CoR Plenary (April 2022)

In December 2020, the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) requested the drawing up of an own-initiative report on the implementation of the citizenship education actions (2021/2008(INI)). Mr Domènec Ruiz Devesa (S&D, Spain) was appointed rapporteur. This European implementation assessment (EIA) has been prepared to accompany the CULT committee in its scrutiny work on the implementation of citizenship education actions in the European Union. The first part of the EIA presents an overview of the EU policy framework for citizenship education, while the second part presents actions in the field of citizenship education supported by EU funding programmes, in particular the Erasmus+ and Horizon 2020 programmes. The second part also presents citizenship education policies and practices in 10 EU Member States.

This study reviews the extent to which European Union topics are embedded at a range of levels across the school curricula of Member States of the EU. It first sets the scene by referring back to a previous report which summarised the situation back in 2012, and which made a series of recommendations for action by the EU and Member States. It then introduced a further review of the specific topic of European citizenship in the curricula, undertaken in 2017 by the Eurydice Network, bringing together the action points from 2013 and 2017. The following section summarises EU actions over the past 10 years that have supported education systems and education stakeholders across Europe, looking ahead to the ambition of achieving the European Education Area by 2025 which will be an overarching framework for education and learning across all ages. The scene is then set for the current study context, bringing together a series of Eurobarometer surveys to show the current context of knowledge and understanding of European issues, particularly among the young people who are the focus of schooling.

Values are called the dominating forces in life while our identity determines nothing less than who we are. Both are therefore extremely important in determining citizens’ preferences towards EU policy. But what exactly are these values? To what extent are they shared among EU citizens? In what sense do they differ among different EU Member States? How do they relate to how citizens identify themselves? What parallels can be drawn between the answers to different questions, and to what extent do more traditionally important socio-demographic factors such as gender, age, education, financial situation, Internet use, political leanings or other determinants influence both?

According to recommendations of the UN Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative, countries and regions require a number of structural changes if they are to implement educational policies and practice based on global citizenship education, and to promote respect and responsibility across cultures. In this paper, we present the first results of a three-year project to compare existing educational policies, strategies and school curricula in ten European Union countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Spain, Portugal, UK) to ascertain the current level of such structural changes. Through a comparative policy analysis, we investigated whether, to what extent, and how global citizenship education is integrated within primary school curricula. The article focuses on national governmental agencies – specifically two main bodies in each country, the ministries of foreign affairs and education – and their political discourses. We argue that the gap between the two traditions, with separate approaches, purposes, concepts and bureaucracies, represents a strategic political challenge for the introduction of global citizenship education in primary schools.

Highlights:
- The Council of Europe and European Union play the most important role in meeting the objective of active citizenship.
- The debate on civic education has not been assigned the position that it should in the European level.
- At a time when EU citizens remain uninvolved in the democratic life, civic education should contribute to the building of a European identity.