The European Education Policy Network on Teachers and School Leaders is a Europe-wide network of relevant organisations (policymakers, practitioners, researchers and stakeholders) to promote co-operation, policy development and implementation at different governance levels, and to support the European Commission’s policy work on teachers and school leaders. 

The 4-year project co-funded by the European Union started in January 2019 and it is coordinated by the European School Heads Association and currently includes 29 partners from 20 countries.

The project aim at creating a sustainable network of key actors representing school leaders, teachers, parents, education employers, policy makers, education policy centres and educational researchers. All major organisations representing the above mentioned stakeholders have joined forces in their efforts to show the best of the worlds of practice, policy making, and research, with the collective goal of facilitating the dialogue and promote and support evidence-informed policy making in order to positively drive change in education across Europe.

The network represents a broad geographic scope and a balance of different education systems, as well as a variety of backgrounds of participating institutions and associations, from policy, practice, and research. The focus is on policies relating to teachers and school leaders working in the field of general education of children and young people (0-18 years of student age).

The core of the consortium’s work is to identify good practices in the field of applied research, educational practice, and current policy making relevant to the central theme the consortium will choose at the beginning of each year.

In the first year, the network focused on the careers and professional development of teachers and school leaders and NEPC contributed with a desk research and a report on “Good Practices on Policy Advice and Implementation“.

The project is currently in its second year, which is dedicated to the topic of skills and competences of teachers and school leaders in the digital area from different perspectives, bringing together policy examples, good practice and research evidence.

For each of the consecutive years, the consortium will choose a central theme out of the list of European education priorities. The project will seek to identify ways to support high quality and effective school leadership in light of the goals set in the European Education Area.