High-quality education is a key driver of economic growth and social progress. Despite large investments in education over the past few decades, the quality of education in some EU countries has stagnated or even deteriorated. Marginalized populations are particularly vulnerable to the negative consequences arising from inadequate educational policies. Understanding the efficiency and (cost-)effectiveness of investment in quality education is crucial for allocating resources to where they could have the largest economic and social impacts. The EFFEct research project has been established as an impact-driven initiative that aims to provide evidence-based policy recommendations to improve the quality of education. By investigating the effectiveness and efficiency of education systems and specific policies in EU countries by using (quasi-)experimental evidence, EFFEct advances knowledge in several critical areas, including diversity, equity and inclusion; teachers, trainers and digital transition; instruction and (adult-)learning. EFFEct has four interrelated objectives. Objective 1 offers novel insights on diversity, equity and inclusion by investigating targeted programs for disadvantaged students as well as religious and elite schools. Objective 2 investigates how teacher shortages can be mitigated and examines the role of digital environments. Objective 3 evaluates policies related to instruction, admission standards, and upskilling and reskilling of adults. Finally, objective 4 analyzes how the efficiency of EU educational systems has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic and establishes the main policy levers and qualitative insights that may explain efficiency changes. EFFEct brings together a multidisciplinary research team of economists, sociologists, (neuro-)psychologists, teacher trainers, education scientists, mathematicians, and sustainability and operational research experts from four European research universities, a research institute and a NGO.

The study will address significant gaps in the understanding of skills deficiencies in Europe – i.e. the extent, causes, and implications of skills shortages and skills gaps. Skills shortages refer to where employers face difficulties recruiting people from the external labour market because applicants lack the skills, qualifications, or experience sought. Skills gaps refer to the extent to which organisations’ workforces lack the skills required to meet their business goals. There is a tendency to think that skills shortages and skills gaps will disappear over the medium to long term, so they do not require policy interventions. The evidence suggests otherwise. Shortages and gaps do not clear quickly enough, certainly from a policy-making perspective, with negative consequences for individual workers, companies, and, in aggregate, the economy as a whole. This has the potential to damage organisational performance and productivity. It is thus important to measure skills shortages and gaps, locate where they arise (or are anticipated to arise) with respect to jobs, sectors, and countries affected, and analyse their causes and means of mitigation. The study will provide a conceptual review of skills shortages and gaps, and devise a means of measuring their incidence and the extent to which they are likely to arise in the future as a consequence of key changes in the economy (notably digitalisation). The study will provide a methodology for identifying the extent, causes, and implications of skills deficiencies in Europe. A series of indicators will be devised, including a Skills Shortage Index, which can be incorporated in a software tool for use by those responsible for labour market skills intelligence at national and pan-European level. The tool will be road-tested by working with those responsible for producing labour market skills intelligence at national level to develop something that provides a valuable addition to that already produced.

The project ‘ALFIRK – Collaborative Networks for Migrant Parent Empowerment’ addresses the importance of including parents, and in particular migrant parents in school and educational processes of their children in order to tackle the high occurrence of early school leaving (ESL) and disparities in learning outcomes of migrant youth in European school systems. This project sought to address the many barriers to increased empowerment of migrant parents by developing practical tools for functioning migrant parent involvement and networking in six countries. ALFIRK was initiated by the SIRIUS Network – Policy Network on Migrant Education with the support of the European Commission through the Erasmus+ Program and builds up on the SIRIUS (2014) ‘Agenda on Migrant Education’.Migrant parents are often found to participate less in the school processes and the education of their children while at the same time many migrant students lag behind in educational achievements. Parental involvement in school and education matters of their children carries the potential to contribute to enhanced educational performance. Furthermore, parents with a migrant background are often not as well connected to local structures and information as parents without a migrant background. Strengthening parental networking and their inclusion in local structures carries the potential to further enhance their involvement in the education of their children.Before this background, ALFIRK addresses barriers in increased parental empowerment in education processes, particularly among migrant parents, by:•Analyzing patterns of migrant parental involvement, parental networking, and barriers in parental involvement and empowerment at case study schools in six EU countries;•Identifying practical tools and good practices for migrant parental involvement and empowerment in order to enable schools to improve their strategies for migrant parental involvement;•Developing online tools to enable migrant parents to easily access information about school and education systems in EU countries and to network and exchange information among each others.This is implemented through three outputs:1) A qualitative study on the experiences of Migrant Parents.2) A toolkit for good practices in migrant parental involvement in education3) A migrant parent empowerment collaborative platform.In the long term, ALFIRK aims to empower migrant parents at three levels: •The family level, which reflects parents’ ability to manage issues of the family within the social context, •The service system level, which reflects the degree to which parents are able to effectively work with the school system, •The community/political level, which reflects parents’ advocacy for improved services for migrant youth in general.The collaborative approach is reflected in the project name “ALFIRK,” which means “the flock.” The project ran from September 2015 to August 2018; it was coordinated by the european forum for migration studies – efms (Germany): The partners were Multi Kulti Collective (Bulgaria), Risbo (the Netherlands), Leeds Beckett University (United Kingdom), Economic and Social Research Institute (Ireland), Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain), and Migration Policy Group (Belgium).

TRAILS proposes a holistic approach to identifying the conditions for skills gaps and shortages across European countries and to contributing to policy actions. Its approach involves all conceptual and theoretical models of optimal skills match and utilization by workplaces, new methodologies for measuring skill gaps, and understanding optimal ways to skills upskilling and reskilling. It involves novel primary datasets, state-of-the-art big datasets from administrative records matched to firms and workplaces, innovative inquiries with large secondary datasets that are merged with taxonomies and other sources to enable pathbreaking analyses, field and stated-preference experiments, along with boost samples of groups of particular interest, such as platform workers and other stakeholders. All these elements will produce a canvas that enables a new framework for identifying the conditions and the elements required for the development of skills matched to the needs. It will allow the inspection of relevant behavioural, societal, and cultural dimensions affecting participation and choice of training and learning programmes by individuals. Moreover, the project will propose aims and objectives for basic and transferable skills that are seen as most conducive to European labour mobility towards the green and digital jobs of the future. Finally, the project will propose ways to optimize the usage of new technology-enhanced ways of bridging the gap between labour supply and demand in matching skills to needs. Via the usage of AI methods and the large-scale piloting, the project will propose ways that empower skills profiling and intelligence in ways that raise awareness of training programmes matched to the needs of individuals and the jobs of the future for European labour markets. Ultimately, a TRAILS’s web-based tool will be developed to bring together new datasets and insights for policy makers and to raise citizens’ awareness regarding transferable skills and training p