A consultation that closed on 8 September will shape the largest education initiative the current Commission has attempted, and the package it feeds into is due in November under the title Quality Education for All: A 2040 Roadmap. The call for evidence asked schools, teaching unions, education ministries, researchers and the general public to comment on three areas that the Commission has decided belong together, and the decision to bundle them is the most consequential thing about the exercise.
The first area is basic skills. The evidence behind it is not in dispute. Performance in reading, mathematics and science has been declining across most member states for more than a decade, and the decline predates the pandemic even where the pandemic deepened it. Roughly a third of fifteen-year-olds in the Union now fall below the threshold at which international assessments consider a student functionally capable in at least one core domain. The Commission has added digital skills and citizenship to its definition of the basics, which is defensible on policy grounds and inconvenient on measurement grounds, since neither has a comparable long series behind it.
The second is teachers and trainers, addressed through a dedicated agenda covering working conditions, career progression and the attractiveness of the profession. Nearly every member state reports shortages, concentrated in mathematics, science and vocational subjects, and concentrated again in rural and disadvantaged schools. This is the area where the Union has the least formal competence and the most obvious problem. Pay scales, tenure, recruitment and initial training are national, in several states sub-national. What Brussels can offer is money through Erasmus+, comparative data, and the reputational pressure of publishing which systems are losing teachers fastest.
The third is digital education infrastructure, framed around artificial intelligence in the classroom and organised by three words the Commission has chosen carefully: human agency, inclusiveness and digital sovereignty. The last of those is not an education concept. It signals that the package will address which companies supply the software running in European schools, and it links the education file to procurement and industrial policy arguments being conducted elsewhere in the Berlaymont.
Bundling the three creates a coherence problem that the November text will have to solve. Declining basic skills and teacher shortages are the same problem observed at different points: a school that cannot staff its mathematics department produces students who cannot do mathematics. Digital infrastructure is a different problem, with a different budget line and a different set of interested parties, and it is arriving in the same document because AI is the subject on which the Commission currently finds it easiest to secure attention and funding. There is a real risk that the third strand absorbs the political oxygen while the first two, which require national governments to spend their own money on salaries, are handled through recommendations that nobody is obliged to follow.
The instruments available reinforce that risk. Education is a supporting competence under Article 165 of the treaties, meaning the Union may encourage cooperation and must respect the responsibility of member states for content and organisation. What emerges in November will therefore be a communication, probably a Council recommendation, and a set of funding priorities attached to Erasmus+ and the European Social Fund. The Commission has proposed 40.8 billion euro for Erasmus+ across 2028 to 2034, up from 26.2 billion in the current period, and that increase is the practical leverage behind the roadmap.
A 2040 horizon is unusual for a Commission with a mandate ending in 2029. It suits a file where results appear slowly, and it also insulates the authors from being judged on outcomes. The question worth holding until November is whether the text names specific targets with dates before 2029, or whether the teachers agenda in particular arrives as a set of principles that every education ministry can endorse without changing a single salary scale.
