Access to learning opportunities and recognition of  learning  achievements is essential for all citizens for their daily life, working life, and life within the  community. In the revised Lisbon strategy the European Commission calls for Europe to refocus its approach to growth and employment. The  development of multi-purpose Adult Learning Centres (ALCs) is considered an important element in making lifelong learning opportunities easily accessible for all.

ALCs have a unique contribution to make in enabling individuals to achieve their personal development goals by identifying and exploiting all available learning opportunities – formal, nonformal and informal. Since the vast majority of what we know and can do is acquired nonformally and informally, the focus of the QUALC project is on ALC non-formal/informal facilitation and specifically on the quality of this facilitation. A strong European partnership is developing the first European Quality Assurance model for ALCs to enable them to continue to provide a first-class service to the 21^st century learner.

The mission statement of QUALC:

• Strategic: QUALC provides solutions (management, core, and support solutions) for Adult Learning Centres to satisfy their main target group: Adult Learners!
• Operative: Whatever their institutional nature and background: QUALC provides consulting and implementation services for Adult Learning Centres in their capability maturity process towards a set of agreed-upon operational principles, especially quality-driven criteria and processes.
• Global: QUALC provides and opens an international-oriented focus to Adult Learning Centres by embedding them into a European network of quality.

The approach of QUALC:

• Research and analysis about the nature of Adult Learning Centres in different European countries.
• Developing operational tools, processes and criteria and testing them in piloting activities all over Europe.
• Providing a meeting point as a forum for the purpose of consolidating adult learning requirements management on www.adult-learning.ning.com within the context of quality implementation.
• Organizing the 1st Trans-National Distance Conference on Quality in Adult Learning  for Adult Learners and the ALC networks in order to decide about an action plan for the future steps towards higher quality in Adult Learning.

The results of QUALC:

Video Summary of the 1st Trans-National Conference on Quality in Adult Learning from EFQUEL on Vimeo.