Education Policy Outlook 2025

Reader’s guide

This report serves as a comparative handbook for policymakers, analysing how countries are building more coherent lifelong-learning systems. It supports the implementation of the 2022 OECD Education Ministerial Declaration on Building Equitable Societies through Education, by identifying policies that help individuals develop the will, skills and means to engage in learning throughout life. It also contributes to policy dialogue across OECD and partner economies by translating international evidence into actionable insights.

Purpose and scope

The Education Policy Outlook 2025 examines how countries can design and sustain lifelong-learning policies across four critical moments in the learning journey: early childhood, early to mid-adolescence, mid-career, and approaching retirement. These are stages when well-timed policy action can have particularly high and lasting returns for individuals and societies.

Analytical framework

Each chapter applies the Will-Skills-Means framework, which captures key conditions supporting people to become lifelong learners:

• Will – learners’ motivation, socio-emotional wellbeing, curiosity and agency;

• Skills – foundational, transversal and digital competences that sustain learning;

• Means – the environments, resources and opportunities that make participation possible.

Chapter structure

Each chapter follows a systematic analytical structure:

Introduction: situates the critical moment in context and highlights its relevance for lifelong learning.

Relevant insights from international evidence: summarises cross-country data and research.

Policies for strengthening the will, skills and means for lifelong learning, organised into:

• Strategic design choices – how systems align aims, delivery mechanisms, actors and resources to translate intent into practice;

• Fostering the will for lifelong learning – policies that strengthen motivation, wellbeing and learner agency;

• Developing the skills for lifelong learning – policies that build foundational, transversal and digital competences;

• Creating the means for lifelong learning – policies that improve access, resources and enabling environments.

Considerations for the future: synthesis of key trade-offs, blind spots and lessons for strengthening coherence and resilience.

This structure provides analytical consistency across critical moments while allowing flexibility to reflect each moment’s specific context and policy priorities.

How to use the report

Readers can approach the report in two complementary ways:

• Sequentially, to follow how lifelong learning evolves from early childhood to later adulthood; or

• Selectively, by consulting individual chapters or specific pillars most relevant to their national priorities.

The common analytical structure and terminology across chapters enable easy comparison and cross-reference, supporting both whole-system reflection and stage-specific analysis.