A Union of Skills or a Union of Learning?
SOLIDAR Statement on the UoS
On 5 March 2025, the European Commission adopted the Union of Skills and two connected initiatives: the Action Plan for Basic Skills and Action Plan for STEM education. The Union of Skills (UoS) embodies the Commission’s vision for “skills, knowledge and competences for life” for Europe and will serve as the EU’s main strategy on education and training for the next 5 years. Find out more about SOLIDAR’s stance on the newest acronym to be added to your EU dictionary below.
The Union of Skills is a step in the right direction towards a future-proof Union, that acknowledges its social model as the main asset for Europe’s competitiveness in the global arena, the foundational role of education and training for it, and thus commits to supporting learners to build skills for life. However, SOLIDAR believes that the UoS falls short in addressing the full scope of what is needed to prepare all individuals to be active – be it on the labour market or in society as a whole.
While the document importantly recognises the challenges faced by the EU in terms of skills gaps and the evolving demands of the labour market, the vision and ambition in the proposal could have been more far-reaching, especially in terms of promoting lifelong learning from cradle to grave for all learners of all ages. “Putting people first” must indeed be at the core of any initiative to tackle the current and future challenges the EU faces. SOLIDAR, this entails that “a UoS is an EU that lives and breathes a culture of lifelong learning’’ – as stated by the Lifelong Learning Platform. For instance, although basic skills for students are covered by the UoS, it is as essential to have the proper infrastructure in place to enable adults – in or outside the labour market – to access basic training, as raised in the statement by the EP Intergroup on the Future of Education and Skills for a Competitive Europe. To achieve this, we also second ETUC in urging the Commission to ensure that the Union of Skills established a legally binding right to training for all workers.
We applaud the Union of Skills’ commitment to support citizens to build skills for life through a solid educational foundation, and the central place citizenship competences take in this. In this regard, SOLIDAR stresses the key role that non-formal and informal learning (NFIL) play in offering valuable opportunities for learners to develop knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours to grow and become active citizens, especially in reaching vulnerable groups and making education systems more inclusive. Among the competences development that NFIL contributes the best to are the citizenship ones and in this regard, SOLIDAR supports the Lifelong Learning Platform’s call for a EU competence in citizenship education, which would meet the demands of the Conference on the Future of Europe, and ensure the promotion of EU values such as democracy, social inclusion and human rights, in the EU’s lifelong learning initiatives.
Initiatives supporting the portability of skills and qualifications across the EU are always welcome; it should be ensured they cover also non-EU nationals’ intra-EU mobility. Besides, the EC is displaying a very utilitarian approach to skills and labour migration. Excellent working and employment conditions, tackling precarity and the optimal implementation of relevant directives is positive but should be a reality for all non-EU nationals, not be reserved only for top students and high skilled workers. All the more so since an initiative such as the EU Talent Pool, with its focus on shortage occupations, risks trapping migrant workers in the precarious, unattractive jobs Europeans do not want. The EU believes it can pick and choose which skills it needs and which jobs to accept migrant workers for, not realising that with demographic, green and digital transitions, the continent is in dire need of labour immigration across all skills levels and sectors. We need broad, not selective labour migration schemes leading to social inclusion, swift and fair processes for recognition of qualifications of non-EU nationals and portability of recognition decisions across the EU, and access to training and education for all workers and learners.
For a successful implementation of the Union of Skills, the Commission rightly stresses the importance of an adequate governance structure. SOLIDAR welcomes the reference to the need to coordinate action among all key stakeholders and expects Civil Society Organisations to be included in the relevant governance structures to ensure a more integrated approach to education and training that is inclusive, accountable, and sustainable. We also applaud the development of a dedicated EU 27 Recommendation on human capital: education and skills in the European Semester, as it is promising that each Member State will be obligated to focus on education and skills, though it remains to be determined how the European Semester will guarantee they act on this issue.
Last but not least, to guarantee that education and training are – and remain – goals in themselves, SOLIDAR calls for increased public investment, and for making sure that education remains a value-driven public good and does not become a commodity reliant on the private sector’s goodwill and purposes. In this regard, a more robust Erasmus+ programme, viewed as more than just a learning mobility tool, is essential. SOLIDAR applauds the Commission’s initiative to make the programme more inclusive but believes these efforts will be limited unless the programme’s budget is increased.
