gartner

3

 
5
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FROM STANDARDISATION
TO CUSTOMISATION 

From industrial-era mass education 
to individualised, digitally-enabled learning paths.

•  The industrial era required large numbers of workers 

with medium-level skills that could be acquired 
through standardised education systems. The rise 
of the knowledge-based economy saw a rise in the 
share of high-skilled occupations and a hollowing-out 
of medium-level skilled jobs. 

•  Modern-day economies are increasingly 
built around human capital (rather than 
industrial machines), and there is therefore a 
much stronger need to maximise everyone’s 
potential.

•  One-size-fits-all is unlikely to work in this new 

environment. Individualised learning paths can help 
students and workers to develop their innate talents 
and capabilities. 

•  Personalisation of learning requires a major 
change in the organisation and delivery of 
education and on-the-job learning, recentring it 
around personal progress. 

•  Up till now, high costs were considered as an 
insurmountable obstacle to scaling up such 
approaches because introducing a truly individual 
approach on a wide scale would mean hiring a 
significant number of teachers or learning coaches. 
Thanks to the emergence of new technologies and 
resources this may no longer be the case.

Learning can be transformed into a customised 
experience where individuals approach problems in 
their own way, acquire knowledge and skills at their 
own pace, maximising outcomes not only for the most 
talented students, but also helping to bring those 
lagging behind up to speed.

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE 

Personalising classroom learning using data analytics: the case of Singapore
With the average primary school class consisting of up to 40 pupils, teachers have typically found it hard to 
personalise learning for each individual student. 

The Government of Singapore is exploring innovative use of emerging technologies to enrich the learning 
experience and enhance the quality of teaching, enabling everyone to achieve their full potential.13

A key feature includes personalised learning using analytics, whereby data relating to the student – on school 
attendance, test results, participation in class, as well as self-assessments and teacher assessments – is 
gathered and combined to draw out crucial insights into students’ learning strengths and difficulties. The goal is 
to help teachers build better pedagogical programmes, empower students to take an active part in their learning, 
target at-risk student populations through personalised interventions, and assess factors affecting completion 
and student success.

4

 
SILOS

FROM
TO MASH-UPS

Towards interdisciplinary, 
technology-powered learning.

•  Local and global challenges, such as addressing 
climate change, food, water and energy security, 
health, or governing culturally plural societies, 
are increasingly complex and require 
interdisciplinarity. 

•  Multidisciplinarity is critical to bridging across silos 
in order to understand the causes and complexities 
of modern-day challenges and develop innovative 
solutions. 

•  It is at the intersection of different 

disciplines that novel insights emerge. 
Yet, in their overwhelming majority, Europe’s 
schools and universities remain organised in silo 
departments that do not sufficiently address the 
interconnectedness of today’s world. 

Technology can contribute to new ways of learning. It 
can be taught not only as a subject but rather used 
to convey the material learned in other subjects. For 
instance, learning about World War II becomes not just a 
study of history but an all-encompassing analysis of the 
sociological and economic angles, using technology to 
bring the subjects learned to life.

TREND 6

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE

Phenomenon-based and interdisciplinary 
teaching: the case of Finland

For the past 40 years, Finland has been one of the 
highest-performing school systems in the world, 
consistently ranking among the top scorers in 
the OECD’s Programme for International Student 
Assessment (PISA), which tests and compares the 
global performance of 15-year-olds in reading, 
maths and science literacy. PISA does not assess 
what students know; it focuses on how students 
apply theory and thinking in answering questions - so 
how they solve problems and apply what they know.

Holding this leading position for so long, however, has 
not made Finland complacent. The country is faced 
with fast-paced technological, demographic and socio-
economic changes that have led to concerns about 
increasing inequality and growing regional disparities. 
In 2016, it launched a national programme14 
aimed at improving primary and lower secondary 
education, further developing the phenomenon-based, 
interdisciplinary approach to teaching which the 
country has been experimenting with since the 1980s.

The new core curriculum for basic education 
focuses on transversal (generic) competences and 
works across school subjects; with collaborative 
classroom practices, where pupils may work 
with several teachers simultaneously – thereby 
also encouraging Finnish school teachers who 
have traditionally focused on a given topic to 
work together with their peers in school around 
multidisciplinary modules.

‘Finnish schools will continue to teach mathematics, 
history, arts, music and other subjects in the future. 
But with the new basic school reform, all children 
will also learn via periods looking at broader 
topics, such as the European Union, community 
and climate change, or 100 years of Finland’s 
independence, which would bring in multidisciplinary 
modules on languages, geography, sciences and 
economics,’ Pasi Sahlberg, Adjunct Professor at the 
Universities of Helsinki and Oulu, and leading figure 
in education policy, explains.

5

7
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MANY (NEW) FISH
IN THE

EDUCATION POND

Formal education provision is complemented 
by new entrepreneurial ventures.

•  The number of actors offering new platforms 

and methods for training and learning has grown 
exponantially; it is no longer limited to formal 
education establishments.

•  Over 800 universities already offer lectures on 

app stores, making it possible to learn anything, 
anytime and anywhere on a smartphone or tablet.
•  Digital technologies are a catalyst for personalising 
learning and making it an increasingly active and 
flexible learning experience. 

•  Peer-to-peer platforms enable people from very 

diverse parts of society and the world, to engage and 
learn from each other.

The growing diversity of actors engaging in education 
opens up numerous new opportunities for people to 
train and retrain at different moments in their lives. 
They can also help to reach out to individuals that would 
otherwise be excluded. 

New forms of partnerships between school actors, 
as well as between public and private actors 
are rejuvenating curricula, experimenting with new 
intersections between disciplines, and are already 
having an impact on employability.

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE

Tech entrepreneur spearheads Europe’s most successful coding school
In France, École 4215 is a free, teacher-less, self-organised university set up by a tech entrepreneur. It is 
schooling thousands of programmers through project-based learning and peer-to-peer learning. Entry is totally 
merit-based as students are selected through a one-month, elimination-based test that they must endure to get 
a place at the school, and the curriculum is ‘gamified’. Almost 80% of students have a job before they finish the 
course and 100% are employed by the end of it.

Going digital: Corporate training as a stepping stone to getting a job or a promotion?
More and more technology and software companies are creating learning platforms that individuals or 
companies can use to acquire valuable new digitial skills, providing certification that is globally recognised. 
The German multinational software company SAP has set up trainings through Enterprise MOOCs (Massive 
Open Online Courses) offering flexible and interactive courses on topics from procurement to how to collect, 
process and analyse data.16 Its learning hub provides education content to support self-paced e-learning, as well 
as access to a community of learners through expert-led live online sessions and collaborative social learning 
rooms. The added value of these trainings is that they offer certification programmes by area of focus and skills 
levels that are globally recognised by all SAP partner companies and customers. 

6

 
TRANSITION, 
INTERRUPTED

The link between formal school education 
and work is increasingly broken. 

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•  Formal education used to be a guarantee for a 

job. Today, this is no longer the case.

•  Europe has the most educated workforce in its history. 
Almost 40% of Europeans aged 25-39 hold a tertiary 
degree; just over a decade ago it was around 25%.17 
And yet, Europe struggles with persistently high 
levels of youth unemployment. Even though it has 
started falling, it is still more than double the overall 
unemployment rate, and far higher than in other 
developed economies.

•  The transition from school to work is being jilted as 

young graduates have a harder time than ever to find 
employment and the vast majority of those who get 
a job do so in very different fields from what they 
have studied.

•  Lack of skills is a common reason for entry-level 

vacancies. 40% of European employers report having 
difficulty finding people with the skills they need to grow 
and innovate.18 There is a twin crisis of high youth 
unemployment and shortage of skills.

Education providers are not engaging sufficiently with 
employers, which often makes them oblivious to the 
realities of the labour market: 72% of them consider 
the graduates adequately prepared for the job market, 
whereas this view is held only by around 40% of 
employers and youth. At the same time, employers 
rarely interact with universities and schools, so their skill 
demands have a low chance of being translated into 
curricula. In effect, a quarter of youth do not make a 
smooth transition to work.19

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS  
Young Europeans are at highest risk of 
being unemployed
Unemployment rate persons under 25 years old, 2007-2016 

In %

25

20

15

10

5

EU28

United States

Japan

7
0
0
2

8
0
0
2

9
0
0
2

0
1
0
2

1
1
0
2

2
1
0
2

3
1
0
2

4
1
0
2

5
1
0
2

6
1
0
2

Source: OECD

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE 

It’s a match!  
Technology-enabled tools with real-time information 
are already assisting schools and universities in 
offering career advice to their students. Personality 
tests can match students with potential university 
degrees and jobs based on their interests and 
personality type. From there, students are able to 
digitally map out different career paths and view 
information relating to the degrees and education 
levels of real people in these fields, average salaries, 
fluctuation of demand in the labour market. This 
enables them to make more informed decisions 
about their future studies and professional 
development, thus also contributing to addressing 
skills shortages and mismatches. 

7

 
TREND 9

LITERACY

MEDIA
WANTED

Critical thinking is needed to make 
democracies more resilient.

•  Close to 8 out of 10 middle school students 

cannot distinguish ‘fake’ news from real news.20 

•  With the emergence of automated accounts (bots), 
the spread of disinformation has never been easier. 

•  Through the use of algorithms, social media can 
create powerful echo chambers, entrenching pre-
existing beliefs, views, visions and animosities, 
and they can also be used as platforms for the 
dissemination of external influence. 

•  The fake news phenomenon is likely not a short-lived 
one and requires media-literate citizens to discern 
fact from fiction. 

Consensus-building, the backbone of democracy, 
becomes a daunting challenge in such an environment. 
Some remedies can come from the social media 
providers. But more importantly, our educational 
systems must integrate critical thinking, 
information evaluation and media literacy as 
some of the top skills for the 21st century from 
very early ages. 

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE

Teaching kids to think when they swipe  
and click
The Italian government, in cooperation with 
leading digital companies, has started an 
experiment to train students in public schools 
to recognise fake news and conspiracy theories 
online.21 Laura Boldrini, the President of the Italian 
lower house of Parliament, who has spearheaded 
the project with the Italian Ministry of Education, 
asserts that the web cannot be forfeited to the 
fringes, and that the government must teach the 
next generation of Italian voters how to defend 
themselves against falsehoods designed to play 
on their fears.

Four dimensions of media literacy for the 21st century

Critical Mind

Able to question, challenge, 
evaluate the meaning and 
purposes of written, visual 
and oral material and use it 
accordingly

Digital Literacy

Able to use digital 
technology, soﬅware, apps 
and networks for work, 
creativity and leisure

Media literacy in 
the 21st century

The Fundamentals

Able to read, write, 
compute, speak and listen

Visual Savviness

Able to identify information, 
including visual messages, 
analyse it, evaluate its 
quality and use it accordingly

Source: European Political Strategy Centre

8

GROWING
GLOBAL COMPETITION
FOR UNIVERSITIES
Europe may have invented universities, but 
now it is time to reinvent them.

0
1
D
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INCONVENIENT TRUTHS 
No EU27 universities in the top 25

Top 25
Universities 
in the world 
2016/17

1.     University of Oxford UK
2.     California Institute of Technology USA
3.     Stanford University USA
4.     University of Cambridge UK
5.     Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA
6.     Harvard University USA
7.     Princeton University USA
8.     Imperial College London UK
9.     ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of 
Technology Zurich Switzerland
10.   University of California, Berkeley USA
11.   University of Chicago USA
12.   Yale University USA
13.   University of Pennsylvania USA
14.   University of California, Los Angeles USA
15.   University College London UK
16.   Columbia University USA
17.   Johns Hopkins University USA
18.   Duke University USA
19.   Cornell University USA
20.   Northwestern University USA
21.   University of Michigan USA
22.   University of Toronto Canada
23.   Carnegie Mellon University USA
24.   National University Singapore Singapore
25.   London School of Economics and Political 
        Science UK

Source: The Times Higher Education World University Rankings

•  The world’s first universities were set up in Europe. 
But today, the highest ranking universities in the 
world are not European. Dominated by US-based 
institutions and a handful of UK universities, no 
EU27 university is in the top 25 worldwide.
•  At a time when European universities risk falling 

behind, bringing more world-leading researchers to 
Europe could bolster European research excellence 
and global competitiveness.

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE

Specialisation as a game changer

94% of graduates from the Turin-based 
Politecnico di Torino find employment within one 
year from graduation.22

The Politecnico managed to achieve this important 
result through a careful calibration between 
specialisation, partnerships and innovation:
It focused on engineering, establishing 
• 
strong partnerships with industry and local 
authorities, making the university a laboratory 
for experimentation of services;
It pursued a policy of internationalisation, 
establishing exchanges with universities in 
other regions of the world and agreements 
for interships with national and international 
companies.

• 

Turin is an example of how specialisation 
in institutional advantages - engineering 
knowledge as a service - can be turned into a 
competitive strength. 

9

 
Notes

1.  European Commission.

2.  European Commission, ‘Parents at work: Men and women participating in the labour force’, 2014, http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/files/

documents/140502_gender_equality_workforce_ssr2_en.pdf. 

3.  European Commission, Early childhood and primary education statistics, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Early_

childhood_and_primary_education_statistics. 

4.  European Commission, Children at risk of poverty or social exclusion, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Children_at_risk_

of_poverty_or_social_exclusion. 

5.  European Commission, Adult learning statistics, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Adult_learning_statistics. 

6.  German Institute for Adult Education, ‘Developing the adult learning sector’, 2013, http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/

education/.../adult-learning-g_en .pdf.

7.  Stanford d.school, https://dschool.stanford.edu/. 

8.  European Commission, 10 May 2017, ‘ICT for Work: Digital Skills in the Workplace’, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/new-

report-shows-digital-skills-are-required-all-types-jobs.

9.  Idem. 

10. Polish Ministry of Economic Development, Digital Poland Programme, https://www.polskacyfrowa.gov.pl/en/; National Centre for Research and 

Development, e-Pionier, http://www.ncbr.gov.pl/en/.

11. Knight, W., ‘More evidence that humans and machines are better when they team up’, 8 MIT Technology Review, https://www.technologyreview.

com/s/609331/more-evidence-that-humans-and-machines-are-better-when-they-team-up/, November 2017. 

12. US Defense Technical Information Center, ‘Accelerating Development of Expertise: A Digital Tutor for Navy Technical Training’, 2014, http://www.

dtic.mil/docs/citations/AD1002362. 

13. Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority, Personalised Learning Through Analytics, https://www.imda.gov.sg. 

14. Finnish National Agency for Education, http://www.oph.fi/english/current_issues/101/0/subject_teaching_in_finnish_schools_is_not_being_ 

abolished.   

15. Ecole 42, ‘Born to code?’ www.42.fr.

16. SAP Learning Hub, https://www.sap.com/training-certification/learning-hub.html. 

17. European Commission, Tertiary education statistics, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Tertiary_education_statistics.

18. European Commission, A New Skills Agenda for Europe, 2016, http://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=15621&langId=en 

19. McKinsey Centre for Government, ‘Education to employment: Designing a system that works’, January 2013 http://mckinseyonsociety.com/

downloads/reports/Education/Education-to-Employment_FINAL.pdf.  

20. Wineburg, S. and McGrew, S. (2016), ‘Why Students can’t Google their way to the Truth’, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/11/02/why-

students-cant-google-their-way-to.html.  

21. New York Times, ‘In Italian Schools, Reading, Writing and Recognising Fake News’, 18 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/world/

europe/italy-fake-news.html. 

22. Politecnico di Torino and Graduate Employability Rankings 2018, http://www.politocomunica.polito.it/en/press_room/press_releases/new_

materials_for_near_future_aeronautic_engines/qs_graduate_employability_rankings_2018_politecnico_di_torino_is_the_top_ranked_world_s_
leading_university_for_graduate_employment_rate. 

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Disclaimer
This publication has been prepared by the European Political 
Strategy Centre. The information and views set out in this 
publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily 
reflect the official opinion of the European Commission.

© European Union, 2017 
Reuse is authorised provided the source is acknowledged. The 
reuse policy of European Commission documents is regulated by 
Decision 2011/833/EU (OJ L 330, 14.12.2011, p. 39).

The European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC) is the 
European Commission’s in-house think tank. It reports 
directly to President Juncker and operates under his authority. 

The mandate of the EPSC includes: strategic analysis and 
policy advice, both short and long-term, to the President 
and the College on issues related to the policy priorities of the 
Juncker Commission (as defined by the President in his political 
guidelines presented to the European Parliament on July 15 
2014); and outreach to decision-makers, think tanks and civil 
society at large.

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