The European Commission reports on STEM education policies. The document offers an overview of all actions, their funding and points to key gaps in governance.
As discourse surrounding the Erasmus+ Strategic Scholarships, often referred to as the STEM-Scholarships, continues to intensify in Brussels, the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (DG EAC) of the European Commission (EC) has released a timely report. This publication provides a comprehensive assessment of all EU policy initiatives and European programmes aimed at promoting STEM education in schools over the past decade. It also offers an overview of STEM definitions as well as STEM competence frameworks.
The EU’s emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) stems from the belief that these fields are crucial for Europe’s competitiveness. At the same time, the PISA results are viewed as a testimony to the stagnant or in some cases even decreased performance of 15-year-olds in science and mathematics over the last ten year in most EU countries. The performance issue and other relating factors like low motivation and interest in STEM subjects, gender and socioeconomic gaps in STEM, shortages of STEM teachers, and insufficient school infrastructure for STEM education have become significant concerns both nationally and at the EU level.
Central to the policy context around promoting STEM in schools is the Council Recommendation of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning, more specifically, article 16. In addition, the EC created the European Education Area (EEA) set to solve the key issues raised above (see SwissCore article). This was followed by STEM education programmes and initiatives churned out in rapid succession: The European Skills Agenda (2020-2025), the Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027; see SwissCore article), and the European Year of Skills 2023 addressing skills shortages in STEM fields. The Draghi Report (see SwissCore article) further highlighted the connection between the EU’s competitiveness and skills shortages. Currently, within the Union of Skills (see SwissCore article), STEM education policy is pushed by the EC with plans such as the Action Plan on Basic Skills and the STEM Education Strategic Plan with the EU Teacher Agenda and a “Roadmap on the future of digital education and training based on the reviewed Digital Education Action Plan” forthcoming.
The report emphasises the contributions several EU funding programmes make to the STEM agenda. For instance, during the 2014-2020 Erasmus+ programming period EUR 593 million has been allocated to projects linked to fostering STEM education, and EUR 14.6 million in the current programme 2021-2027 (note that the final amount might significantly rise), with most projects being subsumed under Key Action 1 and 2. Finally, a total of 4’289 Erasmus+ projects have been identified to be related to STEM education. But STEM education topics have also been addressed in 50 Horizon Europe and 61 Horizon 2020 projects. All projects are listed in the report and also include projects conducted within the Digital Europe Programme, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), and InvestEU among others. But what are the main conclusions drawn from this overview?
A significant challenge within STEM education policy is monitoring. The report highlights how well the Erasmus+ Projects Results Platform allows for an overview of actions to strengthening STEM. However, more in-depth information about other programmes outside of Erasmus+ are more difficult to track. This contributes to the major challenge of monitoring the effectiveness of specific interventions on students and teachers/trainers across the different education sectors. Additionally, this fragmentation of policies targeted at STEM education have further consequences. Again, while Erasmus+ excels as a knowledge hub and a platform for sharing good practices, particularly in curriculum design and pedagogy across formal, non-formal, and informal education, it does not support research or infrastructure investment through its funding mechanisms. These are also crucial aspects of STEM education, and thus, are addressed by research frameworks, such as Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, or other funding programmes such as the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+). However, despite evidence of contributions to STEM initiatives and infrastructure, there remains limited understanding of their influence on advancing STEM outcomes in schools. And lastly, what can we learn from the report for the ongoing discussion of the next Erasmus+ programme generation? From a purely STEM education policy perspective, it makes sense to incorporate ESF+ into Erasmus+ and to have the STEM scholarships run under the same umbrella for a more targeted and comprehensive series of actions to boost STEM education in schools, which corresponds to the need for strengthened governance highlighted in the report. However, even without such integration, the recent initiatives such as the Union of Skills and the STEM Education Strategic Plan as well as the establishment of the European Skills High-Level Board have the potential to tackle these gaps in governance.