Disadvantaged adult learners like migrants, other minorities, early school leavers and women face a significant gap between the quantity and quality of their life related and occupationally relevant knowledge and competences they have and their lack of corresponding qualifications that are valued in education and on the labour market. This pertains to outcomes of prior and current learning in informal and non-formal contexts, as well as formal qualifications acquired outside of the EU territory. Our experience is that especially for disadvantaged learners in adult learning, access to validation that would translate their competences into an increased employability and social inclusion is still lacking. One background is that despite EU-wide advances in validation of learning, there is not yet a coherent approach across or within EU member states, but a lose mix of diverse, sometimes contradicting policies, structures and practices. Adult education has also not been a focus sector, and its validation relevant links to other validation stakeholders have yet to be better established to provide meaningful avenues to formal education and labour market insertion. This poses a challenge especially for small and middle scale adult education providers to identify and implement best practices in validation, including in relation to linkages to other education sectors. This would be a prerequisite for their learners to have access to adequate validation. There also is a discrepancy between the heterogeneity of work related competences held by our learners and validation procedures and practices that are often based on more customary standards of skills and knowledge. This applies especially to the stages of assessment and certification in validation procedures that lead to alternative qualifications taken seriously by employers or that lead to further vocational or higher education. Other problems are the use of assessment methods like written tests that for disadvantaged learners can be unnecessarily challenging. The European Qualifications Framework and corresponding portfolio approaches like Europass CV provide a better correspondence with our learners’ competences, but are underutilised. All this results in an undervaluing and further dis-qualification of disadvantaged learners rather than an adequate appraisal of their competences. The partnership comprises the following organisations: uniT - Verein für Kultur an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria), Associació Catalana de Formació Polivalent Aplicada, Baobab (Spain), Associazione ALPHA (Italy) and the Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft für politisch-kulturelle Bildung in Brandenburg e.V. (Germany). As adult learning providers continuously working with different groups of disadvantaged adult learners, our interest in this partnership is to contribute to improving the access of disadvantaged learners to an adequate validation that translates their individually and economically significant informal, non-formal and foreign formal learning outcomes into qualifications improving their social inclusion. The specific objectives of this project are to a) identify, exchange and test best practices in validation of competences of disadvantaged adult learners, including in relation to linkages to relevant public, private and third sector actors b) identify procedures to systematically incorporate and mainstream best practices in validation in the educational practices of our and similar organisations; c) design and test training courses for adult educators working with disadvantaged learners in order to facilitate their use of and provide guidance on validation in their educational activities incorporating the standards and best practices; d) disseminate intellectual outputs, trainings and training materials to other public, private and third sector adult education providers; e) disseminate recommendations with a special focus on the validation needs of disadvantaged adult learners to inform relevant stakeholders, including in policy making.