European Trade Union Committee for Education

Teacher trade unions in Europe support the aim of the European High Level Conference Education in the Digital Era to improve education via digital tools. Together with the Italian Presidency, the European Commission invited high level representatives from European Education Ministries and other stakeholders in education to discuss education in the digital era. The conference, which took place in Brussels on December 11, evolved around three topics: Increasing the quality and relevance of learning, increasing the Impact of educators and addressing inequalities through better access and lower costs.

"It is important to invest in education now more than ever, (...) to help teachers to use ICT and to train teachers to use ICT in teaching" said Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport in the opening.

This High Level Conference comes in the wake of the ETUCE Special Conference on The Future of the Teaching Profession, where the ETUCE member organisations decided to create a taskforce to develop an ETUCE policy on the teaching profession for the 21st century and the use of ICT. By this, ETUCE wishes to develop a teacher union vision of innovation in education and to formulate a teacher union response to the challenges in this field.

Silvia Costa, Chair of the European Parliament Committee on Culture and Education, pointed out that education is still linked to taylorism and it is therefore important to move to constructive knowledge in future to learn with technologies.

Concerning increasing the impact of educators, Lord David Puttmann declared the gap between the preparation of students for the world of work in colleges and the students' and employers' perception of students' preparedness for the world of work is as wide as a gulf.

Graham Brown-Martin, Founder of Learning Without Frontiers, criticised the development from industrial to digital capitalism and noted that the European Commission and governments have actually not disrupted the marketisation in education but the four main global digital market players in education have perfected capitalism.

Several discussions focused on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) as a tool to replace teaching, traditional education, textbooks and to help low-skilled adults. However, ETUCE strongly believes that MOOCS can be only supplementary to teaching and to teachers' training. MOOCS cannot replace budgets for initial and continuous training of teachers.

Visit the Conference webpage