THE UNESCO GLOBAL NETWORK OF LEARNING CITIES: TOOLS FOR THE PROGRESS MONITORING

The concept of learning cities and regions is recently becoming widespread both in the European and global theory of regional development acting as a marker for the successful socio-economic development of a city and region, development of their human potential, the basis of the regional education policy of countries. Analysis of theoretical principles and, particu- larly, the practice of implementing the concept of learning cities and regions for Ukraine is currently a necessary condition for its sustainable development, full entry into the European and global economy, as well as the educational space. Despite fairly thorough theoretical study of the conceptual bases of the regional education policy, the practice of its implementation indicates a number of problematic issues, among which there is the use of tools for monitoring the progress in building a learning city. The publication highlights the results of the research dealing with tools for monitoring the process of building learning cities. There has been analyzed the content of the Key Features of the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities as a framework document which represents the key features of learning cities and offers a checklist of actions to enhance and evaluate progress on the way of a learning city development. The importance of this document involves understanding the fact that building a learning city is a continuous process and there is no such a final line over which the city could pass to receive the desired status. However, there are objective attributes of a learning city and they refer more to what the city is doing on this way, but not to what it is like.