Three countries, one question: why are adult learners so tired?

In February 2026, three organisations met in Varna, Bulgaria, to start a project built around an uncomfortable observation: adult learners keep arriving exhausted, and nobody in adult education is trained to do anything about it.

SereniSleep — Unlocking Deep Rest for a Healthier Tomorrow — is an Erasmus+ small-scale partnership running through 2025 and 2026. It brings together MOGA ZNAM TVORIA in Bulgaria, who coordinate the project and lead the sleep-science work; Kreativna stanica / Creative Station in Serbia, specialists in experiential learning; and ABARKA ONGD in the Basque Country, Spain, who work on inclusion with vulnerable adults and host the training platform.

The kick-off meeting set the shape of the work. Rather than start by writing lessons, the partnership agreed to spend the first months listening: desk research in each country, surveys of educators and learners, and focus groups with the people actually affected.

The reasoning was simple. Sleep advice is abundant online, most of it written for people with predictable schedules and quiet bedrooms. Adult learners in Europe often have neither. They work night shifts. They care for children and parents. They study between two jobs. Advice that ignores those realities is not just unhelpful — it can feel like an accusation.

So SereniSleep set out to build something different: a course grounded in evidence gathered in Spain, Bulgaria and Serbia, designed for educators who want to recognise sleep deprivation in their classrooms and respond within professional boundaries. Not medicine. Pedagogy.

What the partnership found in the months that followed reshaped almost every assumption it started with.