Learning for Environmental sustainability is taking another step forward

European Commission published a proposal for Council Recommendation, its aim is to guide students towards sustainability.

Learning for Environmental sustainability is one of the priorities of the European Education Area. On Friday 14 January, the European Commission published proposal for a Council Recommendation on learning for environmental sustainability. Negotiations with the Member States on this proposal will begin shortly with the objective to reach an agreement during the current French Presidency of the Council before 30 June 2022. 

The proposal is based, among other things, on an extensive public consultations held from June to September last year, as well as on a European commission study published on 7 January 2022, mapping approaches to learning for sustainability in Member States at all levels of education.  

Objectives of the proposal and supporting documents 

The aim of the proposal is to support Member States in their efforts to equip pupils and students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to address sustainability, climate change and biodiversity loss. To this end, the proposal calls on the Member States to make learning for sustainability a priority, to ensure access to high-quality education on the subject and to promote the whole-institution approaches to sustainability, not only in learning and teaching but for example also in planning and management. There should also be support for the active involvement of staff as well as pupils and students. Last but not least, the European Commission calls on Member States, to invest in infrastructure, sustainable equipment, resources, buildings and training tools with the help of national and EU funds. 

The currently published proposal is also supplemented by two accompanying documents. Firstly, a Staff Working Document in the form of a handbook, which contains details of the proposal, including the results of the public consultation. The second accompanying document is the newly created European Competence Framework on Sustainability ("GreenComp"), which has also been developed by the European Commission. This framework defines 4 groups of competencies (each of which has 3 additional sub-competences) that pupils and students at all levels of education should learn.