On September 16, 2025, we have held our Final Conference at the Fundação Cidade de Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal. During the Final Conference titled “From Learning to Living: Co-creating education quality across European regions”, we have presented and discussed our key findings and insights with renowned experts in research and policymaking.
The Final Conference was opened by the Dean of the Institute of Education, University of Lisbon, Professor Luís Miguel Carvalho who underscored the importance of addressing the pertinent issue of educational quality and congratulated the project for achieving great results with wide-ranging implications for policy and research. The local host, professor Natália Alves (University of Lisbon), has greeted all participants of the conference and gave an overview about the upcoming events to enable a smooth and enjoyable event.
In his turn, the project coordinator Professor Marcelo Parreira do Amaral (University of Münster) has highlighted the significance of education for democratic societies, emphasising that if learning becomes a positional and transactional good, then so does living. If all that cannot be quantified and measured, especially in education, continues to be marginalized in favour of a mode of continuous competitive individuality, the European idea of an open, democratic, diverse and collaborative society will ultimately fail. In that regard, the conference was meant to call for action, to re-examine and re-think education, to uphold the dream of an inclusive and just European Community.
Professor Gert Biesta (Maynooth University) held the keynote during the conference and addressed two interconnected issues. First, he argued that while learning used to be a civic right, it nowadays becomes more of a duty that turns structural and political issues into problems for individual learner to solve. Second, he diagnosed the rise of a new perfectionism in education that creates an urge to measure and assess success in order to uphold the idea of a completely fair and equally accessible system that, in reality, cannot keep its promises. The inspiring keynote laid the ground for the further discussions during the event, in particular during the European Policy Roundtable.
In the next session, Jozef Zelinka and Marcelo Parreira do Amaral (both University of Münster) have presented CLEAR’s main objectives and research design. The project’s approach aimed to explore the interactions of the various factors, actors and spaces involved in the construction of learning outcomes, with a focus on the regional and local levels. CLEAR engaged young people and educational stakeholders in sixteen EU regions and identified key drivers of educational (under‑)achievement in order to formulate recommendations for educational policymakers, practitioners, and researchers. The project’s conceptual design combined the theoretical frameworks of Life Course Research, Intersectionality and Spatial Justice, and successfully implemented its Transversal Participatory Approach in form of several local Innovation Forums, empowering European youths as well as local practitioners of education to let their voices be heard, bringing forth previously untapped sources of knowledge and information. In total, the project has generated an impressive amount of quantitative and qualitative data that enabled us to analyse and compare the processes of constructing learning outcomes.
In the afternoon, Jenni Tikkanen (University of Turku), Xavier Rambla (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Eduardo Barberis (University of Urbino Carlo Bo), and Cristina Cavallo (CODICI Cooperativa Sociale) have presented the key project messages and findings. Jenni Tikkanen showed that the educational achievements of European youths are increasingly individualised by the (dis)advantages of their life courses, as educational and support systems often fail to recognise or tackle forms of inequality. Xavier Rambla stressed that academic success parallels socio-economic status and that particularly immigrant youth face higher barriers to reaching comparable learning outcomes. Eduardo Barberis demonstrated how spaces shape educational processes, often to the detriment of equity, concluding that learning outcomes are often space blind and calling for the empowerment of local voices in the policy design process. Finally, Cristina Cavallo reported on the contribution of participatory elements in research projects, summarizing that participation is a challenging but effective approach for researchers to gain new knowledge and insights as well as to empower local/regional voices.
With European Policy Roundtable joined by renowned policy and research experts, the Final Conference has addressed key policy implications and lessons learned in the CLEAR research project. In her opening remark, professor Nafsika Alexiadou (Umeå University) earmarked today’s education era in which the underlying question of educational policymaking is not how education systems fail young people, but how young people fail the education system. In his turn, professor Justin J. W. Powell (University of Luxemburg) derived three policy options based on CLEAR findings: 1) provide integrated cross-sectional support systems, 2) facilitate diversified learning pathways, and 3) implement measurement that includes qualitative oriented indicators. Finally, professor Tanja Sturm (University of Hamburg) described the concept of giftedness as one of the key elements embedded within the educational policies concluding that there needs to be a political will to challenge the today’s narrow understanding of education. The project Coordinator Marcelo Parreira do Amaral stressed that learning outcomes mean different things for different actors and that their dominant conceptualisation emphasises economic rationales over individual needs and desires of the learners. To challenge the current status quo and avoid producing more of the same data, it is necessary to think the future of education free from dominant political and economic imaginaries and face the contradictions (re)produced by them.
The Final Conference concluded with a Cultural Act by a group of women of African descent, who based their performance on cultural and social experiences of hardships related to their migrant background and low socio-economic status. In that way, the participants were reminded on the social reality inscribed in everyday decisions and educational desires.
