GLOBAL EXPERIENCE OF ESTABLISHING NEW STANDARDS IN EDUCATION: THE CASE OF «GLOBAL NETWORK OF LEARNING CITIES» AND PERSPECTIVES FOR UKRAINE

Recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, boosted online learning, and under current conditions, many new opportunities for learning and self-improvement appeared in society. City development has been promoted in many spheres of public activity because of co-learning in the communities, and many more unresolved issues need the attention of the decision-makers, influencers, community leaders, educators, etc. The work is devoted to analyzing the essence of forms of education – formal and informal, and the need for their combination to increase the level of education for every member of society. One of the core ideas of the research is the preliminary analysis of implementation outcomes for the Learning Cities Approach. This project is analyzed through the lens of social welfare assessment. The project UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC) is an international policy-oriented network that enables sharing of best practices and ideas for city development. This research is mostly an overview and analysis of the functioning of the different clusters of the UNESCO GNLC Strategy. The study of the characteristics of these clusters is necessary for further understanding of their practical use, opportunities for replication at different levels, and possibilities of implementation of some of the ideas in the educational process. The methodology of the research is a literature review, historical review, comparative analysis, and content analysis. The research is designed as follows: the overview of the current state of the project, the accumulation of recent findings of studies related to lifelong learning at different levels, the classification of these findings by their scope, and the revealing of the current and promising direction of further development. The main contributions of the research are that the system of approaches and actors in lifelong learning is schematically performed, the approaches to lifelong learning are classified by their scope and scale, and field of knowledge, and linked to educational leadership hypothetically.