As announced in October 2016 the Council of Europe training programme for education professionals, known as the Pestalozzi Programme, will cease to exist from January 2018.
This results from a decision by member States, as part of a wider re-orientation of the Council of Europe’s provision of co-operation and capacity-building support in education, to shift the emphasis of its support from a programme specifically offering training to education professionals towards a programme targeted at delivering changes in education systems. Thus the future focus will favour working with Ministries of Education and teacher training institutions rather than practitioners.
The accumulated body of work – materials, tools, other publications etc. - of the Pestalozzi Programme will continue to be available to support education professionals in our member States in two concrete ways:
The teaching and training resources developed over the years within the Pestalozzi Programme, together with other suitable resources developed within the wider Education Programme, will form the basis of an on-line catalogue of resources for teachers and other education professionals. Users will be able to search, download and use these Council of Europe materials free of charge. Furthermore it is proposed that self-learning courses for different target groups, as well as inter-active master classes on topical priority themes, will be offered. This online resource will be operational by the end of 2018 and the on-line catalogue will subsequently be updated and expanded on a regular basis.
The on-line Community of Practice of education professionals who have participated in the Pestalozzi Programme, which now numbers over 2,200 members, will continue to operate as a self-organised community for the exchange of ideas and practices, and will be supported by the international NGO “Learn to change - change to learn”, itself initiated by members of this community.
The actions of the new capacity building programme starting in 2018 will focus on three pillars:
“Rapid reaction” through which the Council of Europe can respond to needs identified by member States with short-term, time-limited and self-contained projects, normally designed around providing a solution to a specific problem (e.g. review of draft education legislation);
Thematic capacity-building through which the Council of Europe will assist member States address challenges requiring a longer-term or more structural intervention, designed to build lasting capacity at the local, national, regional or multilateral level directly linked to the priorities identified by the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee for Educational Policy and Practice (CDPPE), for example, overcoming the obstacles to implementing the Council of Europe Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education, implementing the new Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture, or tackling corruption in education in the context of ethics and integrity.
Project analysis and development through which we will seek to draw lessons from all projects undertaken in order to inform the development of both future policy and cooperation and capacity-building programmes – providing a feedback loop from the cooperation and capacity-building activities into policy design and implementation.
This work will be launched at the end of 2017 and concrete details of future actions will be announced on the web site of the Division for Capacity Building and Cooperation
