Today's policy challenges – from AI-driven labour market change to demographic ageing and social cohesion – depend on people's capacity to learn continuously. Yet our international data collections on lifelong learning still provide only fragmented snapshots. Educational surveys rarely follow learners across the life course or connect with adult learning surveys. As for adult learning surveys, they concentrate on certain age groups, particularly adults between 25 and 64, overlook learning before and after those years, rely largely on cross-sectional surveys, and privilege labour-market outcomes over broader benefits such as health, civic participation and wellbeing. Most importantly, they struggle to capture where learning increasingly takes place: in workplaces, families, communities and digital environments.
The instinctive response is often to ask for better surveys or more indicators. That is necessary, but insufficient. What is needed is a different conceptual lens. Rather than treating lifelong learning as an extension of formal education, we should start from the premise that learning occurs across the life course and across many contexts, only some of which are institutionalised. Schools and universities remain important, but they are only one part of a much larger learning ecosystem.
This is why the conceptual framework proposed in this report deserves attention even beyond its immediate recommendations. It reframes lifelong learning around learning systems rather than education systems, and argues that measurement should follow this broader perspective. By organising analysis around the interaction between the demand for learning, the supply of learning opportunities and the mechanisms that coordinate the two, it shifts the focus from educational participation and its learning outcomes to understanding how societies enable people to keep learning throughout their lives.
Such a shift stretches beyond what current statistical systems can readily deliver. But that should not be seen as a weakness. Blue-sky thinking has an important role in public policy: conceptual frameworks often shape what becomes measurable tomorrow. International statistics have repeatedly evolved by first redefining what matters before building the instruments to observe it. This report seeks to do the same for lifelong learning.
It offers practical directions rather than a fixed blueprint. Extending surveys across the full life course, linking longitudinal datasets, integrating administrative records, developing portable learning records and exploiting new analytical techniques all represent plausible pathways towards a richer evidence base. None will be straightforward. But feasibility should not constrain the underlying vision of what societies need to know if they are to govern learning effectively. Only by making learning visible across the life course can countries know whether they are truly becoming lifelong learning societies.