 So, ladies and gentlemen, the clock is now 2 p.m. and we would like to start. So, on behalf of the European Commission, I'm very pleased to welcome you all to this afternoon conference called Key Competences for All Policy Design and Implementation in Europe. My name is Garten Freilich-Hogo. I'm a director at the Danish Technological Institute, and I have the pleasure of guiding you through this afternoon. Together with my colleagues from the European Institute of Education and Social Policy and ECHORIS, DCI has been part of the study which forms the basis of this conference. Before I walk you through the agenda, I would like to remind you of a few housekeeping rules. I'm sure that we have all got used to digital meetings, but nevertheless. So, please turn off your microphone and also your camera unless you are presenting or you are part of a panel debate. And if you would like to ask questions, please use the raise hand function which you will find in the top panel. We will try to monitor all the time if you would like to say a few words. It's also possible to ask questions through the chat. We will also be monitoring the chat all the time. I cannot promise that we have time to address all questions because we have limited time, but we'll do our best to address all questions. Now, turning to the agenda. Christian, could we please have the slides up again? Just briefly going through the agenda of this afternoon. In a few minutes, I'm very pleased to welcome a famous Christofito, who is the Director General of the European Commission, Gigi Ehege, and she will give us the welcoming address. After this speech, we will look into the key findings of the study and the recommendations and the policy guidelines. And this presentation will be provided by Janet Looney, who is the project director of the study, and Magelo Scheer has been the project manager. This will be followed by some reflections on the recommendations, which will be facilitated by Professor Kay Livingston. First, we have invited Professor Dr. Edith Hooch to give some short reflections. And this is followed by a panel debate. And the panel consists of, as you can see, Michael Teusch from the European Commission. Elizabeth Ella from the Danish Ministry of Education and Training. Maria Emilia Santos from the Portuguese National Education Council. And then finally, we also have a presentation from Dr. Drahoj Slava Kekushova. She will not attend this meeting, but she has sent us an audio file. So thank you very much for that. So next slide, please. Around 3.30, we will have a short break for about 15 minutes. And after the break, we will have another discussion where we will look into how to apply the guidelines to different types of education systems and contexts. And again, this panel debate will be facilitated by Professor Kay Livingston. And you can see here from the slides of the participants in the panel, which is Hel Hyslop from Ireland. Peter Lukas from the Netherlands. We have Susan Flockes from Etush and Rares Vulgo from Ubezu. We also have short interventions from Carmen Matinez from Spain and from Jaurezlaw Falcin from the Czech Republic. And excuse me if I do not pronounce your names correctly. I hope you can forgive me. Around five o'clock, we will turn to a presentation from the European Commission by Ulrike Pisaertis. And finally, we will have Sofia Eriksson-Waterskut to do the concluding remarks. So this is quite a full program. So we better get started. So I will leave or handle over the mic now to Femis. Christopher Vido to give us the welcoming address. Thank you very much and welcome. Thank you and you're pronouncing my name very well. Thank you for that. It's not easy. Good afternoon to all and a very warm welcome to our conference on policy design and implementation for key competence development in Europe. This event is a culmination of a year long study carried out on behalf of the European Commission. The European Institute of Education and Social Policy Equities and the Danish Technological Institute have carried out here a very important task. They investigated policy reforms in member states for broad key competence development and a better achievement of basic skills. And their findings resulted in a set of recommendations from member states that will be presented and discussed today. Now, key competencies are not a new priority. In 2018, we put forward a council recommendation on this very issue, which in turn served to update the 2006 council recommendation on key competencies. Key competencies have been a point of focus at EU level for almost two decades actually. They are also a clear priority for our member states with many introducing education since the first council recommendation came out. And it is precisely this sustained focus that brings us here today. It is because of the last 20 years bringing key competencies to the fore that we have the evidence and the wealth of practices that make this study so useful. Of course, we need to go further. So far, the EU has not met its target of fewer than 15% of 15 year olds underachieving in reading mathematics and science. In fact, little progress has been made over the past. In many cases, the pandemic has made things worse. COVID-19 put the spotlight on several shortcomings in our education systems that often led to learning loss. Children fell behind in developing and improving their basic skills. The challenges in connecting to each other during this pandemic certainly have made and still make that bringing them back to up to speed is a harder task. This was aggravated by lacking digital skills, of course, and infrastructure. The pandemic also increased the concern for the physical, mental and emotional well-being of children and young people. On the other hand, this highlighted how important it was to include personal, social and learning. A 2018 recommendation. It also showed how important it is to improve our collective performance in this arena. This kind of discussion forum on reforms is precisely what is needed to improve our guidance at the EU level to implement and fine-tune competence-based education and key competence development. Good policy design and implementation is by no means an easy task, and you know this, I'm not talking to people who are not experts here. Systems, traditions, structures are different in every country. On top of it, these are not immutable. They change over time. What might be right and justified at the beginning of a reform might become less effective or obsolete further along. In any case, reforms take time and change for the better is often not immediately visible. These realities require both commitment and flexibility. They also require us as a community to be able to step back and reflect positively influencing the direction of our work. This is especially true as our competence needs are contingent on the challenges we face and we're facing some very tricky ones currently. Some competencies like basic skills have been around forever and they're not going anywhere. Reading, maths, basic understanding of science and technology, these remain essential. Technological innovation, digitalization or the need to understand the natural world as we fight climate change guarantee that they will remain relevant. I already mentioned how personal and social competencies not to mention digital have become so fundamental to cope with the pandemic restrictions. We can add the need for multilingual competencies as well as cultural awareness and expression in the context of our increasingly globalized world. And of course entrepreneurship and citizenship complete the eight key competencies that are essential to act effectively in society in private enterprise or even in our democracy. All these competencies are a gateway to participation to belonging in our community and enriching the lives of those around us with our efforts and our creativity. This is especially relevant this year as we're launching the European Year of Youth. We all want young people to be engaged and to participate. These competencies are the means to do this. So, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, today we will look at this work, these five case studies looking at different education systems context lessons. We will look at diverse reform paths, but we will be united by the same ambition to learn from each other and to support better learning. It is this commitment that unites us. In fact, I cannot stress this enough. This whole exercise is an excellent example of peer learning among member states. We're learning from our different approaches and through our similar experiences also. Policymakers in other countries will not be able to use those recommendations to adapt their own strategies in line with their specific context. This is at the very core of our European approach to education. And it is at the core of our efforts to create a genuine European education area by 2025. After all, the area is both about sharing our expertise and insight with each other and about reinforcing our education systems so that young people can build their future wherever they may be. Across Europe, across borders and across cultures. So without further ado, I'm looking forward to your own insights. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much to famous and what I really miss here on these online meetings is to be able to give you a big applause. But thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. Thank you. Moving on actually to the next agenda point. We would like to introduce Janet Looney and Magele O'Shea who will now give you a bit of an insight into the key findings of the study. So Christian, could you please put up the slides again? And we welcome Janet Looney and Magele O'Shea. Thank you, Karsten. And good afternoon everybody and let me add my welcome to you to our online conference here this afternoon. In this short session, my colleague Janet Looney and I would like to provide you with a brief overview of our study on key competences in school education and on the policy recommendations and guidelines. The discussion following the presentation will be facilitated by Professor Kay Livingston, who is professor of educational research policy and practice at the University of Glasgow. The study set out to establish how policy reform for broad competence development in school education and particularly a better achievement of basic skills can be effectively designed and implemented. It involved initially a phase of desk research, which included a mapping of the 27 EU member states to ascertain what key policies were introduced over the last 10 to 12 years around competence development. And the better achievement of basic skills. We were interested in well established policies rather than very recent ones so that we could learn from the approaches to implementation and see how that implementation was managed over time. The country mapping then formed the basis of the analysis to allow us to select five case study countries to explore the policies in more depth through a peer learning process. The outputs of the study are the draft recommendations and guidelines which are on the conference webpage and I've actually put a link to the guidelines in the chat in case anybody hasn't managed to access them so far. And there will also be a final study report, which will be published over the coming weeks. We're looking forward to your comments and suggestions today, as they will help us to shape these final two documents. So our Director General has already talked to you about key competences and I know most of you here today are already very familiar with them. But just to remind ourselves that the competence are defined by the European Commission as a combination of knowledge skills and attitudes. These eight competences set out in the 2018 Council recommendation in the areas of literacy, digital competence, citizenship competence, entrepreneurship, and so on. It's important to note that these eight competences are considered of equal importance, but they may be applied in different ways and in different contexts, and in different combinations depending on the aims and priorities and approaches taken in different education systems. In addition, skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving teamwork, those transversal skills are also embedded throughout the key competences. And while basic skills are included in key competences, we have noted that some countries do treat them separately to the development of the competences. So for this reason and for the purposes of the analysis, we looked at basic skills as being reading mathematics and the science skills. We have certainly seen many different approaches in the country mapping examples and in the five case study countries. Competence education is likely to represent a significant change in approaches to taking to teaching, learning and assessment and in ways of working within and indeed beyond schools. As a result, policies that are introduced to support competence education often involve complex change processes that are multi-learned, multi-faceted, and take time to implement. So I'll hand over to Janet now to talk about the key elements for effective change in policy design and implementation. Thanks very much Janet. Great, thanks Majella. Can I have the next slide please? Okay, so this slide lists some of the key elements for effective design and implementation of competence-based education. As the Director General has emphasized already, competence is very important. So for example, for several of our case study countries, new competence-based initiatives were first introduced around the time of the 2008 financial crisis and this had an important impact on the implementation process, particularly in regard to the availability of resources and teacher working conditions. No matter where any country is in its process of implementing competence-based initiatives right now, they will be affected by the COVID crisis. That will be important to consider moving forward. Other country-level contextual factors are also important. For example, whether competence-based education represents a very radical shift in approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment. Whether it's one of just many reforms and there's a reform fatigue. If there are labor actions or other concerns, no matter the different contexts, it's important for countries to learn from each other. They can learn more about what they might anticipate in their own systems, expand their range of policy options, and better anticipate issues that may arise over time by comparing notes, so to speak. The second and third elements on this slide, trust and effective communication are closely related. Trust of course includes trust between national and regional or local levels and institutions, as well as trust among colleagues in schools. It's particularly important during change processes, but it's also vulnerable to break down due to misunderstandings and miscommunications during the times of change and uncertainty. So it's something to watch and support carefully. Importantly, trust can be built or rebuilt over time, so all is not lost if there are issues regarding trust. In terms of communication, effective communication is essential to ensure the buy-in and trust of the key actors, including schools and teachers who are going to be implementing the reforms. In terms of country's strategies to steer change and influence classroom practices, these vary across countries. They include choices regarding the mix of what we refer to as part and soft policy tools and the roles of actors at macro, meso, and micro levels, or in other words, national networks and school levels. So hard policy measures are those that are more rigorous and prescriptive. They include legislation, centrally organized implementation, and so on. These are the policies that allow central governments to steer the direction of policy reforms, and they are aimed to ensure equity and the same quality standards and provision across schools and regions. So these can be quite important and always are present at some level. Soft policy measures are more flexible and allow for adaptation at local levels. So they include frameworks, guidelines, school development focused on improvement, and so on. They allow more flexibility at the local level and can be more effective in building trust and ensuring sustainability as more actors are involved in the policy design and implementation. In deciding how to to design the mix of hard and soft policy tools, countries need to consider where they are now. So for example, if they have a highly centralized approach, they can't move from from that to autonomy in one day. So there's a carefully designed strategy for change over time as needed. Evaluation, both formative and summative are important also. And we're mentioning that specifically here because it needs to be planned for in the early stages of policy design and it's frequently overlooked. Formative evaluation, the ongoing type of evaluation can help capture unexpected results and help systems to make adjustments. And the summative evaluation can capture impacts over time. Again, and that phrase over time is also very important. This is our last point. Change of this scale takes a long time and countries may need to to be very strategic in how they plan their changes and and take into account that they may need to to be building their implementation capacities over time and supporting teacher efficacy. Can I have the next slide please. So this is a visual representation of a complex multi layer education system and some of the important elements of implementation of competence based approaches. So this cut out pie area at the top shows the multiple layers of education starting from the European level and going down to the school level. The next on the outside around is showing the, the context and processes so, as mentioned earlier political and economic context such as a financial crisis can have a big impact. And these all affect part of the process. It is a cycle. At the center of this diagram you see the learner, and we've placed this deliberately here because competence based approaches are constructivist and very learner centered learners are actively engaged in the learning process. Learner voice is also important in terms of the policy design and implementation cycle so learners can be included in this process, and that shouldn't be forgotten. Finally, the smaller pie pieces around the core are the elements that are important or many of the elements that are essential for effective implementation. So governance, the commitment at the ministry level and the stakeholders and their engagement, communication strategies, new curricula for competence based approaches, support for teachers to develop their competences to teach in new ways and to assess students in new ways. New ways of working within and across schools, new infrastructure and teaching materials so as you can see this is no small change in terms of competence development. All these elements need to be considered over time. Next slide please. So this figure highlights the key dimensions of political commitment and implementation capacity. Political commitment includes the commitment of both ministry level and education stakeholders. So if you have the engagement of all those people that's an important aspect. Strong implementation capacity includes a good understanding of the logic of new initiatives and a competent use of appropriate policy tools. There are different combinations of political commitment and strong implementation capacity. Ideally, everyone wants to be in the upper right hand quadrant where implementation is most likely to happen. And of course countries have different strengths and weaknesses. I think both of the political commitment and the implementation capacity can be built over time. And countries can be quite strategic in thinking about how to build those capacities, taking a stage based approach. Okay, I'll hand it now to Majella. Thanks Janice. Next slide please Karsten. So we thought we'd just give you a brief overview of the desk research, which was the first phase of the study. As you can imagine, there was quite a lot of information and analysis leaned from the desk research. So in the short time that we have today, we can only really give you a little bit of an overview. The mapping exercise identified 79 reforms across the 27 member states relevant to the development of key competences and basic skills. If you can see the chart there, you'll notice that most of the reforms that met our selection criteria focused on curriculum development. There were 51 of the reforms, which are very much based around curriculum. These were followed by teacher building of teacher capacity, 40 reforms and assessment practice, 39 of the reforms. In many cases, curriculum and assessment reform was supported by work in developing areas such as teacher capacity and school leadership. So there is of course some overlap in these policy initiatives, reinforcing the complexity of change in policy and practice. It's rarely just one area that is covered, but a number of different layers. Some countries also made some structural changes to their education systems. For example, they might have made changes to the length of their school day in primary education, for example, or by increasing the length of time in compulsory schooling, in particular lowering the compulsory school entry age and increasing the focus on early years education, often with the focus on addressing inclusion and the improvement of basic skills. Some countries addressed all or most of the key competences, the eight key competences in their reform efforts, but most focused on supporting particular competences or on a subset of them. So for example, the most popular areas addressed were literacy, 47 of the reforms addressed literacy, science, technology, mathematics, there were 42 digital competences and multilingualism. Most of the reforms mapped seem to support all the basic skills together, rather than taking them individually. So the science, reading and mathematics. The next slide please. When we looked at some of the common enablers that came through the reforms across the 27. There was strong, the idea of strong political support was cited by a number of countries in the country mapping as being important for getting the reform up and running in the first place, but also ensuring that implementation is effective and sustained over time. In some cases, this political support referred to the commitment of ministers for education, while in others it was a commitment of the broad group of stakeholders are indeed sometimes a combination of both. School stakeholders, including school leaders, teachers, students and parents, especially need to be included from the design stage, all the way through the implementation stages of policy reform, allowing for flexibility in the implementation approach in line with local and stakeholder needs. Not surprisingly, professional development for teachers and school leaders and particularly building self efficacy was highlighted as an important support for change, as was financial support and investment in human resources, which might include time for teachers to lead aspects of the reforms, for example, or time for planning. As the country mapping exercise was conducted early in 2021, the move to remote schooling and the use of digital platforms and resources as a result of COVID-19 were already starting to have an impact on digital development. And in many cases, there were the acceleration of developments and progress in this area was noted when we were doing the country mapping. Next slide, please. And of course, every country has had its challenges with the design and implementation of policies around key competences. And it has been a learning process for all countries and this is something that we were privileged enough to be able to work through the five case study countries in more depth with. When we look at the common challenges, we can see that those most sizes are really the flip side of the enablers. So in, you know, where challenges raised themselves, it was a lack of stakeholder engagement, little or no piloting, inadequate or poorly targeted communications. So you can see that enablers and challenges are often two sides of the same coin and taught planning and resources are needed to build the enablers and to address the challenges. Next slide, please. So we, at the end of the country mapping, we came to a decision on the selection of five case study countries. Several key considerations informed the selection of the case study countries for the in depth country research. It was important to the study team to select countries that are advanced in the reform efforts that they can report on their experience and contribute to the lessons that can be learned. It was also important for the selected countries to provide access to a variety of experiences, approaches and systems, including countries that have approached reforms in different areas or at different stages in sequencing steps of the reform in order to highlight the diverse dimensions of the change processes. And we also looked for variety in the types of education systems and the governance structures of the five countries. Based on those criteria, the five countries selected were Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovakia. Next slide, please. So with those five case study countries, then we embarked on a peer learning group program and we had four meetings of the peer learning group between May and October 2021. And the cycle here followed the policy cycle of design and implementation of policies through policy evaluation and adaptation and the development of policy recommendations. Alongside the peer learning group meetings, we also conducted country workshops with the assistance of country experts in each of the five countries. And there were two country workshops, one on the national policy analysis and the views of stakeholders in each country. And the second one then was referred more to the challenges and successes of the policy reforms and also focused on the situation re COVID-19. So while this follows the policy cycle, and this doesn't indicate that we see that, you know, as being something that's time bound, there was a lot of moving back and forward in the discussions between the different areas from meetings one through four. In the final meeting, participants were invited to reflect on questions organized around the teams emerging from the first three meetings and from the country workshops and to consider the most important lessons learned regarding the role of political support, policy design and implementation of competence based initiatives based on the experiences of each country. So that's an overview of the process, a little bit about the desk recommendations and Janice is going to start us off talking, looking at the recommendations and guidelines. Thanks, Janice. Thanks. You know the next slide please. Okay, just as a sort of a segue what I'll mention here is that our policy guidelines and recommendations are organized along the, the, the classic policy cycle so just in the way that our peer learning group addressed the policy design and early the deepening of policies and practices, evaluation and forward looking aspects. We've also organized our recommendations in that sense. Reinforcing what Majela has just said, these are not to be taken as linear we are not seeing a policy plan is being designed put into place evaluated and that's it. But it's a, it's an effective way to to look at what happens across countries. Next slide please. So beginning with the policy design and implementation process. These are just the headline areas we have more detailed recommendations in the report itself as you can see, when you check that online. The design is the importance of engaging stakeholders and design of policy policy initiatives. So this is really increasingly part of the policy design process. It hasn't been common up until very recently and countries are really exploring and learning how to to make this work effectively. They found that it does take more time, but that the time invested pays off over the longer term, and the research supports its effectiveness and finding that there's greater accountability efficiency, and that that it's a good governance model. It's most effective when there's attention to building trust based relationships when it's transparent when it builds capacity for clear and constructive debate, which is important because stakeholders themselves are not necessarily used to to being engaged in this way. And having a structured process around a shared vision is also quite important. The second headline bring together aspirations and research evidence to develop a theory of change and care logic for implementation. So this is finding the balance between values and aspirations as and research evidence. The research evidence itself should be should include academic but also contextualize insights at school level stakeholders so that those are balanced. University partnerships can be productive and helping create that balance. Together, stakeholders can work to to create a clear logic. Also, that logic needs to build on what's already there what are the existing policies and practices because you're not going to go from from one set to a totally different approach to teaching learning and assessment in one go. Piloting of new initiatives is important and it allows for an adjustment of plans. It provides the opportunity to gather early feedback and what's working well, and to adjust a refiner refine any logistics of implementation and engage a broader group of stakeholders in the discussions on change processes. Again, effective communication channels are really important these include both horizontal and vertical so the horizontal is between the national or regional and the local levels course and horizontal is across networks so within schools and across schools. And this is an important part of the learning process for for those who are implementing changes and reinforcing again plans for evaluation need to be part of this process. Next slide please. So as implementation advances there's a need to allow time for changes to take hold and so we've thought of this as developing and deepening process practice. And we emphasize here the role of school leaders so while school leader roles vary across countries. Schools play a pivotal role in guiding school level change and they need support to strengthen their own roles as leaders and facilitators of new approaches to teaching and learning. Schools like systems also need to introduce the changes over time. Then there's also a need to support teachers professional learning communities. This includes policies to support opportunities for collaborative professional learning and schools is learning organizations. And to create conditions for change and learning across networks. The job. Okay, next slide please. And the third strand or pillar of the recommendations is to do with evaluation and evaluating progress to support system and school level learning. While we often associate evaluation with external processes, internal school evaluation focused on school development can also be very valuable. This evaluation will be most effective when effective when a climate of trust and a focus on the quality of student learning and well being is fostered. And the recommendations focus on providing opportunities for school staff and stakeholders to develop competences to gather and interpret data on the school environment and on student learning and well being. And supporting development of a shared understanding on the aims of competence based initiatives and their evaluation within schools and between schools and external evaluator evaluators. You know, some schools will have a lower implementation capacity than others and may need extra support so that they have the resources and support needed to be able to work with data and to be able to conduct these evaluations. And the school evaluation processes over time need to be dynamic and should themselves be evaluated and improved as needs be. The second recommendation about feedback and feed forward loops regular communication between national authorities and agencies and schools will ensure the challenges to implementation of competence based approaches are identified and addressed in a timely manner. We found from the discussions in the peer learning group that there are numerous channels for feedback and feed forward, including, for example, professional development providers and teacher educators, the inspectorate and curriculum developers and also universities and opportunities to engage with teachers and teachers who leaders should be explored at all stages of design and implementation. What was what came through strongly in the peer learning group was the importance that feedback from schools and to schools is coherent with the logic of the policy design, and that adaptations made on the basis of the feedback are appropriate and also are visible that people can see what they are recommending has been taken into account and makes a difference. And the next slide please. So just very quickly looking at a building on the lessons learned and and looking forward. And I suppose our recent experiences of the disruption caused by COVID-19 has taught us of the important building on lessons learned, sometimes when those lessons are thrust on us unexpectedly. The COVID-19 crisis and emergency remote learning have revealed areas of fragility and resilience across systems, and in particular the socioeconomic disparities between learners and their families have been made even more apparent. In several countries education systems have turned to teacher based assessments, for example, for high state decisions such as graduation and university admission, as it wasn't possible to administer standardized examinations remotely. And I think this is an area that countries have found is something that they have to have to respond to quite quickly. And it appears that there is quite a lot of learning to be had from the responses that were made. And it is important to build on the lessons learned during the crisis and some approaches that may help to capitalize on what has been learned would include the monitoring of the impact of the crisis on implementation of competence based initiatives and on student learning and well being And building on relationships, for example, with parents and carers who have played important roles in supporting their children's learning from home and supporting teachers to deepen assessment competences, including digital assessment competences. Just finally, in terms of the policy learning approach that was used as part of the study, it has been it has proven I think to be a valuable policy learning process. And these type of processes within and across countries can support reflection on past successes and ongoing challenges in policy design and implementation of competence based initiatives. Opportunity for open engagement can help to open channels of communication and build trust across all key actors. Exchanging good practices within and across countries can support this type of policy learning and can encourage policy makers to reflect on lessons learned within their own context, but also on lessons that they might learn from other countries as well. Janet just to finish this off there I think. Okay. Next slide please. So this is just a big thank you for for your attention we really appreciate your your listening to to our presentation it's the product of a year's worth of work. We are now moving on to the more interactive stage of the discussion and I'm going to hand it over to our facilitator Professor Kay Livingston and our discussant Professor. So thanks. Thank you Janet and thank you also to Majela for their presentation. I welcome Edith to join us for this first part of the panel discussion. And also I would like to give my welcome to all of you who are logged on and participants on this online conference we're also looking forward to seeing your questions and comments come so do keep putting them into the chat function. Well, welcome Edith and we're very interested to hear your thoughts on the recommendations that have been presented. Also your insights on how education systems with diverse contexts, governance structures and different development needs could think about how they could perhaps tailor these recommendations for their own context and their own priorities. So over to you for a brief introduction. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to participate in this session in this conference and to reflect on the study on policy design and implementation which is I think of great importance. And I think it's also very interesting that the approach has been taken of peer learning so the five case studies and then learning from each other. This is a difficult endeavor. Let me start with saying good policies travel badly. And this is what I think everyone experiences so it's very important. If policymakers and educational practitioners want to tailor policy design and policy ideas to their own situation they have to learn. And also to learn how to apply this to the specific historical political administrative and cultural cultural contexts. And maybe that is the hardest hardest part and the biggest part. I would like to reflect particularly on first the difficult difficulty of implementation as such then eliminate some focal points which I consider as no regret. And then I would like to go into the viewpoint of the implementers. And what I will tell now what I reflect on will also be much of underlining of the findings of the study which have just been presented. But let me let me first say that the hard work of turning policy into practice after the policy design and during the policy implementation turning it into practice. There are no silver bullets. And so we always have to be in search of important and powerful contributors to better system performance. And this is what has been done in this study as well. There are in the literature but also in practice there are different approaches on policy implementation and the policy implementation of top down perspectives and policy on paper. We have left that a little bit behind and some supplemented it with new insights, new fruitful approaches. And I would like to highlight some of these approaches with which is first drawing on systems theory in order to be able to deal with the complex multi faceted multi layered education systems. Most countries have taking a network approach. And doing that focusing on the actors, state actors and non state actors with on the different levels of the system and focusing on how to engage in actions in interactions and in relationships with respect to the policy. And well, I like to cite Michael Barber with his ideas on deliverology. He summarized these ideas in policy implementation is a matter of gentle pressure relentlessly applied. And then I go to my second point of my reflection. There has been years and years of research on policy implementation also in other fields, other than education. And the first thing, first main thing is change in policy implementation is change requires will skill and capacity. This is the kind of general rule. And there are five focal points five no regret points which deserve attention. And the first is it can't be said enough. Generate a coherent and clear set of limited goals, limited goals so less is more. Second, avoid multiple interventions, you turns and policy borrowing policy borrowing in the sense of applying other policies traveling badly, not being easily applied. I'm sure it is an implementation plan is informed by theory of action, and that it is implicit in policy formation theory of action is a very important perspective. Well, this has been said by by by the researchers established feedback loops at all levels in the system and all the time routinely monitor and address problems in order to address them and adapt and change your policy. And last but not least, indeed build professional skills and capacity at all levels to deliver the change and the improvement. Well, and my last point my last reflection point is, I would like to specify a little bit more on the notion of engaging stakeholders, which is indeed very important. It's important to engage them in the design in the goals and the implementation of policy education policies. And I would like to focus on the viewpoint of teachers and school leaders and other educational professionals in practice. Because we all know we experience teachers and school leaders behavior during policy implementation do not necessarily align with policymakers ambition, not necessarily sometimes not at all. Well, from their perspective they are confronted with new policy programs with change with rules and regulations, and they have to implement it. Well, of course, the idea of professionalization and professional learning as a condition for policy implementation is very important. But maybe this turns professionals a bit too much into objects, policy objects. So what we know from those years of research that successful implementation is dependent depending not only on the capacity but also on the willingness of those who implement it. So the willingness of those school leaders, teachers and educational practitioners. So I would like to introduce here in our discussion and our framework to look at these matters, the notion of policy alienation. And this is about the extent to which the implementers, in our case, teachers, school leaders, identify with the policy. And this has also to do with the notion of trust, this concrete make it more concrete notion of trust. If they, the implementers don't identify, they may be disconnected from the policy. And this disconnectedness is related to two things. First, professional teachers may have a sense of powerlessness. And this is caused by a lack of influence over shaping the policy. And as it is introduced by government or in their own school organization. So sense of powerlessness. And the second is the sense of meaninglessness. If educational professionals, they don't perceive added value from the policy from a change. If they don't perceive added value for their own students, for their own work, or for socially relevant goals, which they consider relevant. If they don't perceive that they sense meaninglessness. So this powerlessness and this meaninglessness, well, it is a risk. And it's very important that the implementers, the practitioners, the professionals do identify with the policy. Well, I conclude because I know we're going to be more interactive. I hope my reflections provide some food for discussions. Thank you so much, Edith. The really interesting points there in terms of policy alienation and the importance of the will and the sense of meaningfulness, not meaningless. So thank you for that. And I'm sure we will pick up some more. You may have an opportunity to come back at the end and reflect on what our panel participants say, particularly perhaps around that building of trust and engaging with stakeholders. But thank you for now, and we hope to be able to come back to you if time allows with the panel. Thank you. So moving on, it's now an opportunity for me to welcome the panel who are going to offer their thoughts. If I can briefly introduce them. First of all, we have three of our panelists who participated in the peer learning groups and also in the country workshops. And we'll have the opportunity to hear from their experiences of key competence policy to design and implementation. I'm also very pleased to say that we have Michael Tush with us, who is head of unit at the European Commission, DG for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. So perhaps I'll turn to Michael first in terms of thinking about the importance of peer learning before we have an opportunity to hear from the panelists about their experiences in peer learning. The European Commission plays an important role in facilitating peer learning opportunities. And I ask you Michael to comment on the importance of international policy learning among the member states in terms of how also the European Commission supports the countries to adapt their policies to their own context and priorities. Thank you so much Kay and for the welcome and good afternoon to all of you. And thanks you so much for participating here in the conference but also in the study the researchers also the countries who have participated in the studies that's great because it was really a peer learning study. And of course I, you know this exchanges is bread and butter for us, it is why I get a salary and because we try to support countries who are responsible for education and training to learn from each other. And Edith Horger just said good policies travel badly made me think so because it shows she rightly so highlighted the difficulties that you cannot just copy paste in a way a policy that has worked in a particular country to another one. I think that's the way what the message I got it and you have to look at specific national regional context cultures actors their interest there. My experience, however, is that this being said, we have a number of questions that all member states of the European Union in beyond are really struggling with and so they all have issues of insufficient number of learners not having the basic skills and the key competence acquired in the way that they cannot actually participate in the society or work properly. So this is something which is which concerns a quite an important number of countries. We see that this very often has a social socio economic background is named strongly impacting on this and some countries have similar issues but some are doing better and someone doing having big challenges so that's why the countries themselves have decided to there's a number of issues that we would like to look at what others are doing. And let's say just coming from the Council this morning and France currently has the presidency of the European Union and France like any other country I could mention and Denmark Island Slovakia the countries we have here is very proud of their own system and what they have achieved. But still they say, we know we're good but we have big challenges elsewhere we're very curious to look at what the others are doing and we think we can learn from that. And that's basically why why why I think my job is still useful why I'm so happy that we're discussing here. And that's why I think this study is useful because then I will turn to the study, you may know. It's been said that this the key competencies we have had it for quite a while, I mean this policy I mean the first recommendation is already 2018 was a revision of an earlier recommendation done 15 years earlier, 10 years earlier. And I mean it showed the way the reason why we did the revision was exactly that that we had a sort of commitment to promote key competencies, but it wasn't so easy to do. So we did a bit of an update on the definition of the competence but the big message was, hey in order to make it work we have to look at learning approaches we have to look at teacher education and training we have to look at, how assessment is done. So we did the countries and we from the Commission after doing this evaluations have said this is what we should look at what does it take to make it work because we can have because we have a community out there was interested in making it work. That's why I'm also happy we have this study here to say, and then I'll stop in a moment we'll come back later. It's this disaster which has been mentioned a lot about communication exchange involving the actors, because I mean it's also we talk implementation or so it it was just said it's not the top down it's more learning process. And this is something which comes again strongly out of the, the message and then come to bed to come back to your original question that's why I think European cooperation index in the peer learning exchanges we do all with the last month project is so useful. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. And I think that the emphasis on the multiple layers and so many things that have to be considered in policy reform and how over time we can learn from one another in terms of the different changes that are made. So thank you. It was it was very helpful to have that introduction and then have the opportunity to hear from the other panelists in terms of their involvement in the peer learning group from a European perspective. So thank you very much, Michael. And can I turn now to introducing the panelists. We're going to hear from Elspeth Allen, who's head of international affairs for Children and Education from the Ministry of Education Children in Denmark. We don't have Dr. Dr. Slava Kekosova from the state who is a state advisor at the Department of Curriculum and Innovation and Education for the Minister of Education, Science, Research and Sport in the Slovak public, but she is going to we are going to hear from out from a through a recorded message. We also will hear from Maria Emilia Brador Santos, who is the president of the National Education Council in Portugal. And first of all, I'm going to turn to Elspeth to hear about the experiences from the perspective of Denmark. Denmark, as you have heard, was one of our case study countries and also Elspeth was involved in the peer learning group and had the opportunity to work with others in discussing the policy implementation policy design stage, the implementation and also the evaluation. So, Elspeth, from your involvement in the key competence policy design and implementation, what have you found that worked well? What might others be able to learn from the Danish context? Well, first of all, thank you. And thank you for the time in the peer learning group. I must say that, for me, it underlined that, yes, as education systems we are very, very different, but probably because we are in a European context, we are also similar in some ways. But with our approach, our thoughts and our school systems. So there is something to learn, but because of these similarities, I found that it's easier to concentrate on the differences. We don't have to start all from the beginning of introducing how do our school systems work and which values and purposes. So, thank you for that. It has been very, very, very interesting. Now, to answer your question, and here I feel like I'm repeating what everyone else has said, involving stakeholders which Edith also emphasized and the presentation of Janet and Madjala as well, to me and to us is crucial in the implementation of reforms. And it is, to me, one of the key recommendations in the report. Stakeholder involvement is crucial, so that the strength and weaknesses and also the real needs of the sector are taken into account and ideally also reflected in the reform. Because we may, in our ivory tower, believe that we know what the needs are, but in the dialogue and involvement of the stakeholders, we will really learn. And it also we find provides the best chances of broad acceptance and understanding of the need of the reform as was just mentioned that without the purpose being part of the stakeholders work, as it doesn't really make sense. If you don't see that there is a need for this and a real proper purpose, then it won't work. And just to mention a thing that Madjala mentioned as well on COVID, that there is a lot of learning to be to be taken from from dealing with COVID. That is our experience as well, because in dealing with the pandemic. We have involved the stakeholders, very, very closely, but all the way from the beginning of the pandemic and then still the case. We work very closely with and very regularly with all key stakeholders, students, parents, school leaders, teachers, etc, at different levels. This, this cooperation and partnership has now developed into a formalized partnership that we call some of schools, and as I'm sure most of you won't understand it roughly translates into together for the school. And, well, I must say that the experiences with that partnership already now are very, very positive. So we recommend, as the port does, that countries beginning a reform process involves stakeholders as early and as much possible to create shared a shared sense of mission trust and ownership. And I don't know if I've got time, but I'd like to mention just an example on how this partnership that I just mentioned has been used already. Yeah, so I believe this time. A political agreement was reached in Denmark in October 2021 about a future evaluation and assessment system in primary and lower secondary school. And that was in this partnership. So in close cooperation with it. And as this now is a turning into legislation. The partnership comments on the law bill in on the way. There is a very, very close cooperation also on what will be included in the law. Now, anything else. Very interesting else that the sense of building that partnership at the early phase of policy design rather than bringing the stakeholders into the process, much later on and I see a comment in the chat in relation to the sense of how from a practical perspective, policy ideas are transferred or understood in into ideas within the actual classroom. And again, being able to bring stakeholders in at that early phase to be able to explore what does this policy actually mean from a classroom perspective it sounds as if the partnership you're suggesting would be extremely helpful. And actually, this is an example of the way that the Danish Ministry of Children Education works and wants to continue to work. And another little point, which I think is important to mention is that we in the real long process of our reform. We experienced the need for changing direction during the implementation process, so you need to course correct on the way. And part of that continue to learn from the development when the implementation is actually taking place. So on the way. So you learn from what's happening, and there must be a flexibility to then course correct accordingly. And I wonder if our experiences with having to be very flexible within this COVID pandemic will help us in that sense of changing direction. So thank you very much as with at this point we are we are sorry it's such a brief time that we have to talk with one another, but we have an opportunity now to hear the recorded message from Tratislava from Slovakia. If Karsten, you can put it on for us. It's a very short message from her, but we're really pleased to have the opportunity to hear from her. In 2008 Slovakia adopted the new Education Act which brought level educational programs state and school and competencies as a goal of education in addition to knowledge. Before that the education was based on the transfer of knowledge and the state prescribed when what and to what extent will be taught. Now the state determines the compulsory minimum in the state educational program and the school has the freedom to profile itself in its school educational program. It has opened up the possibility for schools to focus their education on competencies. NGOs, corporate foundations and some university have done a very good job here giving space to innovative teachers and creating programs in which schools can get involved. The numbers of schools where changes are really starting to take place through such initiatives are increasing. We have understood how communication and involvement of all stakeholders is crucially important to build the trust and engage them for the change. We work on it through different channels now, conferences, working groups, social media and so on. Another way we try to support teacher to make the change in their teaching is to offer them enough teaching materials like textbooks, digital educational content, worksheets and so on, mentoring and networking them. We are building a network of regional centers of curricular management and support for schools. We need to work more on the evaluation process and feedback loops, set the indicators to see and follow the positive changes in the system. We set the goals according to the results from OECD testing. The main one would be to improve pupils learning outcomes in basic literacy about the OECD average. An important shift may bring change to the assessment from distinguishing tests to criteria based tests. Thank you. And we extend our thanks to Dr Aslava. We're sorry that you weren't able to be at the conference online today but thank you for that message and reminding us of that change that Edith talked about from hopefully saying goodbye to more of the top down hierarchical type of policymaking to greater involvement of stakeholders and that emphasis on schools having more freedom to be able to make decisions about their policy. These are recommendations that we heard from Janet and from Magella and also from Edith. So now is our opportunity to turn to Maria Emilia. We welcome you to the panel and as Michael was saying key competence policy has been around for some time and I know in Portugal it's evolved over time. So we're very interested to hear your insights into the sense of policy design implementation and particularly I know that you have something to say around the evaluation of the policies. So we look forward to hearing your views, Maria Emilia. Thank you very much and thank you all very much for inviting me to be here and to be part of the group. I think this is a very important group and a very important initiative. I have followed for many years different attempts at change, different innovations, some more top down, some more bottom up and are some mixed. In every case I was very impressed by its frailty and how difficult it is to really change and to make the change last. So I think it's very good to have this group for two reasons. Because we learn with each other's second because international commitments have shown that they are important for us to keep the focus. For example in 2010 we agreed with the European Union to attain a certain number of targets in education. And it has been the role of this National Council of Education to every year publish a sort of a snapshot of the system and verify if those targets are being approximated or not. So I think that's very good that we can do this work together. The importance of methods or structures. We were talking about the importance of not being just top down but still to have some focus that remains, a political context. The importance of being bottom up so that the teachers and all partners can feel not alienated as Edith was talking about. And how it is more sure to be fit for the situation. But also, and I have found this particularly true with the COVID. Now the closing of schools and how the system reacted very quickly with digital education and so on but still people were not prepared. And how important it was to have these networks of teachers helping each others and how trustworthy they were felt to be. So that's another point I would like to make. Also in the evaluation of you talked about my interest in the evaluation of this reform, which is not an evaluation of the reform but indirectly it gets to be. I just will just say make two comments one that those targets that we were committed ourselves to attain by 2020, most of them we really did. And I must confess I was surprised because I thought with COVID that would not happen but the truth is, all the indicators of school failure of dropouts of entering the higher education, they were all attained or almost all attained or almost there. I want to be very careful and and we want to keep an eye on it as it will because maybe the impact was not in 2020 and it will be in 2021 or 2022. But still it's amazing that this was possible and although this is not it was not intended to be an evaluation of this reform still indirectly it is sort of an evaluation of this reform. Another indirect evaluation came from a Consumers Association that has had done in 2016 an international questionnaire to the Portuguese population asking about the most trustworthy institutions. And in 2016, the educational public system was considered quite good but it was fifth or sixth position in 2021 in March, April when they did the new survey. It was the first. It was the most trusted institution of all the Portuguese institutions which includes political institutions of the army, the police, the church, all of them, many of them. Anyway, so this was also an interesting indication that I thought that they were able to build trust among the community. Still, in my former practice, I used to say that adversaries are the best friends of decision makers and of researchers and I wish we could look into that too. I mean, I wish we could know what, because I've seen so often we have a very nice reform and then the climate changes, the political climate or the economics change and there it goes with the child with the bathwater. So I would be interested in knowing what are the main criticisms that are being said. It's an interesting point from the point of view that we hear about the enablers. Janet and Magella was talking about the enablers, but I know in the peer learning group, it also gave everybody an opportunity to hear from things that perhaps didn't go quite so well. Thank you very much for raising that point that we must also learn from each other, not only in terms of the enablers, but those things that perhaps cause barriers for us in our policy design or our policy implementation. So if I can very quickly turn back to Edith and then perhaps to Michael in terms of any reflections on what you've heard Edith first. Thank you very much. Yeah, well very interesting to hear to learn the other reflections of the other participants in this session and I'm taking away two things. Indeed, it is very important not only to stress the differences, but to share the questions and challenges that are similar. And despite the differences in culture, history, administrative context, et cetera, et cetera, education system. Of course, there are general questions and challenges and to say that again what I found interesting in that as I see in this project the emphasis is put on learning on how to tailor answers to those questions and challenges, how to tailor them to the specific country situation. And that is the right thing to do because as I started that's the hard hard work. So yeah, I am. And the second thing what came in mind is maybe a short thing I learned that Maria Emilia is president of the National Council of Education in Portugal. The Education Council in the Netherlands. I know many countries do have a National Council of Education. And I think or maybe I hope that these councils can be of help in these processes we're talking about, because especially these councils they are depoliticized. They can take a more independent long term but also his historic look at policy building, policy design, education issues, et cetera, et cetera. So that and the last thing I wanted to say related to this political aspect. I found it very interesting to learn from the study, the findings that political commitment, political support in the quadrant is very important to to implementation and success and of course that's very understandable. But maybe we should stress also the tension that the political support and commitment can fade away in the cycles of four year or last year's government. For example, we just have a new government here in the Netherlands, and we're also looking forward to the new policy ambitions, but this can mean indeed policy abolition abolition. So it might be an interesting avenue to think about if some change in policy should be to be sustainable, should be depoliticized, put in another space in society, maybe at an education council or in the education fields, and a bit shielded from political turbulence. Well, this also depends on the country. Thank you, Edith, and I think that Maria Amelia made an important point in relation to the international engagement between member states also helped Portugal in terms of being able to keep the focus on certain policy commitments. I think that's an interesting, those two interesting ideas in terms of depoliticizing but at the same time how international cooperation can also keep the focus on particular policy commitments. So, Michael, if I can just turn to you for for the last word before we we can take some questions perhaps from the the participants that are loved online. Thanks a lot to Maria Amelia again and the others. It's a Danish example from Elisabeth. The, I was thinking this, the effects of the COVID crisis that some of you have talked about. I very much liked it. I don't know who of you now said I think it was Elisabeth from Denmark, how you've worked with stakeholders during this period. And that is actually something hopefully positive to come out of it. This is a big challenge which I think confirms how important this work of key competence is because what we've seen in the crisis in my reading and you correct me is that we were seeing many challenges in terms of continuation but also we see what are the challenges and we've really seen a strong focus on the social impact I mean the social economy background impacting outcomes, but also how this is related to the capacity to organize self directed learning which has become so important because really shown. We've seen some big divided situations between those people who were able to go well through the crisis, or what we've seen the last two years because we're able to gather with the support of their teachers and the teachers who had the competencies to work with their pupils but to provide them not knowledge but actually are you able to resist to challenge organize your learning even if the conditions change. And I think those there we have a group of people who were able to master the key competencies I mean, basic skills, science, mathematics, reading but also learning to learn citizenship issues I mean those are those who have been able to go through the crisis, relatively well. And we all suffered but I mean, relatively well, and those teachers were able to implement these key competence approaches. And this is why I think we've just, we had proposed last autumn, just in summer from the Commission and the Council adopted in November an additional blended learning, which, which looks indeed I mean can you, can we mix different forms of learning. Everybody things of digital, but it's broader it can be outdoor learning it can be go to museums I mean how can we make learning more attractive and for more meaningful by engaging into, and in different types of learning this is something that makes, which we have different competencies and very similar just last Friday we adopted the proposal on the other big, big, big issue it's on learning for environmental sustainability climate change. Everybody what is told being told to us if you want to integrate this into education is also very much about helping people to understand very complex challenges, and in order to to to cope with with the uncertain the various sound knowledge base and but also competencies for further learning. So just want to say how important this competence based approach is on the challenges of today on dealing with COVID on climate change, making the digital transitions meaningful. It's almost as if the COVID-19 pandemic actually brought the importance of the key competencies, much more to the forefront because we had to rely so heavily as you say on things like self directed learning be much more aware of the kinds of challenges that are faced within society around engagement and being able to have access to technology and climate change so lots of these things came to the forefront in many ways. So thank you for that and and also before we close this panel can I turn to Carson just to see if there are any particular questions that you want to draw attention to. Yes, thank you. We have a few questions actually in the chats and then one here from Julian Stanley who asked it seems to me that pretty much of all of the findings and recommendations relate to any policy development in implementation education. I wonder if there's any special about policy for key competencies. I think that's that's an interesting question both for the for the panelists but perhaps also for for Majella and and Janet. Any comments that we want to make from the panel would anybody like to respond. Janet. Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. And something that does need to be brought out. I want to answer that on two levels because there was also a question about whether there were any studies that address adult learning or lifelong learning that are similar to this. I'm not aware of any, but I would also say that those would take a different angle that they would be different approaches because they're placed in the system very differently. So, first of all, we're at a school level. Second, I want to, I would emphasize the complexity of change that moving to a competence based approach is a sea change in an education that can't really be under emphasized. So, Jeff Morgan, for example, who's a specialist in social innovation differentiates between fairly straightforward top down policies that are easy to implement and complex changes that require more engagement more that are more effective when there's more autonomy of key players on the ground. Getting to that point is something that's much more challenging and involves more thinking and then just finally competence based education touches at the heart of so many aspects of education that it's all encompassing. So that can't be under emphasized. Thank you, Janet and I guess I think you had your hand up. Yes. Yeah, because I also love this question. And it's very to the point. I would say, yes, it matters a lot that it is policy implementation on education, especially key competences, because it taps directly into the education learning processes in the classroom. It taps into the work of professionals, teachers, and that matters. So there is content and also because education is a thoroughly social process. So all these features should be taken into account in dealing with the policy that might be different from other content. Thank you, Edith. And just to draw everybody's attention, Michael Tooth has put into the chat, the link to the blended learning document that he mentioned and also I should draw attention to Orica Pesotis also from the European Commission who you will hear from later has put a link in on the learning environment for sustainability as well. So do look at those documents and the links are there for you. Karsten, any more before we close our panel? I think we have time for just one more question. And one came here from Andreas Rush Christensen, who also was part of the the core team around this study. And he asked curriculum development and design is important to support and guide good teaching, but in many countries there has been a too narrow focus on how to evaluate curriculum and students teaching. How do we support not only competence based curriculum, but also purpose based curriculum. Interesting distinction. Again, any panelists that would like to pick up on that? I mean, I could at least say that I've seen it depends very much on how the curriculum is designed. I mean, I've seen the issues that have just been mentioned that they are included in the curriculum of some countries. I mean, we have curricula of countries who do not only say this is sort of the knowledge I would like to achieve, but I mean, I know curricula from countries or from regional authorities, who are much broader, of course, they also include the issues that have just been been mentioned. So I don't see the contradiction between the purpose based and the curriculum as it depends on the quality of the curriculum. Of course, that's my observation. There are some situations that are really also almost impossible to overcome. If you keep them as they are. For example, in Portugal, the access to higher education is dependent on the exams of secondary school. So the pressure to have for secondary schools to be just preparing for higher education and to be centered on content because those exams are very much centered on content. It almost becomes too much of a pressure, so to speak, on this sort of big change that we want to have. So it really was good to show how that's a point we must change. We must separate secondary education and the exams for higher education or else we can't change secondary education into a more competence based one. Thank you very much and I'm afraid we just lost our facilities okay for a short while, but looking at the time, I can see that we are close to a comfort break now. So I would like to take the opportunity to say thank you very much to all the panelists for joining the discussion. Thank you so much. Much appreciated for your contributions. It just before we go to well deserved comfort rates. I would like to invite you to participate in a very short Mentimeter poll and Christian, if we could have the slides up again, please. We have prepared just four questions for a short Mentimeter poll and you can enter menci.com and use the coach. You can see here on the slide and the four questions that we would like you to reflect upon is what is the biggest challenge in your country related to effective stakeholder engagement, school level change, monitoring and evaluation and student assessment. So this Mentimeter survey poll will be open for the next 10 minutes, then we'll close it down and because we need just five minutes to collect the results so we can show it after the break. So for now, I suggest that we go to a 15 minutes comfort break. So back here again at 10 minutes to four. Enjoy the break and see you back soon. Okay, welcome back. We are slowly getting started again. I hope you had time for some fresh air and maybe a cup of coffee during the short break, even though you had to reply on the poll also. Thank you very much for all of you who did reply to the Mentimeter. Just before I hand over the floor again to Kay, I just wanted to show you the results of the Mentimeter poll. So Christian, perhaps you could share the results with us. And we also got a comment in the chat that we forced you to select only one answer through each of the four themes and we apologize for that. But sometimes we need simplicity to be able to explain anything. So you can put on the next slide please, Christian. So what is the biggest challenge in your country related to effective stakeholder engagement? And as you can see here from the bars, 40% of you replied need for better communication strategy. And this was closely followed by a new shared view on priorities for student learning. We had a third one here on the very left, no tradition of stakeholder engagement. So quite a clear picture. Next slide please. What is the biggest challenge in your country related to school level change? And here we can see that the responses were almost equally divided between four choices. In the very far lift of the chart here, lack of teacher buy-in to new approaches. Then with 26% of the responses, lack of free, sorry, I need my glasses on here. So lack of time for teacher professional development. And also with 26% need to build trust with teachers. And finally, policy makers have not engaged with school leaders and teachers during implementation. So equal distribution almost. Next slide please. What is the biggest challenge in your country related to monitoring and evaluation? Again, almost equal between no specific plan for monitoring in relation at national level. And need for schools to develop evaluation capacity. Also with 25% need for formative and summative evaluation was also selected by a few respondents. And the final slide please. What is the biggest challenge in your country related to student assessments? And here the winner was lack of alignment of tests and competence based curricula. So that's it. Quick poll. Thank you very much for participating. And with that, I will handle the floor again. It's okay. And perhaps also some reflections on the results from the Mentimeter. Thank you, Karsten. And welcome back to everybody. I hope you had a pleasant break. Just to draw attention to some of those responses in the Mentimeter. And thank you to Glenn for drawing our attention as Karsten said to the fact that we forced people to provide one answer when perhaps some of you wanted to reply to more than one answer. It is an opportunity for you to engage and for us to get a feel for the participants across the whole conference. So it's only a snapshot and we take it in those in that perspective. Very interesting about the biggest challenge for stakeholder engagement is the better communication strategy. And I'm certainly going to ask the panelists in the next panel in relation to perhaps some of the learning that they've got and some of the experience they've got in developing a communication strategy. It was certainly one of the things that took up a lot of discussion in the peer learning groups. So we will return to that at school level that the lack of teacher buy-in and also time for teacher professional learning. I think in terms of the lack of teacher buy-in both what we heard from Edith and from Elspeth and Maria Emilia in terms of that sense of the willingness. But the willingness only comes from understanding that something is purposeful meaningful in terms of how those policy initiatives can be translated into to classroom practice. So again, it tells us that sense of engagement of stakeholders as early as possible and time for teacher professional learning. Again, it's the time that is actually needed to be able to consider how the policy implementation impacts on what they do in a day-to-day basis. And not only what it means in the context of a country or a region, but what does it mean in the context of a school and a particular classroom with a particular group of students. And that takes time and every teacher is an individual and some will require more professional learning than others. And so it really takes professional learning not only at perhaps a national or regional level, but also in relation to professional learning in relation to my own students. And how do I translate this into what I do in my classroom in my own curriculum area in the context of the community. I think evaluation again really interesting to see the responses there in terms of no specific plan for evaluation at national level. And during the project we had an input from Beaches Point from OECD and she talked about the importance of evaluation and again the sense of when it should occur and how that evaluation should actually take place. And so again this was something that we considered and I will ask the panellists the question about the evaluation that they've experienced and Janet talked about both formative assessment and summative assessment. And then moving from the national to the school in terms for the need for schools to develop their own educational policy and also their own capacity and ability to and time to engage in carrying out an evaluation of what's going on in relation to key competence policy initiatives. So thank you for that and we are fortunate that we have a student stakeholder student organization joining us in the next panel and I think being able to talk about the lack of alignment in relation to the testing that still is often a preferred form of assessment compared to how do we go about assessing key competences. It will be very interesting to hear the opinions from our panellists on that matter. So thank you for your input and accepting the limitations that have been pointed out. It has given us a sense of some of the key priorities. So we move to the second panel. Again it is my pleasure to have the opportunity to welcome the panellists and also to introduce them. I shall just find the right page that I've got my list of panellists on here. So the focus of this particular panel is on thinking more about applying the guidelines and the recommendations that we heard from both Janet and Majella to different types of education systems and context. And in this panel we'll hear first of all from two panellists who again were directly involved in the peer learning groups from Ireland. We have Harold Hyslop who is Chief Inspector in Ireland and we have Peter Lukas who is a Policy Advisor at Vio Road Rad in the Netherlands. We're also here from two countries who are not involved directly in the peer learning groups but of course I've had experience in relation to implementing the competence policy. Carmen Cabello Martinez who is Head of Area of General Regime Education, General Sub-Directorate for Academic Organization, Director General for Evaluation and Territorial Cooperation from the Ministry of Education and Educational Training in Spain and also from Yaroslav Falton who is EU Department Deputy Director, Minister of Education, Youth and Sport and from the Czech public. So we'll also hear, as I said, the student perspective from Reis Voisu, apologies if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly, who is from Obesu and offering perspectives from a teacher stakeholder organization. We have Susan Flocken who is the European Director of Etush. So welcome to you all and I look forward to hearing about the perspectives from you. First of all, I'm going to turn to you, Harold, if you're connected. Can you just say hello if you can hear me? Yes, I hope that's fine. Thank you. No problem. So Harold, from a perspective of Ireland based on your involvement in the peer learning group and in this project and also the experience you've got in relation to policy, design and implementation. What are your thoughts about applying the recommendations and perhaps thinking particularly about what we've heard in the Mentimeter, engaging with stakeholders and maintaining and building trust in policy implementation? Thanks Kay. And it's great to be here, particularly seeing the results of the outcome of a year's work, which is really, really, I think is going to be a really, really valuable study. Because I think it's what it's as a participant, if I can start there, it is really enabled reflection, not only between countries, but also even within countries. I mean, I've noticed that the people who have been involved in Ireland in the case studies have themselves started a conversation among themselves. So that's really, really been useful. And actually, sometimes having this conversation prompted by somebody outside actually helped us to have a conversation internally. Maybe about issues that we had found too controversial even to discuss and reflect on fully ourselves, you know, so it came at just the right time for us. And I suppose that's what I was reflecting on. What lessons can we take from this for the next phase of curricular reform? And I suppose in the Irish context, the most pressing one of that is at the upper secondary level where we're embarking on a pretty major piece of curriculum and assessment reform, and to some extent, a primary education as well. I mean, one of the things that I think the strongest thing that comes from me is the importance of the trust, the relationships and the genuine stakeholder engagement. And I mean, it's very clear to us we need to build a shared vision of the change that we need. That comes very strongly out of the report and about the presentation earlier. And that isn't always easy. I mean, we all argue over education and what it's meant to do. But looking at the past experiences of ourselves and others, and sometimes having your successes recognized by others, because the day you facilitated discussion about our past changes. Actually, we heard many of ourselves talk and many others talk about the successes of what we've done, where you can focus too much sometimes on the problems. I mean, to build that trust and relationships, I think though, and the stakeholder engagement, you have to think about the context in which you're working. The economic context even can be seen far away from education, but actually if you're not spending enough money on education or if you're cutting expenditure, that can impact on the whole mood for it. The timing of the change and also the industrial relations climate between teachers, schools and governments at a particular time. Now, ironically, like the experience talked about in Denmark, I think COVID may have helped. It has forced us into a greater collaborative effort on many, many areas of policy. And I think the other thing COVID has done, it has given a much in Ireland anyway, a much, much stronger voice to students. And they've been at the centre of decisions about examinations and so on. And I mean, certainly I take away from this whole project that the need to have that conversation in Ireland. Now, we have invested in that conversation in Ireland, or at least part of it for a number of years. So we've had pretty good structures in Ireland for discussing curriculum development. We have a National Council that does that for us. What I think you've shown to us, we're less successful in ongoing consultation about how to implement. And that point that teachers, I think in the past in Ireland may not feel that they are being really represented within the structures about implementation. And sometimes they don't believe that the teacher representatives actually represent them. The legitimacy of their own representatives are sometimes questioned. We certainly need to engage students better. So even though we have good structures about curriculum consultation, we have much weaker structures about exams, assessment and implementation. And we really need to improve that. And that is that you've posed a question to us now and we certainly intend to look at that. I think there's a really good lesson for others also in terms of both stakeholder engagement and implementation, the emphasis that you place in the report on research. And perhaps there wasn't enough of that perhaps even in the presentation I thought just earlier. We've certainly taken the notion that all this change has to be research informed. Our own curriculum council has engaged in a lot of research. We've brought in outside bodies like the OECD for the next phase of our development to research how best other countries have done it, how it might apply in Ireland. And we've built on internal national research about our junior circle implementation, which is the lower secondary level and lessons from COVID. And also ongoing findings from things like school inspection, which we hope would help to inform change as well. I think you've posed the biggest questions for today for me about planning the logistics of how it happens. I mean, I've mentioned those consultative mechanisms. But there needs to be another layer of mechanisms to steer and implement change. How do you get stakeholders involved in that? Because if you do it in a participative way, it can be quite slow and not agile enough. And it can take too long. And it may not always impact at the local level. And I think Edith raised the issue at the end of the last session about the political cycle, the need for the political support. But it's hard to sustain that over several political cycles, yet we know the time is needed for change. So I think the way I think we're going to go about thinking about it is in winning hearts and minds to think of it as a storytelling, a constant need for storytelling, telling the story of what your ambition is. It has to be easily understood, despite the fact that it's complex and slow. I mean, to get key competences into the curriculum the way we want is an intensely challenging process. It needs a lot of time, but it has to feel real. So it has to be easily explainable to parents, to students, to prospective parents and students as well and the wider public. So we're trying to think out what are quick wins? What are quick significant changes that tell the narrative of the change, the point in the direction of the change? We hope to use piloting as you've suggested. But we want to get that down to teacher level where it's meaningful change for them, not that theoretical one. And for us in Ireland, we also think that it has to link with other policies properly. It has to be coherent with our policies for special education, for social disadvantage and wider policies like our STEM education, climate change, well-being. Because if we present it as an isolated initiative, it just appears to schools as an overloaded curriculum, as the school trying to solve all problems and immediately you've lost the teacher audience in that regard. Thank you so much Harold. There's just so much in there. I think not only for our audience that are logged on, but other things that we can ask other participants to pick up on. I think a really important point you made at the beginning and you used the word genuine, genuine engagement of stakeholders and the sense of that ongoing. It's not really about consultancy. It's about ongoing engagement participation. I think that that is such an important point and given that the engagement of stakeholders was one of the challenges that was highlighted in the Mentimeter. The other thing I'd like to pick up on is research, as you said, how we could say more about that, but it's also about not only drawing on evidence-informed research, but how do we actually have a better understanding of how to access and critically review research so that we can use it in a meaningful and helpful way. Is there one last point you want to make out before we move on to Peter's views? I've gone away with thinking a lot about teacher capacity, but particularly in the area of assessment. I think if we don't make the assessment meaningful for students and teachers and preserve their trust in it, then we actually won't succeed in the curricular reforms. And we might discuss that further perhaps in the questions. Thank you for that. And I think the whole point you were making about the narrative and keeping the narrative going and making sure that it connects to all those involved in the policy reform implementation and evaluation is so important. Peter, I turn to you now. Peter Lucas from the Netherlands and also in terms of from the Netherlands perspective, can you share your thoughts about how you bring attention to the reform process so that there is that connection between policy and stakeholders in a more successful way, effective way? Yes, of course I can. And first I want to thank Harold Hisler because what he said I totally agree and I nearly wanted to say you can take my time to elaborate on that thing. But that's perhaps a subject for another conference. I will take the time. Thank you for for having that time to emphasize on two things, the stakeholder engagement, how we did it the Dutch way and some remarks on communication and trust. But first I will go back a little bit in history because the latest curriculum reform for us the Dutch started in 2017 and we still work in progress. And there was a need and also a will to reconsider the current program with core goals and elaborate goals for the program for the exams, etc. And in general the determination of what should be in the program was made in 2007 by institutions and not so much by teachers. That was one lesson and perhaps the lack of direct commitment by students, no, not also by students but also by by teachers may lead to a feeling by teachers of well I wait and I will read in the textbook what is elaborated for my subject. So I will wait. And I won't tell you too much about how we started the process but two things are very important. The Ministry of Education decided that the curriculum should be reconsidered. And there were some basic design elements. One was that and I think Harold also mentioned it. Three quarters of the time should be spent on the subject now leaving a time for a school curriculum so the schools could decide themselves what to do. Second was very important. The importance that it was led by teachers and not also led by but we asked the Ministry asked the teachers to give the proposals. And of course they were helped by curriculum developers but the decision was by the teachers and the school leaders. And of course there was a steering committee with the key actors well that also was very important but the key element was all the subjects were taken in consideration but also led to the possibility to see where key competences could be implemented. And some subjects were grouped together because they were more or less in the same direction like geography history and economy but there were also some specific groups digital skills and competences for civil society. But inclusion that's one important thing the inclusion of the competences was arranged in the design from the start. In the meantime we also tried to emphasize those key competences by presenting the groups a study how now first of all what the key competences were and how you could implement them. And that was of course a balance because we said the teachers are in the lead so we had to inform them and give them information and have the trust very important word that they should do something with it. And the third way was that before the start of the groups we asked universities higher vocational education etc what in their eyes was essential for new students. And they said most importance of basic skills and competences at least more important than to know certain aspects of volcanoes or what happened in the 80 years war of the Dutch. And that feeded the teachers the groups to take that in mind and they took it in mind because the goal was to present proposals for a future proof curriculum for the pupils for the students. We also organized feedback for the stakeholders and it also led to a discussion. Also perhaps another subject who is to decide what the curriculum should be is that the teacher is that the student are that the parents are that are is it society is the politicians. But in the end we said it should not be only the teachers to decide so we organized a whole setup of meetings and possibilities to react first by writing and later we realized that speaking and meeting was essential. And that is also a very important thing that we learned from the for the implementation. We also learned several things that it was very difficult for individual teachers to respond to a product like what is the vision on a certain subject because teachers are mostly interested in what's in it for me at the moment and how to implement it at the school level. And of course it was very important and also a lesson for the implementation. Of course, very important to to grab the teachers, but when do you do it and what do you ask them. It was also important to involve teacher organizations to the unions and those organized around a third certain subject because they could be well the messenger of the message and had also the possibility to involve all kind of well teacher organizations. It was also important to talk with the teachers and not to the teachers. The second point is that brings me to the communication and trust and skip a lot because I see the time is running out. It's not so difficult to reach teachers and school leaders, but it is difficult because that is sending a message, but important is to decide what is the right moment and with what message do you reach them in the heart in order to take a reaction to respond or to give feedback or whatever. So when is it effective for the receiver, not from your perspective, but when is it effective for the for the receiver that is very important. And as I mentioned, communicates to early teacher think well this is not interesting that they will never react again. If you do it too late, then they say well, you could inform me earlier because what will you do with my reaction at the moment. That was also something that we included in the feedback loops. We organized feedback. We made an analysis of it. We reported it back to the organization that gave a reaction in order to give them the possibility to say OK, they listen to me or they didn't listen to me. But that was the reason very important to give trust and to be trustworthy yourself. So that's for us very important. And it is also important. Well, I've noticed it is try to be the guest on a popular party instead of organizing a party of your own, because then you invite yourself to a group that is already united. For instance, the unions or a school or whatever, and that is an other perspective than you give teachers the possibility to come to you. So go to the teachers. Very important. At last, a very important lesson we learned is that policymakers should stick what they said before, because one major. Well, question was, let the teachers make the proposals and where they proposed it to the Ministry of Education way back in October 12 and not 12 2019. The politicians said, well, OK, but what is your support base? And of course the support base is not the 180 teachers that were involved in the direct organization of the proposals, the feedback, whatever, but there are 60,000 teachers. And of course there is no possibility. Well, no possibility. I think it's an illusion to think that all 60,000 will react. So politicians said you did what we do. You did what we ask you. But now we want to know what is the scientific base and what is the support base. And changing the rules made it for the teachers that were involved. Well, very hard to believe that what they did was meaningful. So to end, two words are important trust and time to give trust. Trust has no price, but gives pride for those you give it to and give time, time to talk. And many teachers that were involved said we did it now on the national level. What we wanted every school or every teacher of a school is to have those discussions we had at the school level. So that's not to organize at the moment for us. But to talk and give trust, give time. That's what I wanted to end with as the words very important. Trust and time are certainly important, Peter. And I think your point about not talking to teachers with teachers and also listening to teachers. So they actually have a voice that can be meaningful. You also mentioned about the unit, the unions and the involvement with with them and when is the right time for engagement with teachers and other stakeholders. So it would be helpful to turn to Susan now Susan flocking from me to us in terms of your thoughts. Can you share your thoughts about the involvement of teachers as key stakeholders in policy design implementation and evaluation Susan. Policy is the role of teachers and when should you be involved. You're still on mute Susan. Sorry, I had a muted earlier and okay. So thank you very much for those many questions and good afternoon to everybody. And thank you also for the panelists have spoken already previously on this point. And for this, the key competences recommendations they're really interesting to read. And I do think very useful as well. And of course, for us, indeed, the key words are transparency. The trust that we heard about. It will help with the ownership of the of the of any reforms or bringing on board the competences. Very important part is indeed the inclusion the involvement of the teachers of, and of course, as unions we speak on behalf of the teachers so using that voice and seeking dialogue and not only consultation but really meaningful dialogue. For a change. So, we do have seen also throughout the covert 19 pandemic countries that have engaged and we have stories that are positive indeed which is really good to see that for the sheer need to really bring on board the teachers because they are the practitioners they're there daily and so you rest take on board what what you know to hear the voices and what works. But we do have also unfortunately many examples where countries just use this top down approach. And then, of course, it didn't work. We saw also parents who are then confused to turn to the school leaders who haven't got the answers to the teachers who haven't got the answers. So this involvement is really important at the beginning. When considering and designing the reforms, and then of course throughout the implementation. What is also really important is to keep this continuous or regular monitoring and being prepared to adapt, not taking for granted that because we've implemented something and we had such long discussions to put it in place that it's going to work. It is part of this whole development to have trial and error to be prepared that things will need to be adapted. In the course of how things are changing covert 19 has asked for many changes and very quick changes in education, as we have seen but there are other issues as well that that are indeed need to be addressed. So what's important in education of course is that we are doing this in a context where there are serious teacher shortages in Europe. And not only on the side of teachers as such but also education person support personnel. It's very difficult to adapt and make changes in that environment teachers are already stressed, because there have been so many changes and adaptations that have been often very short term. So that is a, it's a difficult context. And so the timing aspect that we were just talking about is crucial. And the other topic I wanted to address here is as well we do need when we talk about key competences we're talking also about training for teachers. So the investment we talked about is very important and we coming. We really focus also on this public investment this commitment from public authorities to this public good, which is there to provide quality education to all that's that's what we're talking about. We need to make that investment also in the training so there's the infrastructure to provide the basis but we need the training for teachers to provide those competences. So we need to ask also what are the needs of the teachers of the school leaders. And that's very important in this discussion. And when we talk about as I started with the importance of dialogue and social dialogue and inclusion. So I think one of the forms and I'm very happy to see this also mentioned in the report is indeed this effective distributed leadership. So that that's what we see that that works really well because it fosters the engagement. It takes up the ideas it invites for ideas, and the positive approach to this. I'll conclude on this here because I think we'll have more points to discuss further on. Thank you Susan and you raised that important word about, you know that sense of transparency and what's happening and and also reminding us that the complexity of the reform process is also made even more difficult when we have shortages of teachers right across Europe and beyond and the challenges for schools in trying to bring in reform when they are dealing with trying to find teachers to to work with the students in the classroom. So I think that was a very timely reminder of the challenges and again I think that takes us back to Harold's point about the communication of the narrative and getting across what is meaningful and what is is purposeful for the schools and how do we help them to to manage things like teacher shortages and reform at the same time and being very conscious of the context within which reform happens. So thank you for those points and now it's time to to hear from the student voice in terms of we heard Peter talk there about future proof proof the curriculum for students. So I thought that rears you might be a really your ears picking up on that what does a curriculum that involves key key competences look like from your perspective and when should students be involved in this reform process. What are your thoughts. Yes, thank you for having so good afternoon everyone listen to your contributions very very closely and I've also gone over the recommendations and I'm very happy to see that within the document for the recommendations for key competences a good chunk of the recommendations are actually centered out involving stakeholders and namely school students as as main stakeholders and I'm very happy to see that as for to answer your question precisely working in the past with the schools from the representatives and being involved in curriculum design process at all levels. What we've the conclusion that we've come to is that it's not so much as to what is the technical side of it, one in terms of stakeholder engagement because oftentimes cool students truth be told do not have the the background academic background to be able to come up with curriculum on their own or to be able to create a bottom up approach. But that does not mean there are any circumstances that the input that we bring to the table is not relevant or should not be regarded as being as being relevant. And when looking at the process of engaging school students in creating a curriculum and in school democracies in general, what I believe is very important is to remember the fact that oftentimes we see that that approach on behalf of school students and of governments when trying to engage school students and teachers alike. They wonder why why teachers why school students don't don't don't get engaged or why they they're reticent in doing so. And the truth is that oftentimes these processes are just so purely technical and purely rigid in a sense that the participation of key stakeholders is not seen as being meaningful and does not have a meaningful impact. So in return, of course, there is a big a big sense of reticence towards these processes. But our perspective on the matter is that in order to be able to attract school students and to attract stakeholders and bringing their input and being honest and relevant input to the table is, of course, having them engage during the entire process, because we have to think of a coherent process so not only the design part of policies and curriculum, but also the part about implementation and evaluation, because we cannot think of one without the other of course if you involve stakeholders in the design part but not in the evaluation part. So that means you're missing a key set of benchmarks in which could help you evaluate the performance of the set curriculum or the set policy. So, as I've seen that everyone has given sort of a key word to some of their, their statement for for us it will be first of all coherence. So having stakeholders and namely for our school students involved during the entire process in a meaningful and constant way. And of course, we're also talking about talking about processes which are adapted to school students understanding the school students needs that doesn't mean by by by any chance dumping it down or whatever. You might think of but rather creating safe and inclusive spaces for school students to be able to voice their opinions in an organized manner that also entails supports from school administrations or from from governments for school students to be able to self organize and to be able to create their own organizations and their own democratic for to be able to debate this issue to be able to make democratic decisions, which they can integrate and further take up in the policy design and implementation and evaluation process. So I think that is very much essential and it's very much ties into the transparency component that everyone has referred to so far in that if you have stakeholders be they school students be teachers involved in policy making processes. Everyone will wonder how did they end up there. How were they selected what happened and the issue of integrity. I think brings such a can can bring a lot of decredibilization so fast and for absolutely no reason when transparency is it's right there it's it's really within our reach so enabling school students to to self organize and to have democratic structures which are transparent and open about their processes is definitely a way to bring transparency into this stakeholder engagement process. And yes in the end I think the bottom line would be not only to see because unfortunately you know we have these sorts of conferences and recommendations and they're amazing they're done by experts who know they're talking about who have a very very firm grasp on the topic. The question still remains up to this date. How do we get rid of the tokenistic approach which in a good moment or in good settings only happens in the case of school students but unfortunately oftentimes it happens in the case of all stakeholders which are brought to the table. Maybe for a photo or just to sign a present sheet that they were at the table. It's it no longer works like this and we've seen this especially after the pandemic when everyone is lost. Really in my opinion because when policymakers are lost all they have to do is turn towards the the main beneficiaries which are students and of course teachers. So we are the light guiding this process and I think we should act upon it accordingly. Thank you for that really important and pointing out these important points. And I was going to ask you in terms of what would be your advice around how you build the capacity of students to engage in policy initiatives but actually you suggested creating these safe spaces to develop the capacities for students and to help them to self organize and to build up the sense of confidence in their engagement in what they're doing. So thank you for those words of advice and I'm sure that the involvement of students as you've seen in the recommendations as a key stakeholder was quite strongly organized and it was certainly discussed all the way through the peer learning groups that I was involved in. And so I think that I hope that you have some feeling that students are being involved to a greater capacity although I think in terms of what we've heard of the need for more teacher professional development around engagement. There's more need for also professional development almost for the students or at least learning opportunities for the students around their engagement and building their capacity and I'm sure that Obecio will continue to have a role in that. So thank you. We now have the opportunity to hear from two countries who weren't directly involved in the key competence project in the peer learning groups. And so it will be really interesting to hear the fresh perspectives from our last two panelists in terms of their thoughts about the application of the recommendations in their country. So first I'll turn to Carmen Cabello-Martinez from Spain and I'd like to ask you what are your thoughts about the recommendations and how are they applied already perhaps in the context of Spain. And perhaps you could say something in particular Carmen about the evaluation of the key competence policy because it was one of the things that was picked up in the Mentimeter about something we need to think more about. Hello, my name is Carmen Caballero. I work for the Ministry of Education in Spain. Well, first of all, let me congratulate you on the excellent work you've done. I think that the publication of these recommendations for policymakers is particularly relevant in this moment since many of us are somehow involved in different initiatives related to the promotion of competence-based education. Broadly speaking, the recommendations make complete sense to me. I really appreciate the down-to-earth approach and I'm sure there will be very, very helpful for all of us. In fact, I could say that most of them could be directly applied in my daily work, but of course some others should have to be adapted to our context. Let me make a few remarks about the document based on my own experience in the Ministry. As you may know, in Spain we are not finishing the design of a new national curriculum with proposals and competence-based approach. This curriculum is due to enter into force in next academic year. If I think about the works with Phoenix until now, I must say that we have followed most of the recommendations mentioned in the document. For example, regarding the need of listening to the voices of stakeholders from the earliest stage of policy design, the Ministry of Education organized an online forum called A New Curriculum for an Advancing Society in November-December 2020. The forum consisted of five working sessions where university experts, representatives of teachers, schools, trade unions, politicians and other educational sectors could share ideas and discuss. As the recommendations say, we were careful in choosing the participant trying to cover the full range of stakeholders. We even had the honor of having a representative for the Portuguese Educator Ministry sharing good practices with us. In parallel, we opened our public participation project to collect questions and contributions from the whole education community. And in view of the success of the event, some other online discussion forums have been organized, and some of them say a lot to specific topics, assessment, teacher training, educational orientation, inspectorate, school leaders, students, families and so on. And then when we started the design of the curriculum, we discussed a lot about how a national curriculum can help to move forward a competence-based model. And we learned from other countries, particularly from Portugal, that a very good point of departure was to draw a profile of students to identify and define the key competencies that students are expected to have developed in a specific moment of their training path. In our case, we chose the end of the compulsory stage of education, normally 16 years in Spain. Well, this profile is the foundation for change in the curriculum. It should be something like the matrix that supports curricular decision strategies and methodological orientation. So we worked with the eight key competencies for live law learning in the recommendation of the Council in the 2018, adapted to the goals of Spanish law of education. And we also deferred the profile to the challenges of the 21st century. And for each of the eight key competencies, we have defined a set of operational indicators. Then, of course, we are aware that changes must be built on existing policies and practices. But at the same time, we wanted to take advantage of the excellent work that many individual people in schools are already doing in this competence-based approach. To this end, the new National Curriculum tries to avoid a very prescriptive tone to facilitate schools and teachers' progress towards a competent-based approach, depending on their times, possibilities, needs. But without imposing top-down rules that could produce disruptions and radical breaks in part of the education community. For example, traditional subject areas are maintained in the new curriculum, but schools and teachers are invited to organize them into bigger learning areas to facilitate the integration of competencies. We've also designed a new curriculum element that we call specific competencies. These specific competencies establish the performance that students must be able to display in activities or situations whose approach requires the basic knowledge of the subject area. These specific competencies are designed under the framework of the operational indicators of the output profile of students. Regarding the question about the specific contextual elements that are important in the case of Spain, I must say that the most relevant one is probably a consequence of the distribution of powers in education between the national level and the regional levels in Spain. The Ministry of Education designs the main framework from the National Curriculum, but then the 17 different autonomous communities are responsible for its development and implementation. And these autonomous communities are also responsible for its cool organization and teacher training, which are two particularly important issues regarding the implementation of a competent-based learning approach. That's why the Ministry of Education is making special efforts to strengthen the communication between different policy levels and provide support and guidance for all. In this respect, we are preparing a lot of materials to help teachers and schools to implement the new curriculum. These materials will have free access in the internet. Also, we are planning a set of online activities of teacher training and more than 40,000 teachers from all over the country are expected to participate in them. And then if I have to talk about which aspects of the recommendation are most useful for us right now, it's exactly what you have just asked me. I must say everything related to evaluation. Since our time limits prevent us from piloting the implementation of the new curriculum, which is something I wish we could have done, evaluation is particularly important to identify and address those aspects that may need some adjustments. And to this end, a special unit is going to be created in the organic structure of the Ministry of Education to contribute to the permanent updating of the curriculum in cooperation with autonomous communities. And I think that's all. And thank you very much for your attention. And I hope I have an overrun by a significant time. Thank you, Carmen. It's very interesting to hear about the matrix you're creating in terms of the profile of students and how all of the elements have been put in in relation to the key competences and something that I'm sure that people would like to know more about is how they align with assessment and manage that situation of looking at not only summative assessment, but more formative processes. And it would have been very good to have had time to go into that in more detail. But very interesting to hear about the unit that's being set up to look specifically at evaluation. So thank you for your input and we will try and turn to some of the questions in the chat. But before we do, we have our last panelist, Yaroslav Falton from the Czech Republic. And again, not directly involved in the key competence project peer learning groups. But we're very interesting Yaroslav to hear about the application of the recommendations either already in Czech Republic or something in the future that you feel from looking at the recommendations. Thank you very much for the invitation. Good afternoon everybody. I'm of course going to respond to your question, but before that, I'll go into the history as it illustrates the situation in this country and its specific way of implementing the key competences. And I also would like to thank all the colleagues for their previous inputs and for their ideas. And I would like to say that in Czech Republic we implement key competences for more than 18 years as they were implemented into curriculum first in 2005. And in 2021 later on we added the digital competence, but I will come back to that later. So more than those 70 years ago, then the introduction of this new concept took place without unfortunately conducting sufficiently wide professional or either wide public debate. As at the time, broader collaborative approaches to reforms were not quite common in in Czech Republic, and only a small percentage of schools were involved in the previous piloting of completely new concepts of key competences. Unfortunately, the consequences of this way of managing change are still visible here as the necessary space has not been yet created in the school curriculum for the development of competences. Although, of course, the development of the child's key competences is undoubtedly very time consuming. Both for the preparation of activities and for their implementation, but also evaluation and appropriate feedback for each learner so that he can develop his own personal competences effectively. The second bit of competence reform in our country was that schools and teachers did not receive necessary support to integrate competences into the education process into the classroom life and especially quality teaching materials and materials for the development and assessment of pupils' competences were missing. So we still do not have dedicated research for the actual implementation of competences, but thanks to the school inspectorate, we work with data on school curricula and on the work of schools on developing pupils' skills. So we know that in general competences are not developed systematically at schools in Czech Republic, so far it is most successful in pre-primary and primary education, but the further we go to higher levels of education, the lower the quality of competence development is. This is in direct conflict, of course, with the fact that the process of developing key competences should be graded throughout the education pathway. Why is this happening or why was this happening? Teachers in Czech Republic often perceive the tension between the content of their subject or subject fields and the competences on the other hand, not the opportunities to interconnect them. Then part of the teacher's work depends on quality of the teaching materials and it is clear that schools need guidance and quality teaching materials to implement competences successful. Within the primary stage, textbooks often develop fast. Primary educators do not have a subject burden and are much more child-centered, have more child-centered learning and naturally focus more on the competences. Then the higher the level of education is, there is less emphasis on the learning processes themselves and therefore there is less development of key competences at Czech schools. Both are unintentional according to the inspectorate data, but this is the reality. The basic problem lays at the level of the policy from my view and the policy expects that the schools will implement competences on one hand and on the other one. The system level must implement competences first and provide schools with guidance, support and quality learning texts, quality verification tools, assessment tools so that the teachers have these things ready before they are in charge to implement the reform. And as teachers will always look and work, look on their work partially, unintentionally, work unintentionally, their work will be based on the things that are available to them as a means of support. So what the Czech experience says, of course the top-down reform direction doesn't work. Schoolwork boundaries are needed rather than some certain target categories of what the student should be able to do at the output from the education. And teachers do not identify themselves with the target categories automatically, which was probably something that characterized the past history, but it's not the reality anymore. There is a need for quality teaching aids for teaching so that it is more natural for teachers to lean higher competence goals with the subject ones so that they do not see the contradiction in between. It is necessary to make a great effort to ensure that there is enough knowledge from evaluation activities for the teacher to be able to be able to reflect on it so that he can approach his teaching by evaluating it not only from an actual point of view but also from the point of view of the competence development, something which is overarching the single moment, which is rather long-term. Formative feedback as a means of support should be directed to the teachers. Primarily, it's important that the teacher can reflect his homework first. Competencies have proven to be the most difficult concept for Czech schools in recent years, and this still persists, and there is absolutely a need for further communication between all stakeholders on key competencies and support for schools to implement them. I would say that the concept of the key competencies is definitely correct and relevant, but most of our schools still do not know how to work with the competencies. It's a too complex issue for them, but in 2021, we added a digital competence into the curriculum, which happened on the basis of two years of piloting and also on the basis of widely accepted and publicly discussed and inspected database education policy strategy of the Czech Republic until 2030. And of course, schools receive support in the form of teaching materials and digital devices and professional development support plus new stuff for the IT administration. And this is the interconnection of the several corresponding policies in practice, which Harold Wieslop already spoke about a while ago, and schools now spontaneously participate in their form since last year. So we see that such a mission is possible either in the specific country context, including 30 years of transition to democracy and introducing democratic principles in various societal processes. So it is definitely the role of the ministry in our country to conduct ongoing and participative stakeholders debate. I would just conclude by saying that I consider the recommendation to engage stakeholders in the design of policy initiatives to be absolutely crucial. And with good participative leadership, it will ensure a realistic setup of the reform and its later acceptance by the stakeholders. I would like to emphasize that I personally consider the draft recommendations to be justified and very well thought. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. And it's interesting when Harold at the very beginning of this panel finished his presentation. He talked about that looking to the future would be looking at the secondary in terms of secondary school in terms of implementing key competences or further developing and enhancing them. And you're mentioning about the challenges of the secondary school level in terms of the interconnection between the key competences and the individual subjects. Thank you for that. And thank you for also your validation of the recommendations. And we just have, I think, some time to turn to Karsten and to see if there are some questions that our audience would like to ask of the panel. Well, we have at least some reflections in the chats, which are very interesting. We have one from Karsten Glenn, especially. I can read it loud and you can have a think about it. She says, unless there are rapid changes in the style and content of university faculties of education and other faculties producing teachers and continuing postgraduate education and in service training, competency education will take as long as the Irish stories will be told. So combining social interaction with those and 21st century technology is one route to success, she said, and it goes on. But what do you think about this question? Maybe Harold will be the right one to address it. Harold, any thoughts about the university faculties in terms of their changing their processes? Are you still with us, Harold? Yes, I am. Well, I think the issue is not simply universities and on their own. I mean, I think that we have to have a change of mindset about valuing the competences. Because there is a sense and I pick it up from the Czech experience that we are happy with knowledge in many cases in education system and blocks of knowledge that people can repeat. We're less clear in our own minds about how competences can be displayed, but particularly how they can be assessed. And I think there's a real challenge and it crosses all of our countries and systems or very many of them. How do you develop assessment tools that have the legitimacy that traditional exams of knowledge can have? And that also give parity of esteem to the skills and competences as much as they do to blocks of knowledge. And I mean, if we're developing different pathways for students at upper secondary level, I mean, you'll find in many systems where either a particular pathway leads to say vet or vocational education and training. It has sometimes less esteem, less high regard, because it's not so much seen as blocks of knowledge leading to academic success. I mean, and we face that challenge. And I mean, certainly for us in Ireland at upper secondary level, it's developing a form of assessment that does give parity of esteem to different forms of competences and knowledge. And we have to then get, and it's a challenge for us in Ireland, we have to get universities, but other parts of further and higher education to accept the legitimacy of those. And if we don't do that, parents and students will not trust competences and they will not trust the assessments. And the result of that is that the teachers in the end will not be interested in them because they will not be convinced that the student and parent will actually value this approach. So it's a huge cultural change. And that's why I use the word storytelling. I think there's a constant story to be told and retold over this and demonstrated. And maybe that's why we need to get quick wins and quick changes. I mean, the example that we had earlier from Maria Amelia in Portugal, it would be mirrored exactly as it is in Ireland, in exactly the same way. It's interesting, Harold, because we're not even talking about one story because it's actually multiple stories of how do you communicate the message to universities, how do you communicate the message to parents, how do you communicate it to students, to teachers, and so on. And so we begin to see the complexity of a communication strategy that has to unfold throughout the whole period of the design and the implementation and the evaluation, but it has to not only connect to multiple stakeholders, but it's also got to be heard and understood and valued as something legitimate. So I think that's a really interesting point. Karsten, is there anything else that you want us to draw attention to and to ask of the panel before we conclude? Well, unfortunately, the time is already five o'clock and we kind of need to close at 5.30. But there are some interesting remarks still in the chat that you can reflect on and perhaps you can reply in the chat. If you have the time. But thank you so much to Kay for facilitating the two panels. Thank you so much for all the panelists to participate and for your valuable inputs. So thank you so much. Thank you. And now we turn to the last agenda point before the closing remarks, and that is an input from the European Commission from Ulrike Pesiotis. So Christian, if we could have the slides up again please, and then I will just hand over the floor to Ulrike, who is going to talk about initiatives to support broad competence development and better achievement of basic skills. So the slides should be up here. Thank you very much and good afternoon to everybody. So I would like to give you an overview of different commission initiatives that are related to advancing the development of key competences and basic skills. And some of those initiatives have already been mentioned today, either in panels or in the chat. So I'm really happy that I can give you a little bit more context here. And in line with the thematic of this conference and the study it's based on I concentrate on those initiatives that target school education in particular. So next slide please. And these are the four areas in school education where we are currently working on a number of initiatives together with member states. And those are blended learning pathways to school success, teachers and trainers and learning for the green transition. And I'm going to give you a brief overview on each of them. Next slide please. So last year in 2021, the EU member states adopted a council recommendation on blended learning at primary and secondary education levels. And this was on the one hand an immediate response to the lessons learned from the COVID-19 crisis. It highlights challenges that have been exposed during school closures and the remedial actions. And on the other hand, it's also presents more long term opportunity to work on a future learning model that blends learning tools and learning environments effectively to support and further improve key competences. And as you can see also here from the examples and brackets this relates to digital tools, of course, but it also and equally relates to non digital tools and environments. And the recommendation signposts to all member states, the areas of school education systems that may need targeted support. And it also intends to facilitate the sharing of practical examples of a blended learning model to demonstrate how different environments strategies and tools might be integrated more effectively. Next slide please. And this I have also posted in the chat today already. And it is, yes, really hot off the press because published by the Commission just Friday last week actually a proposal for a council recommendation on learning for environmental sustainability. And the aim of this proposal is to support member states to equip learners at all ages with the knowledge. I have to say this is like you just you just you were just frozen for for a few seconds. So perhaps you can just repeat the latest your last sentence. Is it is it working now is working now. Yes. Good. So here. Yeah, I just want to mention this is actually this proposal is not directed at school education only but it really takes a lifelong learning approach. And it encourages member states to establish learning for environmental sustainability as a priority area in education and training. And by doing so also to invest buildings and grounds and to do so to mobilize national and you funds and encourages them in particular to support whole school and whole institution approaches to sustainability, which encompasses teaching and learning and really all operations of a school or other education institution. Next slide please. And another initiative that we are going to launch this year in 2022 is also a proposal for a council recommendation on pathways to school success. And this recommendation wants to ensure that all learners can complete successfully their educational journey. So pathways proposes a broad vision for promoting positive system change for inclusion and school success. And it aims at addressing simultaneously the two level targets the one on basic skills and also on early leaving from education and training. And it aims at raising the level of proficiency and basic skills of as many pupils as possible, while also increasing the number of young people with an upper secondary qualification. And we have touched upon that already quite a few times today. Well being in schools is of course also of great importance to school success. So improving also social and emotional education and learners well being is key to raising educational outcomes and this is really the vision behind pathways. Next slide please. And yes this is a topic or these are actors that of course have come up also at different points already in our discussions today, because key competence development would not happen without teachers. So therefore the vision to also advance and build our European education area really depends on motivated and competent teachers at the same time and we are all aware of that of course this is a profession that has many challenges. I'm not going into them here in detail, but what I want to underline is that what we know from teachers who service, service like Talis is that they want to have more training on working with students with special needs. And also what comes out strongly again and again they want to improve digital skills and competences for teaching, and they also want to have more professional development opportunities on teaching in multilingual and multicultural environments. Next slide please. So, and this is one of the responses to support teachers in in their professional and initial training actually the Erasmus plus teacher academies, and they really want to provide an enriched learning with a career long perspective. Meaning targeting both initial teacher education and also continuous professional development. And what we want to do here is to cooperate also on key EU priorities, such as digital learning, sustainability, equity and inclusion. And they really look at providing joint learning offers for both students and also again, serving teachers already. And there is a coordinated and effective mobility schemes in different models are foreseen. And also, we hope that teacher academies can contribute to policy development, for example, because they can then provide firsthand experience on effective teacher education. And obviously, there are more initiatives for teachers, which I don't have the time now to go into. But at the end of this presentation, there will be a slide also with links to all the different initiatives that I refer here. Next slide please. And this is something I want to mention here because that is something that we consider very important tools that can help educators and learners improve key competences. There are different competence frameworks that have been developed by the commission's joint research center. I have listed several here starting with the framework on digital competences and it's different offshoots for consumers, educators and organizations. And there on the left side, you also see selfie and selfie for teachers. These are self assessment tools that have been created to support the development of digital skills and competences for schools and teachers alike so they can assess their readiness in their use of technology for learning. And also, it can help them identify further training needs. Life comp on the right hand corner is the European competence framework for personal, social and learning to learn competence. And that is another important framework that can be of particular use and interest with regard to well being and inclusion agendas. The entrepreneurship competence framework defines what it means to have an entrepreneurial mindset so to turn ideas into action and this doesn't apply only to to business but really it is meant for every aspect of life. And the last one here on the right lower corner is screen comp the sustainability competence framework and this is the most recent one it was also released just last Friday together with a council recommendation on learning for environmental sustainability. And this framework intends to help users develop the competences that are needed to live and act sustainably. Next slide please. So, how do we work with with you with a member states with policy makers. Probably most of you are aware. I'm sure that one important way to work with member states is through our working groups. Those working groups consist of government officials appointed by you member states and other participating countries, as well as representatives from stakeholder organizations and social partners. And you can see the the working groups that that we have at present and I have highlighted the ones that we have on schools where we have one subgroup on pathways to school success and another one on education or learning for environmental sustainability. And the focus of these working groups is to as part of the mutual learning share information about reforms of national education policies inspire positive change and in general to offer a form of exchange on experiences and good practices on how to address key challenges. Next slide please. And of course, another important way to collaborate with and to advance key competence in particular, in particular is through participating really in the many opportunities that the Erasmus Plus program and other funding instruments also provide. And here I have listed some of them for you in information together with links and for school education. I just want to point out specifically the school education gateway which provides material and training courses for teachers, for example, including on key competence development. And also the e-twinning platform which I'm sure most of you know, so the online collaboration platform for teachers and schools in Europe. Next slide please. So here is promised more information you can find under the links that are provided. And next slide. And of course, you can also drop me an email and if you want more information or have questions. And there's still one more slide, because normally the presentation would have finished with a previous slide, but what I and what we as a commission would like to hear also from you are your ideas and initiatives that planning or have already started in the area of key competence. So it would be great to hear on your ambitions and initiatives that you envisage in your national context. And also, and where and how in your view, the commission can best support member states and key competence development and this is obviously in relation to what I have presented, but also of course, in addition. So I know this has been a long day, a very interesting day, but perhaps some of you are tired now, but still, it would be great to hear from participants here in the in the conference on those plans. So I give the floor back to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. And as I mentioned, we almost have an open mic if you want to share some of your experiences, or if you want to mention how the commission could support you to further develop and implement competence based approaches. Now is the chance. So you can you can, you can put your questions in the chat. You can you can raise your hand. And we will try to identify you as we like you mentioned, it has been a long day, but still, it's not every day that we have an open mic. Yes, Michael, please. Sorry, just feel so tempted coming in again as there was this reference to teacher education in the previous panel. And now again, I think Harold put a really nice comment, as always when Harold says anything in the in the chat, pointing at the importance to support teachers with the teacher education and continuous professional efforts. And I think just this is something that we have actually strengthened and the council has strengthened in the teacher in the key conferences recommendation version of 2018 looking at the need to edit support teachers and we have a number of work here I mean with some of you with you know perhaps about a new flagship project of supporting teacher education institutions who collaborate on the European level via what we call the teacher academies at Aspen's plus teacher academies which is one opportunity and just would just like to highlight this as a really as an avenue for further work as Rick has actually also mentioned in the presentation. So thanks Harold for the comment. Thank you very much, Michael. Harold, do you want to add anything. I think actually the, the, the commission's emphasis in the whole work actually around competences. Building the capability of all the stakeholders has been a theme in the in the commission's work for some time. I mean, Michael is right, there's been a strong emphasis on enabling teachers so investing in teacher education both initial teacher education and continuing teacher education has been a focus and and actually at subsequent in subsequent work I think it has come up on the theme of investing in parents as well and the structures around parents because you need them to buy into the change that you want as well as well as the more recently know in the supports for students and it's really good to have that commonly done across the across countries and the commission's work has been really supportive and influential in that. I think sometimes I wonder is there a possibility to all of countries collaborating on the assessment instruments and I see in the chat there's a reference to a book on a range of assessment instruments and approaches of innovative assessment instruments across Europe. And I wonder is, is perhaps there a possibility of collaboration on actually building both it and AI systems that could help assessment development across across some of these components because the investment involved is very substantial for each individual country. I really thanks I mean to the team who conceived this project and who allowed us all to learn the lessons from it and Michael and the commission for the funding and so on. I mean we owe them a great debt actually for for for facilitating our learning in this way. So any last questions before we turn to the conclusion session. We will make sure that the presentation from today will be available so that also all the links provided by like a can be accessed by by you. Okay, I think we we will close the this agenda point show thank you very much to like it for presenting. And we will now turn to the very last point of today's program, a closing remark by Sophia Ericsson water shoot, I hope I pronounced it correctly. Yes, thank you so much. And good afternoon or almost good evening to everyone. I mean this must be perhaps the worst slot of the agenda but but I'm here and I have actually listened to a big part of the session today so my first point is really to thank the organizers of course, but also all the panelists, the participants for what I think has been a really stimulating exchange. Actually very rich and I appreciated that all of you were so generous in sharing both the successes, and also some of the challenges that that you have met when when developing and commit for key conferences so perhaps a few final reflections. And there's absolutely no intention to some to summarize this, this whole session, it's kind of not my intention, but just to reply to the last Harold your invitation of course I would say we have lots of avenues actually defined here for further collaboration so it is part of what what we will be thinking of after this seminar what what could be the priority for next steps on, on these exchanges of collaboration so thanks a lot for the ideas in Aurelian and also in this in the chat I see. Well, maybe it's useless to repeat but I do it anyway how important key competencies are they're really at the heart of the European education area and we know that we discussed it I haven't heard you saying it all the roundness let's say the importance of having a broad set of key competencies for for all and the importance of basic skills the importance to be prepared for the green and digital transitions to be ready to learn over life the the social and personal emotional skills, etc etc it's really in a nutshell that we need all this to be prepared for what for today and and for tomorrow so hearing what you said in this case studies I find it really encouraging that there's so many actors and so many countries that are now engaged in the reforms and development of key competencies. What I also hear and I find it very positive is this strong and clear commitment that I've heard especially from the countries here today and presenting what they're doing. So we have some really promising initiatives indeed that are underway or actually also planned. And perhaps the study and the recommendations that come out of it for policy design and today's discussions that have been adding on to that of course, I think they will provide us all certainly for the Commission side, a new or ample or new foods for thoughts and and possibly also ideas for further action to try to support where we see the challenges are the biggest. And sort of ending the day I want to also keeping the positive spirit so although we all know that the pandemic has been incredibly challenging and you have mentioned many examples here today but perhaps what is nice to say at the end of the session is also how many positive developments that have also come with the challenging situation and some of you mentioned examples but we've seen of course the big leap here into improving digital skills and actually some big willingness and not least with existing but also resources planned in our resilience and recovery plans on digital infrastructure. So this is really positive and I'm sure it would not have happened that quickly if we wouldn't have had the pandemic. And also the the emergency learning that we perhaps witnessed more in the beginning of the pandemic it really brought this importance of relationships and and the engagements that schools of course and teachers have a really strong role for that. And the whole debate and the focus of student and teachers well being has come into the spotlight and I'm not sure it would have happened as quickly either if it wouldn't be for this for this development. And not the least to say this is very closely linked of course with the personal and social competencies that are a really important part of our key competencies recommendation. And then adding on to that a lot of positive collaboration can that we have seen experiences between schools themselves between schools and the private sector between schools of course with the public and governmental authorities and so there's a new kind of new partnerships created and perhaps also a new sense of trust. And I think many of you actually mentioned the word trust several times how important it is and the trust of course also goes with all the actors that will make this happen. So, I think it's important for the next steps to really build on this positive developments and, and of course we have we should not forget that our education and training systems. They have to be inclusive will not have any successes if what we are offering here is not for everybody so key competencies have to be for all from an early age and throughout life so the whole life learning element also is a good reminder. And then we have a commission and I think we mentioned it and Mikael also in his intervention. I mean the commission really stands ready here to support member states in all these efforts. And we have a number of tools to our disposal and we are ready to to mobilize the different tools and the support measures that that we can help with. We hope that it's useful already with this study actually as support for policymakers and other stakeholders. And as you've heard also from my colleague Ulrike, she also shared a number of recent initiatives and others that are planned for the future so as you see the whole spectrum of key competencies. It is much more than the recommendation it has a little bit of trickling out to other initiatives that either recent or, or will be coming so the whole core discussion of key competencies is definitely going to continue. I cannot say these last words without also encourage you to use the many opportunities that the new, well, since one year new erasmus plus program provides. You know the program has grown we have almost the double budget and the previous programming period so there are definitely a lot of opportunities both for mobility clearly students and for for teachers and staff exchanges a lot of possibilities for partnerships and projects so for developing enough innovative policies materials resources and tools etc. Now, we are also planning to put a lot of emphasis on actually also, I would say key competencies because we are under. Since first of general we are under the European year of youth, which is really also a good or a possibility and opportunity to put some visibility to all this work that in the end benefit. Many people all see the sense but in particular it benefits young people so we can also use the fact the European year of youth to put some spotlight on on all of this work. And indeed the work will continue. I really would like just to thank again everybody who participated today and I find the study really interesting it has. It will help us in the developing the work and thanks a lot for for the contributions today or interest and and we hope the commitment and wishing perhaps all a good start or a good continuation with your own work on key competence and development we look forward to hear the progress when we find the next moment. So all the best. Thank you. Thank you so much for your for these concluding remarks. Also from our side, thank you very much to all participants for active participation. Thank you for all the panelists and presenters. We will take your inputs today into account and and we will finalize the study and it will be published very soon. I can't promise any exact date but but very soon so we will keep you posted. And that's it from our sites. I wish you all a lovely evening and thank you again for participating in this conference.