Education can play a vital role in enabling young people to understand and acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes to address the global challenges that they will increasingly face during their lives.

Media headlines are dominated by the challenges that the climate crisis and its accompanying uncertainty bring to our everyday lives.

In this interview, Arniika Kuusisto from the University of Helsinki talks about how educators can best support the development of values, worldview and resilience within young children.

For a long time, we have been focused on promoting the resilience and wellbeing of children. Rightfully so. But we also need to see how our educators are doing.

Europe is truly multilingual, with its 24 official EU languages and about 60 regional and minority languages.

School education is only possible thanks to teachers. They help children develop essential skills for their future working life and become active and responsible citizens. However, most EU countries struggle to engage young teachers and to keep experienced teachers in the job, which increases the need to reinforce the attractiveness of teacher careers.

We’ve been very chatty in recent years; various platforms have enabled many different opinions and points of view to be shared. The same goes for education. After observing the aftermath of the pandemic and the changing educational landscape, it was clear that we needed to do things differently. But we quickly returned to our familiar practices and from there, we were catapulted again; the infamous ChatGPT tool was introduced. And everything changed. Again.

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures young people’s competences in basic skills: mathematics, reading and science. The 2022 study involved 690 000 students, representing 29 million 15-year-olds across 81 education systems; all EU countries except Luxembourg participated, and its results were published in December 2023.

Teachers play a vital role in shaping our societies. Despite this, the profession is seemingly becoming less attractive since more than half of European Union Member States have raised concerns about teacher shortages.

Engaging young minds in meaningful citizenship activities poses a formidable challenge – one that cannot be adequately addressed by rhetoric or the occasional ‘Go vote’ poster.