The overall objective of the project is to contribute to the improvement of policy development in education and training in Europe through the setting up of a stable and effective network of experts working on the social aspects of this field. The network should fulfill the following criteria:

• It should be made of least eight experts who are active researchers;
• the composition of the network should reflect a good gender and geographic balance of European countries;
• all experts should possess a high standard of scientific excellence, be well-published, recognised and respected for their work and with a very good feel for the policy issues involved;
• their main research interests and work should be in the sociology of education and training;
• they should have expertise spanning several disciplines, ideally including educational and social inequalities and disadvantage, pedagogy, and psychology, and covering all sectors and levels of education and training, both formal and non-formal within a lifelong learning perspective;
• they should have a good understanding of the broader issues in the social sciences, the interconnections between education and other fields of social policy and the economic aspects of education and training;
• they should have experience of comparative research in education and training, multidisciplinary social research and of working close to both practice and policy development.

Deadline: 25th August 2006

Network of experts in the social sciences of education and training