One of the greatest challenges of societies in Europe today is to foster lifelong learning and to create inclusive learning environments for adults, especially for low-educated disadvantaged social groups including also ethnic minorities. The learning of basic skills is not easy for adults, who have already faced learning difficulties and are not easily motivated. The project "Promoting Social Inclusion through Basic skills training" tackled this problem: partners from eight European countries aimed to develop simple and innovative work tools for adult education providers, enabling them to improve their basic skills training. Right from the start it was decided that these tools had to be applicable in different social and cultural contexts. The partner institutions shared their experiences and expertise, and also collected also information on existing basic skills programmes. All the different existing practices and programmes were evaluated; surveys to identify basic skills needs among the adult population were conducted. This led to the development of a more European tool, the project opting for a "bottom up" approach, starting at a small regional level (NUTS IV); experience made here is supposed to influence the basic skills strategies at regional and national levels. The project partners assume that a bottom-up approach could help countries who have not yet developed measures in the field of basic skills learning for adults. The project also aimed at sensitising local policy makers towards basic skills development and was successful in raising awareness on this issue. It managed to change the attitude towards what basic skills and key competencies are today and questioned the opinions of people about what learning is and where it can take place. Further research and promotion will be needed to tackle one of the unexpected outcomes: how small a role is generally attributed to civil society as a learning setting. The project made a start in this area.