A European Commission working group published a compendium illustrating inspiring practices on how to make education more civically engaging and inclusive.
Between 2016 and 2020, the Education and Training (ET) 2020 working group on ‘Common Values and Inclusive Education’ worked on a massive compendium, meant to offer ideas to policymakers and practitioners to improve the inclusiveness of education across the EU. The report also relates to the Council Recommendation on promoting common values, inclusive education and the European dimension of teaching, adopted in 2018. To make the report more accessible, it is divided into five themes that cover specific topics related to inclusive and citizenship education. The working group was composed of representatives from EU Member States and Candidate Countries, EU agencies, stakeholder associations, social partners and international organisations. Concretely, the compendium counts 131 examples of inclusive education and citizenship education across the different themes, of which 96 are implemented in one country and 35 either on a transnational or international level. Switzerland is present in two joint practices as a partner country.
The first theme of the compendium is ‘Fostering social, civic and intercultural competences’. Here, the working group focused on best practices on active citizenship education, teacher education, democratic engagement of young people and active participation in educational governance. An example of one of the practices for this first category is the Council of Europe’s project ‘Competences for democratic culture in schools’. This framework aims to outline the attitudes, skills and knowledge needed to empower learners in education and training on all levels to become active citizens. The second theme ‘Enhancing critical thinking and media literacy’ gives advice on how to deal with cyberbullying and misinformation in educational settings. The third theme ‘Supporting disadvantaged learners’ addresses inclusive citizenship and offers examples on how to remove structural barriers between various educational levels and sectors, how to integrate refugees and how to handle educational disadvantages of students with migrant backgrounds. Other sources of disparity are also brought to light, like gender inequality and the different learning needs of individuals with disabilities. Practical solutions implemented in different countries offer the readers options on how to create supportive and inclusive learning environments on all levels.
The fourth theme ‘Promoting intercultural dialogue’, focuses more on the external aspects of education and provides approaches on how education institutions can work with parents to create a diverse learning environment and how they can promote measures to bring underrepresented individuals into the field of teaching, such as men or ethnic minorities. The fifth theme ‘European history education’, concentrates on providing a good common knowledge of Europe’s shared history to its citizens, including the functioning of the EU, in order to emphasise European shared values and to foster a sense of European citizenship.
This compendium is part of the European Commission’s plan to achieve the European Education Area (EEA) by 2025. In fact, the EC addressed common values and inclusive education as one of its top priorities, along with key competences for lifelong learning and digital skills. This goal is tied to building democratic education environments (free from bullying, harmful speech and disinformation) throughout the EEA. Social inclusion in education is also one of the main priorities of the Portuguese Council Presidency. During the informal video conference of EU Education Ministers on 19 February 2021, the Presidency stated that equity and inclusion are decisive for well performing education systems. This is also reflected in the Council Resolution on a strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training towards the European Education Area and beyond (2021-2030), which features the improvement of ‘quality, equity, inclusion and success for all in education and training’ as first strategic priority for European cooperation in education for the next decade. Furthermore, in light of the Porto Social Summit in May 2021, the recently published European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan proposes concrete EU headline targets related to inclusive education and social protection (see SwissCore article).