In its consultation response, CESI stressed the importance of the role and the initiatives dedicated to teachers and education professionals within the European Education Area (EEA) and called to put the needs and roles of educators even more in the centre of the EEA’s future objectives and initiatives.

CESI in particular noted that the EEA should increasingly focus to:

1. Empower teachers by ensuring that teachers have a say in decision-making processes that affect their work, promoting a bottom-up approach to educational reforms.
2. Enhance the social recognition of teachers by promoting the key role of teachers in society and fostering better working conditions by addressing fundamental issues in the areas of (often inadequate) wages and (usually excessive) workload.
3. Support autonomy and professional development with training by providing high-quality initial and continuous training to all education professionals, including in green and sustainable education as well as in digital technologies. These training programmes should be easily accessible and relevant to the needs of educators.
4. Establish a reference framework for the digital literacy of teachers by ensuring consistency across the EU, making sure that that teachers receive ongoing training in digital skills to keep pace with technological advancements and integrate them effectively into their teaching.
5. Foster professional stability by moving towards stable and secure employment conditions for teachers to retain the workforce, and by thus avoiding precarious working arrangements.
6. Ensure the recognition of professional experience by encouraging reward systems that acknowledge the contributions and achievements of educators at national level, but also promote the recognition of professional experience across Member States to facilitate mobility and career development for education professionals.

CESI Secretary General Klaus Heeger said: “The building of the European Education Area should consider that employment and working conditions for teaching must improve in many Member States in order to attract, recruit and retain young workers into this occupational field and to counter widespread teacher shortages. This is especially true for the areas of VET, lifelong learning and the education of adults.”

He added: “Also, teaching is too often still a profession that does not enjoy a high social standing in the eyes of a wide range of population. Its low prestige frustrates the recruiting and retaining of teachers in both rich and poorer countries. Teaching is a highly valuable profession and should guarantee teachers decent salaries and quality working conditions on all levels of the educational system. Their work and contribution to society must be adequately valued and recognised. This should be more reflected in the framework of the European Education Area.”

CESI’s full consultation contribution can be accessed here.