• Literacy rates adults (15+) rose worldwide from 74% in 1990 to 86% in 2018 and from 45% to 64% in least developed countries.
• The youth literacy rate increased from 83% in 1985 to 91% in 2018, while the number of illiterate youth declined from 170 million to 115 million.
• Literacy is lowest in least developed countries and higher among males than females. In the most recent years for which data are available, young women accounted for 59 per cent of the total illiterate youth population.
• The ratio of female to male enrolment worldwide has risen from 81% to 97% since 1970. | Related Megatrends: Work; Inequalities
• Yet, globally, 123 million youth (aged 15–24) lack basic literacy skills – 61% of them young women. 
  | Related Megatrends:Work; Inequalities
• Some 40 million youth (15% of those aged 15-29) in OECD countries are NEETs (not in education, employment or training). | Related Megatrends: Work; Inequalities
• More than 617 million children and adolescents are not achieving minimum proficiency levels (MPLs) in reading and mathematics. Of the EU-27 and UK population aged 20–24 in 2018, an average 83.5% had completed at least an upper secondary level of education (for women, the average is 86.1%); one of the targets of the Europe 2020 strategy for education was to increase to 40% the proportion of 30–34 year-olds with tertiary education by 2020. The target was reached for the first time in 2018 with 40.7% of the population aged 30-34 in the EU completing tertiary education| Related Megatrends: Technology; Work; Education
• Unless major interventions, it is likely that SDG4 (Sustainable Development Goal on education) will not be met by 2030.
• The Education 2030 Framework for Action provides guidance to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 which aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”.
• EU policy strategy is the Council Recommendation on Common values, Inclusive Education, and the European Dimension of Teaching.

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An increasingly knowledgeable society is exponentially rising the amount and quality of knowledge that becomes ubiquitously available. Knowledge is becoming more accessible to everyone everywhere as never before.

• There is increased focus on creativity, continuous increase of intelligence, problem solving skills, tolerance, and interaction with the digital world; life-long learning becomes the norm. There is a now solid shift toward competences-based learning. See the Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning.
• Education is diversifying: there is growing peer-to-peer learning, increasing use of bite-sized learning in workplace and personal environments as well as in an increase of home-schooling; Blended learning is a main trend as well as customised, individualised learning. A prime reference is that of the EPSC “10 Trends Transforming Education as We Know It” (2017).
• Internet-based personalized education might increase the risk of "educational bubbles" - children only receiving information that fits their pre-existing knowledge and interest. | Related Megatrends:  Technology
• By 2019, the MOOC movement has reached 110 million learners (excluding China), with 13.5k MOOCs offered since the first MOOC appeared.
• There is a massive increase in OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) (over 6,000 MOOCs in 2015).
• In the next 5-10 years, online courses will be serving more learners than the combined provision of physical courses offered by the world’s universities.
  | Related Megatrends: Technology
• Digital competence developments are observed since very young age across Europe, mainly in family context and in an uneven and patchy way, depending mostly on the digital landscape available and on the digital knowledge in family.
  | Related Megatrends: Inequalities; Work
• With the aim of establishing a shared understanding of digital skills challenges within Europe and beyond, the European Commission has developed three European Digital Competence frameworks: DigComp, DigCompEdu and DigCompOrg.
• The entrepreneurship competence is increasingly recognised as a competence for life, relevant to personal development and fulfilment, finding and progressing in employment, as well as initiating new ventures ranging from community campaigns, social enterprises to new start-up businesses.
• The privacy paradox is intensifying, as the relation between maintaining privacy while "volunteering" increasing amount of private data online becomes more complicated. This sets a significant media literacy challenge for children as well as for educators.
• Socioemotional education and learning (SEL) is will transform the curricula. This is due to the rapid fluctuation of the labour market needs, with an increased demand of the so-called soft skills and the understanding of the role of education for self-fulfilment and satisfaction.
• The above-mentioned Recommendation on KCs for LLL (2018) includes the key competence Personal, Social and Learning to Learn as one of the main competences citizens should have in the context of a LLL society.

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The meaning and scope of education are shifting towards self-fulfilment, rather than seeking qualification for a job. Education is increasingly shifting from obtaining degree to developing skills and specifically soft skills (non-cognitive skills, human skills etc.). The advent of Artificial Intelligence in every sector and specifically in Education will change the learning and teaching paradigm.

• If large changes in education systems are not carried out, some believe that the world might face 50% technological unemployment by 2050.
• By some popular estimates, 65% of children entering primary school today might be working in job types that don’t yet exist. 
  ​| Related Megatrends: Technology; Work
• The technological revolution is causing significant changes in the world of work due to increased automation Some jobs are at risk of being lost to machines. Others are being transformed and new ones are being created. As a result, the skills we need are also changing.
• The projected talent (degree holders) shortage could be 2.2 million in France by 2020, and 10 million in Germany by 2030. In the ICT sector, the number of practitioners in the EU is estimated to reach some 8.7 million by 2020, with a potential gap between supply and demand of some 500,000.
  | Related Megatrends: Technology; Work; Inequalities

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• In the 2030s, humans might become hybrids with augmented intelligence, with the brains connected directly to the cloud via nanobots made from DNA strands; in the 2040s, thinking might be predominantly non-biological; by 2050, parts of the world could become augmented geniuses. These will radically change the role and methods of education and could potentially further increasing the intelligence divide between the have- and have-not knowledge people. | Related Megatrends: Technology; Work; Inequalities
• The EU, US, China, Israel, and Japan have major research projects attempting to understand the brain. Future results could address brain diseases, improve brain functioning, lead to better computer designs, and create new brain-computer synergies.
• Increasing intelligence becomes a goal of many national education systems. | Related Megatrends:Technology; Work; Inequalities

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