We looked for a sleep policy in adult education. There isn't one.

The first strand of SereniSleep's research was the least glamorous and, it turned out, one of the most revealing. Between February and March 2026 the three partners mapped the policy landscape in their own countries: adult-education frameworks, mental-health strategies, workplace well-being rules, and anything that touched sleep.

The headline finding is a number: zero. No partner country has a dedicated sleep-health policy for adult-education settings.

That is not to say sleep is absent from every document. It appears occasionally, folded into general health promotion or workplace stress guidance. But as a factor in learning — in whether an adult can concentrate, retain, return next week — it is essentially unrepresented.

The gap matters because of what sits either side of it. Sleep science is well established. So is the evidence that sleep-deprived adults struggle to consolidate memory, regulate emotion and sustain attention. Adult educators see the consequences daily: drifting focus, irritability, absence, dropout. What is missing is any institutional bridge between the two.

Each country's research also surfaced its own texture. In Spain, the analysis pointed to migrant women and caregivers carrying compounded loads. In Bulgaria, to a culture of overwork — multiple simultaneous jobs, long hours extending even into retirement. In Serbia, to stigma around discussing sleep and mental health, and to uneven digital access outside cities.

These national differences became a design principle rather than a footnote. A single European sleep course, translated four ways, would have failed. What the evidence demanded was one shared framework adapted deliberately to each context — which is exactly what SereniSleep went on to build.

The consolidated desk research is published free on the Results page.