Locked away in the Europa Building in Brussels, the twenty-seven Heads of State and Government of the European Union and the European Commission – at a European Council meeting which, according to António Costa’s illusory intentions, was supposed to define the European strategic agenda on finance, defence, enlargement and migration policies, alongside so-called topical issues such as competitiveness and the market, the arctic region, COP31, energy, ongoing wars, Artificial Intelligence and the dismantling of international law – have maintained a deafening silence in the face of the protests that have been rocking the world of education for weeks in a growing number of European countries, involving students, teachers and trade unions.
It has been written and said that the European Union lacks the competences, powers and policies to address the reasons behind the protests, which concern the cost of living and housing, the shortage of teachers and their pay levels, the dilapidated state of school buildings, the lack of meaningful mobility, university admission procedures, and the job market prospects for young people leaving technical schools who are unable or unwilling to embark on a university course – to name just the key reasons for the protests.
All this is only partly true because the issue of the cost of living and housing involves not only national governments but also the European institutions; expenditure on education concerns negotiations between the European Union and the Member States regarding the rules that define the levels of national and European budgets; the condition of school buildings was covered by the resources allocated under the NGEU – which, not coincidentally, referred to the younger generations – and now falls within the scope of cohesion policy; the European mobility of teachers and learners has long been part of European programmes; the pathways to higher education should form part of the Alliance between Universities; and prospects on the labour market fall within the scope of European social programmes linked to vocational training.
There has been a total and irresponsible failure on the part of governments and European institutions to engage with pupils and teachers, eve n though they had already expressed growing discontent during the previous school’s year – discontent which subsequently manifested itself in the protests that erupted from the start of the 2026–2027 school’s year in Germany, Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium and now also in Italy, with a clear knock-on effect.
There has also been a lack of preventive and proactive measures also within families to address the escalation into extreme, unjustified, and unjustifiable violence – sometimes preceded by an unjustified attempt to impose a pre-emptive ban on initiatives that were announced as acts of peaceful protest.
Since it is difficult to imagine that these violent outbursts were the result of mere youthful spontaneity alone, the inability of the intelligence services to verify – through European dialogue and joint preventative action – the presence of more or less covert orchestration behind the organisation of the violence has become evident; this ranged from the purchase of thousands of black jackets to the provision of destructive tools and the collective use of social media.
Networks of secondary school pupils are becoming European in scope, rather than merely national or local, not least in view of the announced European demonstration on 20 November 2026 (as set out in the Collective Appeal based on the proposals drawn up during the annual conference of the Collectif pour un Service Civique Européen, Paris, 28 May 2026. LINK).
It is urgent and necessary that European and national institutions, local and regional authorities – as well as the intelligence services – break their deafening silence by launching a wide-ranging initiative to listen to and propose solutions on the issues mentioned above (the cost of living and housing, the recruitment of qualified teachers, mobility, access to university and the labour market, the quality of school buildings, as well as the planning of extracurricular educational activities).
In our view, the European Parliament should swiftly promote – together with the European Commission and with the support of the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions – a European conference aimed at student networks and teachers’ unions, open to parents’ associations and organisations representing civil society, with functions that are not only consultative but also deliberative, submitting the results of the deliberations to a special ‘Jumbo’ Council and an extraordinary session of the Assembly in good time before 20 November, placing the European Union’s supranational competences and powers at the heart of the decisions.
Rome, 19 October 2026