Talking about subsidiarity in education in the EU…

The recently launched UK call for evidence on the government’s Review of the Balance of Competences, between the United Kingdom and the European Union, is yet another act of defending national competence in education… or maybe not?

This Review, according to the UK Government, will “provide an analysis of what the UKs membership of the EU means for the UK national interest. It aims to deepen public and Parliamentary understanding of the nature of our EU membership, and provide a constructive and serious contribution to the national and wider European debate about modernising, reforming and improving the EU in the face of collective challenges. It is not tasked with producing specific recommendations or looking at alternative models for the UKs overall relationship with the EU”.

The whole UK approach is interesting for different reasons: political, historical and educational.  One can read already in the Review the structure and exhaustive presentation of what Education and Training means at the EU level in a chronological perspective. Interesting it is also to observe how the UK sees the cooperation with EC and OECD. Actually, there is so much cynicism in that text that any person who works in the European institutions could easily feel threatened!

However, I have not read the Review just to be informed about what the UK feels about the EU in the field of education. Furthermore, I am not interested to read the review to see if there is a positive or negative balance of competences in the field of education between the EU and the UK. What I am interested about is subsidiarity in education and what is actually the driving force behind it, not only in the UK or the EU, but in many other federal national or multinational structures.

The principle of subsidiarity in the EU is used to set the frame of competence. Under the principle of subsidiarity, where the EU does not have exclusive competence, the EU can only act if it is better placed than the Member State to do so because of the scale of effects of the proposed action. Competence in relation to education is supporting. This means that both the EU and the member states may act, but action by the EU does not prevent the member states from taking action of their own.

But why countries defended so strongly this competence? I quote from the Review: “from the early days of structured cooperation amongst countries in Europe, there has been a strong political desire amongst governments to retain the organisation of education systems as a national competence. Education was absent from the 1951 European Coal and Steel Treaty and from the 1957 Treaty of Rome”. Those were the times that European societies were coming out heavily injured from the ashes of the Second World War. Education was the pillar on which the states held the cohesion of their societies. The reforms of the decades to follow until the 70s were described by values and a strong social sensitivity. They were meant to reconstruct the lost identity and help form the new European borders. This role for education could only come from the country or from the region itself.

Policies always serve to manage change. But how exactly this management occurs can vary greatly from policy to policy. After the wave of conservative reforms in education led by Thatcher in the UK in the 70s, there was a significant shift of the interest of education policies. Education is no longer a commodity but a product that sees, slowly slowly, some of its parts fitting into the rules of freedom of movement and services agreements within the EU. The first community action programme on education was adopted by the Council in 1976 with a view to its subsequent inclusion in the treaty. This contained six priority areas for action: education of the children of migrant workers, closer relations between education systems in Europe, compilation of documentation and statistics, higher education, teaching of foreign languages and equal opportunities. From the outset, this was sensitive territory for some member states. In 1992, education was incorporated into the EU Treaties via the Maastricht Treaty.

In the aftermath of these reforms, education was never the same. Organisations like the OECD developed their own programmes to measure the ability of students, teachers and adults to participate fully and successfully in the society. The measurements of OECD feed numerous studies, which examine the impact of education and skills in growth. “In the long run it is human capital of nations that drives economic growth. And it is economic growth that determines the pattern of incomes across nations”. These words come from E. Hanushek in his chapter “The Cost of ignorance”, where he continues to make clear link between the importance of education policies and growth: “… the gains are large enough that we should be willing to consider more radical changes than a small adjustment in class size or worrying about exactly what the math curriculum is”. Hanushek is a strong supporter of the idea that nations need to pay more attention to their teachers.

Having said all that, the question why member states today defend their competence in education remains very blurred ad controversial. If it is claimed that education is not about values anymore, but all about supporting economic growth, why then this is not part of the bigger group of portfolios where a central authority at EU level could be more efficient?

I understand of course that this argument is not enough to change things; nor I share the view that education can be amoral. Though, whatever my view on education is, or no matter if policies in education today are those that they should have been, or whether the role of education is the one that will really push societies forward, we need to be sincere. Education cannot be exploited. Regarding the effect of our policies, as long as the politics remain “apolitical”, we will have the same paradox phenomena and the same unaffordable results. On the one hand, to support national competence for education to promote economic growth and, on the other hand, to have strengthened internal market… It’s a joke!