Exclusive: Juncker’s new fund will boost education to raise Europe’s competitive position

Member states want large chunks of the European Union’s new €315 billion investment fund to be directed to education, and alongside conventional infrastructure projects, such as more energy efficient buildings, are bidding for computers for schools, expansion of R&D facilities and support for student loans.

According to European Commission sources, the largest single proposal, €24 billion for school computers, was made by France. Italy has asked for €8.8 billion for school buildings and Spain wants €1.5 billion for university student loans.  

The bids follow a request for proposals from the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, and were dispatched privately by member states in the run up to the announcement of the €315 billion European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI) last week.

The process of submitting bids for education and other policy areas, is ongoing. Before any money starts to flow, projects must be designed, an agreement struck with the Commission and the European Investment Bank, co-investors secured, planning permissions granted.

The European Commission says all viable submissions will be posted on a special website.

Despite the gap between proposal and reality, Juncker is already waxing lyrical on the prospects. Speaking in Strasbourg last Wednesday (26 November) he spoke of imagining schoolchildren in the Greek city of Thessaloniki walking into a brand new classroom equipped with computers.

Juncker was however hazy on the details, and while the aim for the Fund for Strategic Investment to leverage in a total of €315 billion on the back of €21 billion hard cash from the Commission has been chewed over in the past week, there is little clarity on exactly where this money will go.

In addition to questioning whether the fund really can attract so much private investment on the back of the Commission’s small amount of seed money, there have been criticisms that the process of identifying projects is not more advanced.

The European Investment Bank, charged with the final decision on projects, is expected to publish a list before the end of the year.

Proposals

Here is a selection of proposals sent by member states before 21 November.

Public-private collaborations

• Finland: €7 million for EduCloud, a cloud service for learning materials that can be shared with all schools across the country.
• Croatia: €72 million for the University of Rijeka’s Science and Technology Park, a business incubator.
• Hungary: €170 million for a scheme to team up research institutes, SMEs and second-level institutes, in the Higher Education and Industrial Cooperation Centre. Spending will be supplemented with money from the 2014-2020 EU structural funds.

• France: €24 billion for a six-year E-education programme to buy school computers.
• Italy: €8.8 billion for La Buona Scuola, a programme to upgrade school buildings and ICT training programmes for teachers.  
• Ireland: €200 million for an ICT programme for schools.

• Germany: €1.8 billion for university buildings in several cities.
• France: €900 million for the “European e-Campus”, a remote e-learning facility.
• UK: €1 billion to upgrade facilities for teaching science, technology, engineering and maths.  
• Greece: €200 million to make school buildings more energy efficient.  

• The Commission’s Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC): €100 million for its HEInnovate instrument, a scoring tool for higher education institutes focusing on entrepreneurship development.

• Poland: €209 million to create new, or renovate existing, child care institutions.
• Belgium: €246 million to broaden access to early education by creating 11,500 places in Brussels.

• Spain: €1.5 billion to help students from poor backgrounds pay university tuition fees.

Boosting investment in tomorrow’s brains

Although education budgets in Europe may not have been first for the chop, half of EU countries have reduced spending on education in the past few years.

Cash-strapped governments in the EU devote nearly 5 per cent of GDP to education, but the hunting pack includes China, India, Australia and Brazil, which have been steadily closing the gap.

DG EAC says if the investment plan helps EU as a whole to improve by 25 points in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a ranking used to gauge the quality of future labour forces, the gain for the EU’s economy would be an extra €35 trillion over the next 80 years.

The Commission calculates that an additional €2 billion annually could fund between 30 and 70,000 extra school places for young children , while an additional €20 billion on the latest computers would benefit between 15 and 20,000 schools.