Communication on the Teaching Professions - Roadmap

A roadmap gives a first description of a planned Commission initiative. Roadmaps, which set out the planned impact assessment work, are prepared for: those legislative proposals which have significant economic, social and environmental impacts, non-legislative initiatives (white papers, action plans, expenditure programmes, negotiating guidelines for international agreements) which define future policies, certain implementing measures (so called 'comitology' items) which are likely to have significant impacts.
Initiatives outside Commission work programme: Communication on Teaching Professions.
This indicative roadmap is provided for information purposes only and is subject to change. It does not prejudge the final decision of the Commission on whether this initiative will be pursued or on its final content and structure.
A. Context, problem definition
(i) What is the political context of the initiative?
(ii) How does it relate to past and possible future initiatives, and to other EU policies?
(iii) What ex-post analysis of the existing policy has been carried out and what results are relevant for this initiative?
(i) (ii) The Europe 2020 strategy calls for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. This requires – among other things - improving the quality and equity of Europe's education and training systems. The Europe 2020 flagship initiative 'Youth on the Move' explicitly calls for the improvement of the education and training system to provide more young people with the necessary competences to become lifelong learners. European benchmarks on education and training show progress in several Member States, but the targets are still not reached. Teacher quality is the most important in-school factor affecting student attainment. By extension, the quality of those who educate teachers (teacher educators) and those who lead teachers (school leaders) are also increasingly under the policy spotlight.
The importance of the teaching profession was highlighted at an Informal Ministerial Meeting in Gothenburg in September 2009 under the Swedish Presidency of the EU and this was followed by the adoption of new Council Conclusions on the professional development of teachers and school leaders. These Conclusions further develop and extend the European agenda for improving the quality of teaching and teacher education that was set out in Conclusions of November 2007 and developed in the Conclusions of 2008. The fact that teachers have been the subject of Council Conclusions in three consecutive years highlights the growing importance that Ministers attach to improving Teacher Education systems.
These Conclusions also form the agenda for peer learning and knowledge development on this policy area through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) for Education and Training. This has already produced guidance for policymakers on: improving Initial Teacher Education, teachers' continuous professional development and support for beginning teachers; and on adopting a more coherent approach to the selection and development of Teacher Educators and School Leaders. By the end of 2012, this will have been complemented by peer learning recommendations on teachers’ core competences, and teacher recruitment/selection, by the results of a study on policies to make the teaching profession more attractive and by the first results of the new European School Leadership Policy Network. Data from the OECD’s TALIS study are invaluable and will be complemented in 2012 by Eurydice data.
(iii) Existing European policy concerning the teaching professions takes the form of Council Conclusions setting out very broad indications of the policy areas on which Member States need to focus (e.g. improving recruitment and selection); the purpose of this initiative will be to flesh these with more detailed guidance, based on work undertaken in the context of the OMC. Our information about the impact of existing policy comes from the reports of countries participating in the OMC and indicates that more specific guidance, based upon latest research and good practice around Europe, is needed.
What are the main problems which this initiative will address?
Many Member States are facing the large-scale retirement of experienced teachers. At the same time, potential young recruits are discouraged from joining the profession by its perceived problems (low pay, low status, poor support for beginners, difficult working conditions including aggression by pupils and parents and more heterogeneous classes etc.). The underlying factors need to be tackled now if they are not to threaten the achievement of key E2020 ambitions such as improved levels of basic skills and higher participation in Higher Education.
Therefore, the initiative will address a number of problems which, taken together, point to the need for Member States to upgrade their systems of support for the three key professions: teacher educators, school leaders and teachers themselves. Challenges currently identified include (for example):
· inefficient systems for the recruitment and selection of candidates; (e.g. inability to attract the best candidates and select only those with the right teaching competences; high level of drop out of young teachers; high proportion of Teacher Educators without essential competences …);
· the lack of integrated, career-wide support for the education, induction and professional development of teachers, and of their educators and leaders (e.g. significant proportion of staff lack the required competences and are not proactively engaged in updating their skills; shortages of applicants for School Leadership posts; …);
· the lack of explicit reference frameworks of the competences that such staff should possess and continuously develop (leading to lack of proactive management of staff competence development; lack of measures to retrain or remove underperforming staff; unclear lines of responsibility for the quality of staff …);
· ineffective management and quality control over the continuous professional development of staff (staff cannot get access to the in-service training they need; allocation is random and not planned according to the needs of the institution, the much-used external courses and conferences are less effective for staff development than the (less-frequently used) school-based approaches …).
Who will be affected by it?
Teachers, Teacher Educators, School Leaders, other education staff, learners, parents, employers, education authorities, professional bodies, ministries, Teacher Education Institutions etc.
(i) Is EU action justified on grounds of subsidiarity?
(ii) Why can Member States not achieve the objectives of the proposed action sufficiently by themselves? (Necessity Test)
(iii) Can the EU achieve the objectives better? (Test of EU Value Added)
(i) Yes. The purpose will be to make the results of good practice and research evidence more readily available to Member States on a comparable and transferable basis, but it will not infringe their exclusive competence for the structure and content of their systems.
(ii) The challenges faced by Member States are often similar and many are in the process of designing or implementing policy measures to address them. No Member State is in a position to have a comprehensive overview of such measures, nor to investigate under which conditions they are effective and what elements may be transferable to other contexts. To seek to do so on a bilateral basis would be impractical. Member States have therefore themselves asserted their need for closer working through the Open Method of Coordination to develop more effective policy responses to these issues, and have asked for input from the Commission.
(iii) The OMC adds value at EU level by bringing Member States together in a more efficient and effective way than the Member States could achieve on their own. The initiative will gather together the results of this work and other relevant evidence in a way that makes them readily accessible to Member States.
B. Objectives of the initiative
What are the main policy objectives?
To help make more efficient and effective Member State action to effect a major improvement in the quality of teacher education and teaching, and thereby help achieve EU2020 goals.
In particular, the aim will be to promote policy approaches that:
· ensure that only the best candidates are attracted into the profession and selected to be teachers;
· provide integrated, career-long support and professional development for teachers, their educators and school leaders;
· make explicit the competences that teaching staff should possess and how they should develop throughout the career; and
· lead to increasing teachers’ access to high quality continuous professional development opportunities.
Do the objectives imply developing EU policy in new areas?
No. They will assist Member States to give effect to their existing policies in this field.
C. Options
(i) What are the policy options being considered?
(ii) What legislative or 'soft law' instruments could be considered?
(iii) How do the options respect the proportionality principle?
(i) The policy options can be defined as either:
(a) to present key lessons from the OMC on the teaching profession and other relevant international evidence in a format accessible and useable for policy-makers and other stakeholders in the Member States, or
(b) not to do so.
(ii) The instruments available are: Council Recommendation or Commission Communication, and Staff Working Paper.
(iii) The Commission and Member States having invested significantly in the OMC in Education and Training, it is not a viable option to ignore the results of their joint work.
The options of ‘soft law’ (Council Recommendation) or Commission Communication are proportionate with the Commission’s aims in the context of its legislative base.
The Commission Communication format allows key messages to be conveyed concisely, while research evidence is provided in a detailed supporting Staff Working Document.
D. Initial assessment of impacts
What are the benefits and costs of each of the policy options?
A Council Recommendation could set out a framework for Member State action to improve support for the teaching professions. However, this option is not proposed because
(a) this is an extremely sensitive field in which the Commission must avoid the impression of ‘interfering’ and
(b) whilst the problems faced by Member States are similar, the solutions proposed must be entirely contextspecific:
there are no solutions that fit all Member States, nor would it be realistic to seek to organise them into a broad ‘framework’ as was done for the Recommendation on early school leaving.
By contrast, a Commission Communication, with supporting evidence, is a cost-effective way to make the results of good practice and research evidence readily available to Member States. It would then be for Member States themselves, in the context of their national priorities and of the specificities of their education systems, to choose from the ‘menu’ of possible approaches to tackling each challenge.
Ultimately, the expected impacts would be: more competent teachers, more effective schools, and higher pupil attainment. Interim impacts would include:
· peer review process motivates Member States to carry out reforms;
· policy-relevant research findings are identified, synthesised and disseminated amongst policy makers; and
· good policy practice is identified, disseminated and fed into Member States policy-making processes.
Could any or all of the options have significant impacts on
(i) simplification,
(ii) administrative burden and
(iii) on relations with other countries,
(iv) implementation arrangements? And
(v) could any be difficult to transpose for certain Member States?
The answers apply to all the instruments identified in C above.
(i) impact on simplification is neutral;
(ii) all the instruments identified in C above share the advantage of imposing no additional burden on Member
States; they merely assist Member States in the implementation of decisions they have already taken. Member States would be able to select the measures that best fitted with their own approach.
(iii) impact on relations with other countries is neutral.
(iv) impact on implementation arrangements is neutral – Member States choose the arrangements most appropriate to their circumstances
(v) Transposition is not an issue for the instruments identified.
(i) Will an IA be carried out for this initiative and/or possible follow-up initiatives?
(ii) When will the IA work start?
(iii) When will you set up the IA Steering Group and how often will it meet?
(iv) What DGs will be invited?
(i) Based on the nature of the initiative no IA is planned
(ii) (iii) (iv) (see above)
(i) Is any of options likely to have impacts on the EU budget above €5m?
(ii) If so, will this IA serve also as an ex-ante evaluation, as required by the Financial regulation? If not, provide information about the timing of the ex-ante evaluation.
No
E. Evidence base, planning of further work and consultation
(i) What information and data are already available? Will existing impact assessment and evaluation work be used?
(ii) What further information needs to be gathered, how will this be done (e.g. internally or by an external contractor), and by when?
(iii) What is the timing for the procurement process & the contract for any external contracts that you are planning (e.g. for analytical studies, information gathering, etc.)?
(iv) Is any particular communication or information activity foreseen? If so, what, and by when?
(i) Policy knowledge is being created continuously through the peer learning carried out within the OMC in Education and Training. Data on Teacher Education are available from OECD surveys such as TALIS and from Eurydice. Data on policy effectiveness are available from academic research; this shows, for example, that the most effective education systems have specific approaches to attracting and selecting the highest quality graduates for the teaching profession, that high levels of attrition amongst new teachers can be palliated by effective systems of early-career support, that certain modes of in-service training are much more effective than others, or that certain approaches to school leadership are linked with higher levels of pupil attainment. Relevant existing impact assessment and evaluation work will be used.
(ii) As previously stated, knowledge is being created through the OMC, which draws upon evidence from
research and good practice from participating countries.
(iii) No procurement process / external contracts
(iv) As with all products of the OMC in Education and Training, dissemination will be a priority. Communication will take the form of a set of products targeted at different audiences – web-based and paper publication for a wide public; articles for specialist journals and teacher union newsletters; presentations at professional conferences; presentation to Member State authorities through the Council and fora of decision-makers such as the regular Presidency meeting of Directors General for Schools of all Member States.
Which stakeholders & experts have been or will be consulted, how, and at what stage?
The reflections and research upon which the Communication will be based are set in the context of the Open Method of Coordination.
By end 2012 a dozen Peer Learning Activities will have been organised by and with a group of experts nominated by Member States on the themes covered by the Communication. Stakeholder groups (employers, trades unions and professional associations) are active participants in the OMC.
Dowload Communication on Teaching Professions. See also: Internationalisation of Higher Education, Rethinking skills in the context of Europe 2020, Directive on European Capitals of Culture post 2019.