SKILLS, Several Keys In Learning to Learn Skills.

Traditionally, learning has been aimed at the acquisition of knowledge, which has caused that social sectors with special difficulties –personal or social- had serious limitations to acquire, update, complete or improve their profile. Training of educators and trainers has followed the same process. This has been identified as the main difficulty in order to develop education for a society in which knowledge are updated continuously and very quickly (Implementation of “Education and Training 2010” Work Programme, Working Group B “Key competences” Analysis of the mapping of key competency frameworks, November 2004): the classroom can no longer provide the person with the large amount of knowledge which shape the work, personal, social… worlds. This causes that the educator must focus on teaching to learn and teaching to transfer knowledge and skills between fields (personal, professional, educational).

The Key Competences for Lifelong Learning –A European reference framework suggests how necessary it is to consider that “the differing needs of learners should be met by ensuring equality and access for those groups who, due to educational disadvantages (…) need particular support to fulfil their educational potential (…) Key competences are those which all individuals need for personal fulfilment and development, active citizenship, social inclusion and employment (…) The 3 basic competences are an essential foundation for learning, and learning to learn supports all learning activities”. Although learning to learn is admitted to be the basis for all those learnings, KC5 is the one on which trainers have the least training –they are experts in their respective fields of knowledge but not so much in learning strategies- and the least approached one in an innovative way for disadvantaged groups. It is also the least developed one with regard to methodologies and resources for the classroom (Eurydice studies on education in Europe support this statement).

In the partner countries –IT, PL, UK, FI, ES- the development of KC5 for disadvantaged sectors is poor and more is needed: more didactic innovation that gives new strategies to individuals who distrust their learning capacities in particular and the educational system in general, and more and better training for trainers. For instance Poland (Ministry of Education and Sport-MENiS, Strategy for Development of Continuous Education until the Year 2010. 2004) has included the concept of Lifelong Learning into the ongoing reform of the education system. “The main goal of the STRATEGY is to outline the directions of development of continuous education in the context of the concept of lifelong learning and the formation of a knowledge based society”. The strategic goal is providing support and modelling development of personality, stimulating innovation and creativity of an individual. At the same time, in some partner countries –FI, UK- there are bodies and institutions devoted to developing and/or assessing learning skills (The Basic Skills Agency, Assessing learning to learn Finish framework); there is also the example of the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEF) which describes levels of mastery in foreign languages and its principles. These references can be extended to develop and measure the learning to learn competence and the project has them into account when establish objectives and assessing its innovation level.

All partner countries, when identifying the future challenges (Analysis of the mapping of key competency frameworks, November 2004), identify the need to improve their systems with regard to competences.