摘要:In recent years, in most countries of the world, it is observed the spread and change of the main paradigm of the education system, which involves the addition of classical formal education (in official educational institutions with the official document about a degree) with informal and informal types. The last two forms of education are the acquisition of knowledge, skills and abilities for comprehensive development and qualification development of a person, the formation of a civic position and the motivation for self-development and self-education, which is not necessarily accompanied by officially recognized documents but has no less value. This leads to the formation of a new system of learning that will operate throughout the life of a person and should become one of the strategic objectives for any state that strives for sustainable development. Such changes require an innovative approach at all stages of the new system formation, including its financial support. However, due to objective reasons for the limited budget funds, the state cannot independently provide financing for the lifelong learning system without involving additional economic entities. Thus, this article is devoted to building expenditure optimization model as the main innovation in the financing of the lifelong learning system. For this purpose, the authors define the stage of formation, the essence and basic characteristics of the lifelong learning system in the modern world. The next step was a providing of a comparative analysis of the main trends in financing education in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and their partners and Ukraine at the expense of various sources (public and private) and for different levels of education (primary education, secondary education, postgraduate education, elementary education higher education, higher education). On the results of analysing the absence of structured information about extra-budgetary funding of lifelong learning system is indicated. Thus, authors developed the approach to estimating potential volume of extra-budgetary sources of funding for a lifelong education system by using structured equation modelling method, where the informational basis are education expenditures of the Consolidated Budget of Ukraine and the Education Index (as a component of the Human Development Index). For calculations software, STATISTICA 6.1 was used. This approach allows to indicate the expenditure optimization model and to determine the financial potential of the lifelong learning system development.