European Trade Union Committee for Education

On 18 May 2016 the European Commission published the new proposal for Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs) for the EU Member States. The European Council will discuss and adopt the CSRs during its meeting on 28-29 June. The CSRs, being part of the European Semester cycle, among other things, provided individual recommendations also on education and training for every Member State, with the notable exception of Cyprus, Italy, Luxembourg and Sweden. This year, the Recommendations strongly emphasise the need to improve educational outcomes and to strengthen the efforts to include children from disadvantaged background, often of migrant origin, into mainstream education, especially in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and in the Slovak Republic.

The aftermath of the economic crisis also aggravated challenges with regards to large skills mismatches and employability. Ten countries - namely  Belgium, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovenia, Spain, United Kingdom, Croatia and Finland - explicitly received recommendations on the need to address skills mismatches and shortages to improve employability, with a focus on Vocational Education and Training, apprenticeship systems, lifelong and adult learning. ETUCE strongly welcomes that the European Commission addresses the need to tackle unemployment in Europe, especially among young people. However, education and training should not be considered as the primary tool to address this challenge. In parallel, France, Lithuania, Poland and Spain were directly addressed with recommendations stressing the need to improve the links between the education sector and the labour market. In the view of ETUCE, education is a public service conceived to give the opportunity to all citizens to receive quality training and to get a chance to improve their life and to get employment. Education and training is therefore a long-term process and cannot only serve the contingent and rapidly changing needs of the labour market.

To raise the attractiveness of the teaching profession and the quality of teaching has been recommended to Czech Republic, Lithuania and Slovakia. “It is paradoxical that on one side the European Commission recognises the many challenges of, and puts so many responsibilities on, the education sector”  stated Martin Rømer, ETUCE European Director, “while on the other side it hardly mentions the support for teachers and educators, who stand at the core of the school community and should be instead more supported in their everyday work by decent salaries and working conditions, and by professional development opportunities”.

To enhance investment in education and research is a major issue for Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania and the Netherlands, according to the CSRs. However, several countries are prompted to promote private investment in research (Spain and Estonia), the cooperation between businesses and universities (Spain, Estonia, Denmark and Portugal), and performance-based funding of public research bodies and universities (Spain), which could worryingly result in first attempts to privatise and commercialise public education systems. One of ETUCE member organisations in Spain, FE.CC.OO., recalls that public research institutions and universities must respond to the general interest of the public, therefore the European Commission should be clearer on the principles that regulate performance-based funding.

Read the ETUCE Summary of Education-related Country Specific Recommendations 2016 here.