European Trade Union Committee for Education

ETUCE has successfully submitted its pledge for the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs. The Grand Coalitions has been implemented by the European Commission, aiming to ‘facilitate collaboration among business and education providers, public and private actors to take action in attracting young people into ICT education, and to retrain unemployed people.’

ETUCE is the first trade union organisation to submit a pledge to the European Commission’s Grand Coalition. Others participants until now are companies such as Adobe, Google and Microsoft and organisations such as the European Schoolnet and the Digital Leadership Institute. They have all proposed their pledge with different goals and for different policy themes, for instance ‘Training and Matching for Digital Jobs’, ‘Certification’, ‘Innovative Learning and Teaching, Mobility and Awareness Raising.

Aiming to ensure that teacher unions and education staff at all levels remain at the forefront of the developments concerning innovation in education and in the teaching profession, ETUCE addresses in its pledge the Grand Coalition’s priorities Innovative learning and teaching (with the ultimate goal of students obtaining the necessary skills for lifelong learning) and Awareness raising (to attract young people to ICT, with a view to promote rewarding careers and decent working conditions for both women and men).

With a view to tackle the lack of digital skills in Europe and address the ICT-related vacancies across all industry sectors, this initiative wishes to make a public sector contribution, around aspects such as quality teaching, academic freedom and inclusive and free of charge quality education for all.

Teachers throughout Europe face challenges concerning the use of digital media in their everyday working life; up-to-date ICT equipment and teaching a responsible use of digital media in education institutions will become of even bigger relevance in the future. ETUCE wishes to support teachers to address the challenges of the 21st century teaching profession and to enable students obtain the necessary skills for the labour market as well as the high quality education that appropriately prepares students for lifelong learning. Building on the ETUCE’s Conference resolution on shaping the teaching profession of the 21st century, ETUCE has set up a taskforce which consists of eight experts in innovation and ICT in education from ETUCE member organisations from Austria, Cyprus, Germany, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Sweden and is chaired by Odile Cordelier, Member of the ETUCE Bureau.. This taskforce is  developing a Policy Strategy on the “21st Century Teaching Profession and the Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)”. The policy is based on the exploration of following topics: Information society and its Impact on Education; Quality teaching, skills - education staff’s competences; Attractiveness of the profession, including initial teacher training and continuous professional development; Addressing ICT in education within social dialogue/collective agreements.

To see more information about the pledge, please click here.

To see more information about the ICT taskforce, please click here.