B. Belfi

Barbara Belfi (1981) is a Senior Researcher Education in Transition at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on how education can adapt to social, cultural, environmental, and technological changes to remain inclusive, relevant, and future-oriented. Migration, globalisation, and growing social and economic inequality have made student populations more diverse than ever. Students increasingly differ in their backgrounds, learning needs, and performance levels, while digitalisation and technological progress are transforming what and how young people need to learn to thrive in today’s and tomorrow’s society and labour market.

These interconnected developments raise a fundamental question: how can education evolve to meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations while equipping all learners with the skills to thrive in a rapidly changing world? Barbara studies how schools and universities can address this challenge by developing learning environments, curricula, and teaching practices that accommodate different backgrounds and learning needs while preparing students for changing societal and labour market demands. Her work explores how education can foster skills such as creativity, adaptability, and collaboration, ensuring that all students have the opportunity to succeed in an increasingly diverse and rapidly changing world.

She coordinates the HBO-Monitor, a large-scale survey among graduates from Dutch universities of applied sciences, which tracks how higher vocational education prepares students for the skills needed to succeed in today’s and tomorrow’s labour market. She also contributes to the Horizon Europe project Skills2Capabilities, which examines how vocational education and training (VET) can respond to evolving skill needs – identifying which skills are becoming more important and how schools can best integrate them into their curricula. In the NWA project Juveniles, Equality and Digitalization (JEDi), she studies how digitalisation affects young people’s learning, self-image, and confidence – and how schools and parents can help them build the skills needed to navigate digital life responsibly.

A central aspect of this work is understanding how educational institutions can respond to growing diversity in ways that support all learners. Her book Samen tot aan de meet (“Together until the Final Grade”) offers practical tools for teachers and is widely used in Dutch and Belgian schools. In the Erasmus+ project Alternatives for Retention (AlteR) and the EARLI Centre for Excellence in Research (E-CER), she works with European partners to explore how schools can adapt their teaching to increasingly diverse student populations.

Across these research projects, Barbara aims to bridge research, policy, and educational practice, translating scientific insights into approaches that help make education more equitable, inclusive, and future-ready.

Her work has been published in leading journals such as Educational Research Review, British Educational Research Journal, and Teaching and Teacher Education, and has been featured in Dutch and Belgian media.

For her full and up-to-date list of publications, please visit her Google Scholar profile.