This year’s European Education Summit saw the official launch of a new Learning Lab on quality investment in education as well as the publication of recommendations to foster innovation in education.
On 1 December 2022, the 5th European Education Summit took place in Brussels. The main moment in the year for the European Commission to take stock of past year’s initiatives and to make announcements. The Summit was opened by a number of senior commissioners, including Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The reaction of the EU education systems to the multiple crises of the last few years was at the centre of the discussions. President von der Leyen highlighted the EU support for Ukrainian refugees and the Ukrainian education system as well as the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the mental health of young people in schools. She cited that 50% of pupils in Europe report sadness and negative mental health effects. As an additional challenge, many teachers do not feel supported or appreciated enough in their profession. Therefore, President von der Leyen wants to put well-being as a key element in teacher training in the EU. As a first step, the European Commission (EC) set up a new informal expert group on well-being in schools. The education ministers also recently focused on this topic and adopted Council conclusions on supporting well-being in digital education.
The Commission used the opportunity of the Education Summit to make two noteworthy announcements. Firstly, Commissioner Mariya Gabriel announced the official launch of the new Learning Lab on Investing in Quality Education and Training. This Learning Lab is following up on the work of the expert group on quality investment in education and training, and their final report on the topic entitled ‘Investing in our future: quality investment in education and training’ delivered in October 2022. The EC started this work last year to guide and support the significant investments in education systems that are provided by the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF); in total, about €71 billion for education and training, which represents 14% of the total fund (see SwissCore article). Every EU Member State (MS) has included investments in education and training in their national RRF implementation plans. Adding the EU funding from the other relevant programmes, most notably Erasmus+ with €26 billion but also the Digital Europe programme (DEP), the European Solidarity Corps (ESC) and the European Social Fund (ESF+), the EU’s investment in education and training for the seven year period 2021-2027 tripled compared to the previous multiannual financial framework. However, evidence shows that the quantity of investment in education is not necessarily linked to the quality of the educational outcomes. In this context, the Learning Lab will be set up to improve evidence and identify the best ways to invest in education to generate better learning outcomes, and very importantly, to increase equity in education. The Lab will support policy evaluation practices and, together with MS, identify effective tools for policy evaluation. Concretely, the Lab will build up capacity in MS and provide a space for peer-learning. The first general online training course will take place in March 2023 for EU Member States only (while some MS are interested in engaging with the process, others are sceptical of this approach). A factsheet provides an overview over the concrete offers of the Learning Lab for government officials. Ultimately, the idea is not to harmonise any practises but to make use of the diversity in education systems and policies in the EU to create a culture of education policy evaluation.
The second announcement was the publication of the anticipated report on innovation in European higher education by the European Network of Innovation Higher Education Institutions. While the ten recommendations could provide interesting food for thought, the set-up of this new network by the Commission was controversial (see SwissCore article). Commissioner Mariya Gabriel announced at the European Education Summit that they will study the recommendations and take a number of them forward to implement in the next year. The network’s future role after the publication of the recommendations is unclear.
Next year’s European Education Summit will be focussing on the mid-term reflection of the progress towards achieving the European Education Area, and it will be preceded by the Lifelong Learning Platform’s (LLLP) Education and Stakeholder Conference.