DigiSET, an Erasmus+ project on teacher competences, publishes its national reports on how school systems prepare teachers for the twin transition.
Somewhere in a European school there is a teacher who handles digital tools with ease and brings them into the classroom without a second thought. The same teacher talks to students about the climate, the environment and responsible consumption with just as much conviction. Both competences may be well developed, yet they often remain in separate drawers. It isn’t a personal failing. It is how that teacher was trained, and how they carry on learning.
The DigiSET national reports provide initial evidence of this structural separation. The first phase of the DigiSET project has produced a set of national reports examining, country by country, how far Europe’s school systems really prepare teachers for “sustainable digital literacy”: the ability to use technology and artificial intelligence in ways that are pedagogically sound, inclusive, ethical and environmentally responsible ways. The research reviewed public policies, competence frameworks, initial training and continuing development. Across every country studied, the same pattern surfaces: digital competence and sustainability grow along parallel tracks and rarely meet.
The DigiSET findings form part of a broader European challenge. According to Eurostat, in 2023 only 55% of Europeans aged 16 to 74 had basic digital skills. Among those expected to teach those skills, the picture is no more reassuring: national studies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland find that between 10% and 30% of teachers judge their own digital competences insufficient. More than half of Europe’s education systems have made digital competences compulsory in initial teacher education (Eurydice, 2023), yet making something compulsory is not the same as making it happen. And if digital skills struggle, sustainability enters schools almost everywhere through the pupils’ curriculum, rarely as a professional competence of the teacher.
This is the space DigiSET sets out to occupy. DigiSET, short for the Academy of Digitally Sustainable European Teacher, is a project co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ Teacher Academies programme (project no. 101249272). It began on 1 January 2026, runs for thirty-six months on a budget of €1,500,000, and brings together sixteen organisations from eight European countries under the coordination of the University for Continuing Education Krems, in Austria. The national reports are the first major analytical output of the project: before developing its competence framework and training pathway, the project mapped how national policies, teacher education systems, and professional development structures currently address digital competence and sustainability.
The picture that emerges is one of isolated strengths and a shared gap. Almost everywhere, the de facto reference for teachers’ digital competences is DigCompEdu, the European framework for teachers’ digital competence, while the other European standards remain largely recommended and unevenly applied. Each country has a strength of its own: Italy, with one of the most advanced systems of school inclusion in Europe; Austria, with a well-established national framework for digital competences; Norway, which counts digital competence among the basic skills of its curriculum. But the profile that combines digital skills, sustainability, the critical use of artificial intelligence, and inclusive teaching does not yet exist in any of them. One detail recurs in nearly every report: the environmental cost of artificial intelligence, from energy use to data centres, remains an almost complete blind spot.
At this point the reports stop being an academic exercise and become the ground on which DigiSET builds its proposal. The project brings together three European standards that today sit apart: DigCompEdu for digital competences, GreenComp for sustainability and LifeComp for transversal life skills. On that basis, it defines four thematic areas: the ethical and non-discriminatory use of artificial intelligence, systems thinking applied to sustainability, AI for adaptive learning, and inclusive teaching alongside the creation of Open Educational Resources. The logic is not to add one more priority to everything a teacher is already expected to do, but to connect competences that already exist, separately, into a single pathway that can be recognised and certified area by area, as micro-credentials valid within national systems.
It is no accident that the reports point to continuing professional development as the most realistic way for these changes to take hold: more than initial training, this is where they can take hold. The training programme will run in seven countries, Austria, Bulgaria, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Spain and Turkey, each with markedly different school systems, infrastructure and policies; Norway contributes its expertise in competence frameworks and micro-credential certification. It is precisely this breadth that makes the ambition credible: to build something that works at European scale, and not only in a single setting.
By the end of 2028, DigiSET aims to train and certify 700 teachers. The framework will be put before policymakers, trade unions and training providers in each partner country, with the stated aim of easing its way into national continuing professional development programmes. The project will also develop a sustainability and exploitation strategy intended to support the continued use of its framework, training resources, and certification pathway after EU funding ends.
The real test, though, is not counted in certificates. It will be measured by how willing school systems prove to adopt a competence profile that does not yet exist in finished form. The reports say plainly where we stand: mature competences, but separate ones. What remains is harder than writing new rules or building new tools. The greater challenge is institutional: embedding this integrated profile in teacher education, professional development, certification, and everyday school practice. The reports show that many of the necessary foundations already exist. DigiSET’s task is to connect them—and to demonstrate that digitally capable education cannot be fully sustainable unless it is also ethical, inclusive, and environmentally responsible. From here, the work truly begins.