Europe Day 2026: Skills, people, and the meaning of the European project

On 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman stood before journalists in Paris and proposed something radical. French, West German and ultimately European nations were to place their most strategic industries under shared management, through shared institutions bound by common rules. The goal was simple and immense. Make war not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.

Seventy-six years later, we mark Europe Day to remember that declaration, but also to ask a harder question: how does the architecture of cooperation actually hold? What does it look like in practice, beyond summit tables and founding texts?

At the European Training Foundation, our answer essentially looks toward Europe and beyond it. It is reflected in daily routines such as a young person in Georgia completing a vocational programme aligned with real employer demand. It looks like an adult in Tunisia accessing retraining when the sector she worked in changed. It looks like a ministry in the Western Balkans redesigning its apprenticeship framework, or a school director in Morocco understanding, for the first time, how an institution's outcomes compare with regional benchmarks.

Cooperation holds when people have something to hold onto, and these can be skills, opportunities, or a credible path forward.

The Schuman logic, applied to learning

Schuman's ideas were institutional. He understood that shared interests, left informal, erode under pressure. They require structures like rules, agencies, or mechanisms for trust. The European project has spent seven decades building those structures across trade, law, currency, and borders.

Skills systems are part of that same architecture, even if they rarely get the credit they deserve. When education and training programmes are functional, relevant to what economies need, accessible across social backgrounds, and capable of adapting as work changes, they become stabilising forces. They widen the circle of people who participate in economic life. They reduce the pressure points that make communities feel left behind.

When they fail however, the consequences are not abstract. Youth unemployment entrenches. Adults are locked out of transitions. Regions diverge. The social fabric that cooperation depends on begins to fray.

What the ETF does to make skills a social good 

We work with countries across the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. These are regions at various stages of reform, each with education and training systems shaped by their own history, politics, and economic pressures.

We help national authorities, educators, and social partners build systems that work for their own contexts, while learning from the broader experience of what has and hasn't succeeded elsewhere.

In practice, this means maintaining sustained engagement over time. Supporting the redesign of vocational qualifications so they reflect what employers genuinely need. Helping governments build the evidence base to make informed policy decisions. Strengthening the institutional frameworks through which employers, training providers, and public authorities coordinate. Working with universities, schools, and training centres to develop the capacity of educators themselves.

It also asking inconvenient questions about who is excluded from learning opportunities, where data is missing, where policy intention diverges from classroom reality, and seeking solutions to see change happen.

The changes reshaping labour markets right now, they accelerate faster than most education systems were designed to respond. The countries the ETF works with feel this acutely: they face the same transitions as EU member states, often with fewer resources and less institutional margin for error.

This year’s Europe Day: looking forward, not back

Europe Day is sometimes treated as a commemorative occasion. A moment to look back at what was built. At the ETF, we think of it as a forward-facing date and a reminder that the European solidarity project is permanently unfinished, and that its continuation depends on choices made every day, in systems most people never see.

We go back to the young person navigating a vocational programme. The adult returning to learning after years away. The policymaker trying to align a training system with a rapidly shifting economy. These are the actors on whom European cooperation ultimately rests.

Our work is to be useful to them and to the institutions that shape their options. That is how, in our particular corner of the European project, we honour what was declared in Paris on 9 May 1950, reflecting on the speeches, and delivering with systems that work.