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As part of its corporate strategy, Education and Learning Wales (ELWa) aims to work ‘in support of the Welsh Assembly Government’s priorities, including their ambition to make Wales’ learning system one of the best in the world’. It recognises that ‘a shared understanding of what constitutes excellence in the field of learning’ needs to be developed to support this aim. ELWa therefore aims to be ‘benchmarked against the best in the world’ and the construction of an initial set of comparative indicators is the first step towards achieving this. This document is the first stage in this benchmarking process and reports on research that aimed to: (1) benchmark the performance of Wales in lifelong learning against the UK, the rest of Europe and the world; and recommend processes within ELWa for monitoring on a regular basis. A quantitative framework for monitoring performance was developed comprised of indicators that were selected to: reflect international definitions of lifelong learning; and reflect their importance to ELWa and wider Welsh education and training policy objectives. ELWa will use these international indicators alongside their Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs), which are not internationally comparable. Two overlapping indicator ‘domains’ have been identified between the international PIs and ELWa’s SPIs - ‘participation’ and ‘achievement’. The other indicator areas will be used to complement ELWa’s SPIs thus providing additional data to inform planning. This research will be complemented with qualitative research into the economic, social and political factors affecting learning and the determining structure of the education systems and differences in policy goals between countries.