PPMI | Part of the Verian Group has begun work on a major study for the European Commission (DG EAC) that will map literacy initiatives and the organisations behind them across 36 Erasmus+ and Creative Europe programme countries. The study will build the evidence base for the future EU Literacy Coalition, a flagship action under the EU's Action Plan on Basic Skills.
The need is pressing: Across the EU, around one in four 15-year-olds struggles to understand a basic text, and roughly one in five adults score at the lowest levels of literacy. The Coalition aims to connect governments, schools, libraries, publishers, authors and civil society to reverse this decline and help foster a culture of reading, with particular attention to children and young people.
To inform the Coalition, our study will produce a comprehensive picture of who is doing what, where, and for whom across Europe. It applies a broad, lifelong-learning view of literacy spanning formal, non-formal and informal settings, and looks beyond the education and book sectors to youth work, culture and community-based actors. The work combines large-scale desk research with AI-assisted data processing, complemented by an online validation survey, in-depth case studies of effective initiatives, and a social network analysis that reveals how stakeholders are connected. Two participatory workshops with practitioners and policymakers will test and refine the findings.
The result will be a repository of literacy initiatives, a connected repository of stakeholders, and an analysis of the success factors, barriers and gaps in Europe's literacy landscape. These will offer the Coalition a clear, evidence-based foundation for deciding where it can have the greatest impact. The study runs through January 2027.
