In 2023, the Council of Europe Education Department initiated a project aimed at developing guidance on how the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) and its “butterfly” of competences can interrelate with Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). To contribute to this initiative, a Working Group* was established.

On 21 February, the Working Group held its second meeting online to discuss the Concept Note for the upcoming guidance on RFCDC and ESD. This Concept Note describes the rationale, scope, target audience, methodology, and proposes a structure for the future guidance document on RFCDC and ESD.

While there are already several conceptual frameworks from different organisations aiming to assist educators in teaching ESD, the Concept Note highlights the advantages of using the RFCDC in addressing Education for Sustainable Development, such as:

• providing a common unifying language across existing conceptual frameworks.
• offering a set of 20 individual competences that are known to be teachable, learnable and assessable, and that can be targeted through suitably designed learning activities based on experiential, participatory, transformative methods.
• providing empirically validated scaled descriptors at multiple levels of proficiency for each of the 20 competences, which can be used to specify learning objectives.
• emphasising the link between ESD and democracy and human rights, thereby explicitly connecting ESD to citizenship education.

The Group shared insightful perspectives and provided valuable advice on the content of the forthcoming guidance.

The Group also addressed the next steps for the development of the guidance, including the organisation of a thematic conference in June 2024.

*The Working Group is composed of education experts from 20 member States and observer organisations to the Steering Committee for Education: Cyprus, Iceland, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Romania, Portugal, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, the European Students’ Union, the Federation for European Education, the Lifelong Learning Platform, and the Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions.