Established in 1988, CIIE has long embraced its mission of developing high-quality research on key issues of lifelong and life-wide education. The centre has an international reputation as an excellent context to research, innovate, and inspire change in education with and for educational communities. CIIE is also extremely well-known for its top-quality doctoral programme in Education Sciences, PDCE.
For 2025-2029, CIIE will host around 70 PhD full members, including professors and lecturers from FPCEUP, members from other HEIs and full-time researchers and postdoctoral research fellows. CIIE also engages 120 associate members, most of whom are full and part-time PhD students. PhD students, emerging and senior researchers all come together in small face-to-face collectives of research-in-the-making, the research communities of practice, CoPIn. These are organized into three research groups:

• PITE - Politics, Inequalities and Transformative Education;
• DJusT - Diversity, Social Justice and Territories; and
• SCInTE(a)+Democracy - School, Curriculum, Innovation, Teacher Education plus Democracy.

For 2025-2029, CIIE continues for further state-of-the-art research that addresses educational and societal challenges while advocating for a just internationalisation - as in the recent collaborative research line on Artificial "Intelligence"; engaging citizens in the co-design of 'societal challenge-driven research' through the collaborative work of two observatories, OBVIE and ODEC, and the recently created LabDERE; sustain an international leadership on the advanced training of young researchers and mentoring of researchers' careers; encourage public, reasoned debate on educational issues; and reinforce its Open Science strategy by publishing open-access outputs and managing two diamond open-access scholarly international publications: Educação, Sociedade & Culturas and Scopus JSSE-Journal of Social Science Education.