"Instead of wasting time and getting demoralized during incarceration this project envisions prison staff to stimulate convicts to enhance their skills and be better prepared to tackle professional challenges when they have done their time. Prison staff represent an essential link between the static conditions of imprisonment and the challenging and volatile conditions of the labor market. We observe that in penal systems across Europe, women and ethnic minorities are less likely to be reached by these stimuli. Those populations tend to be much more isolated and much harder to communicate with. Prison staff and volunteers reaching out for those groups need to reinforce their communication skills to distinguish profiles and put forward the most suitable personal strategy to accompany the inmate on the path to a better future. To reach those objectives this project will in a first phase engage on a multinational survey to reach a factual approach on causality between international and local needs and priorities. This survey will gather statistics on demographics, conditions and dynamics of those vulnerable populations in EU-wide prison systems. This first phase will conclude in the mapping of priorities. These factual underpinned priorities will in a second phase be used to create a body of knowledge to coach staff into the specific domains they need to reinforce, to first help them to get a synoptic view of the challenges they are facing and according to this to direct their efforts. During the third phase the feedback from first and second phase will be used to popularize the experiences of the first contingent of staff to create a recruitment base for next generations. Recruitment bases and specifics for staff addressing those vulnerable groups, which at this point has proven their efficacity and efficiency, can be disseminated to all organizations and institutions of interest. During the final fourth phase, we will make a roundup of what has changed according to the priorities concluded in the survey during the first phase and so measuring the overall success of the project. A great advantage of this partnership is that it covers these topics in a full geographical European spread, from Portugal over central Europe with Spain and France through East Europe with Poland and Romania. Lifelong learning needs to become a priority in one of the most challenging environments in Europe - the prisons and the prison system. And what better change agent to use than the prison officer? They are the backbone of the prisons’ daily activities, spending good portions of their lives in the same environment and with the same conditions as the prisoners. EESPIP project aims to put in the spot light the potential of a prison officer to interact with women prisoners and minorities in a lifelong learning context, as a ""champion"" for a learning culture. In order to achieve this, we will have 3 major blocks of activities throughout the 3 years of project development and implementation: - first, we will do the research - setting the context, the numbers, the connections and understanding the perspectives of all major key players on what is the role of a prison officer in the learning process and education of women inmates and minorities. - second, we will develop the content. Training modules, EQF 4 or 5, revolving around units of learning outcomes that can be easily integrated in any initial or continuing VET program for prison staff. - third, we will pilot and multiply our developed content to professionals and management of the prison system as to the education environment and to adjust it as much as possible to the realities encountered by those professionals. All of this will be managed closely responding to effective quality levels, close monitoring of the partnership performance and disseminated at national and European levels."