School’s out…too early

A look at the EU’s light-touch approach to the sensitive topic of secondary education.

The EU has limited competence over primary and secondary education in the member states, but that is no longer proving a barrier to its involvement in schools policy.

In the past six weeks, the European Commission has published an action plan to reduce the number of pupils who leave school early, another policy document calling for universal access to pre-school education, and it has produced statistics on ‘grade retention’, the practice of making pupils repeat a school year.

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Permission to get involved in these issues comes from the Council of Ministers, which last May made a commitment to reduce the percentage of early school-leavers – 18- to 24-year-olds who are no longer in education or training and who have only a lower secondary education or worse. The aim is to reduce this percentage from the current EU average of 14.4% to 10%, a target that has been written into Europe 2020, the EU’s growth and competitiveness strategy, and was linked to a goal of ensuring 40% of people aged 30-34 have completed higher education.

EU schools policy is developing through the ‘open method of co-ordination’, which enables governments to agree on collective action without going through the EU’s usual legislative processes. Schools policy has been a clear beneficiary since this method was formalised in the Lisbon treaty, according to Martin Romer, European director of Education International, a teachers’ organisation.

“There has been increasing co-operation between ministers and an increasing willingness to develop common policies, because everyone realises that EU countries have more or less the same challenges,” he says.

Whether that has produced tangible improvements is another matter. “You can say that it has an effect on national laws and initiatives because this co-operation inspires ministers to go home and change laws,” says Romer, who believes “it has produced a focus on the necessity to upgrade teacher education in Europe”.

The method does not always work, however. “We also see member states come to Brussels, give lip-service and agree to different issues, and when they go home they do nothing – or do the opposite,” Romer says.

The mid-February meeting of education ministers, for example, saw the UK refusing to set a target to reduce the school drop-out rate, since it has no legal obligation to do so.

Identifying causes

The Commission has no power to sanction countries that change their minds or do not meet targets set through this process. What it can do is to identify the causes of a problem and suggest measures to address them.

In the case of early school-leaving, it has proposed measures to avoid conditions that prompt pupils to leave early, such as being obliged to repeat a year or a lack of help for children with different mother tongues. It then suggests ways of responding to indicators of emerging difficulties, such as truancy and poor performance, and of offering second chances to pupils with problems.

Beyond targets, which are already in place for 23 states, EU governments have been invited to adopt strategies based on this framework by the end of 2012.

The lack of sanctions in this process is matched by a lack of incentives, though the Commission has some funds in its lifelong learning and research framework programmes that it can use to investigate innovative ways to tackle school problems, and there may also be scope to tap into the European Social Fund to finance measures to reduce early school-leaving.

Romer sees such project funding as making a useful contribution to evidence-based policymaking. “That gives you the ammunition to change policy, if you want it,” he says.

Student organisations are also positive about the Commission’s involvement. “The Commission is pointing to the right problems,” says Jonathan Favereau, secretary-general of the Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions. “The fact that education remains a national competence restricts the actions possible,” he says. “But we believe that having a more ‘macro’ approach to these issues, and trying to learn the best and worst practices from one another is very useful. The name, shame and blame strategy can have a real impact at the European level.”

Ian Mundell is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.