On 15 and 16 March, the European Parliament’s (EP) Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) held its firstexchange of views on the forthcoming own-initiative report "European Education Area: a shared holistic approachto education, skills and competences". This report is among the key political priorities of the Committee for the current legislature.

The Rapporteur, Ms Michaela Šojdrová (EPP) outlined the overall political priorities of the upcoming report which will be structured as follows:

1. The rationale for building a European Education Area
2. Bridging institutional and stakeholder approaches
3. Turning vision into reality: common strategic priorities and EU-level targets
4. Sector-specific measures
5. Enabling framework and governance
6. Towards a greater European dimension in education

The CULT members stressed the importance of fostering the EEA not only from an educational perspective, but also as a major way to provide a new impetus for the European Project by fostering a sense of European belonging.

In preparation of the Committee’s EEA report, the EP’s Policy Department for Structural and Cohesion Policiespresented the in-house study called “Making the European Education Area a reality: State of affairs, challenges and prospects”.

This study examines three communications on the future EEA published by the European Commission betweenNovember 2017 and September 2020. It analyses the assessment of these communications by various stakeholders, ACA being one of them, and puts forward recommendations for the strategy, governance and priorities required to turn the EEA vision into reality.

The study concludes that although important steps have been taken to convert the ambition of creating the EEA by 2025 into political action, it continues to resemble a vision rather than a concrete policy programme.