Assessment and Promotion of Social, Emotional, and Health Skills in European Schools: The Learning to Be Project

The school, as an educational system, is increasingly asked to teach students social and emotional skills that may facilitate their social success and well-being, and teachers are also expected to evaluate these competencies. Both of these goals (teaching and assessment) are mentioned in the Recommendation of the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union of 18 December 2006 on key competencies for lifelong learning (European Union, 2006), and reiterated in 2018 in the New Recommendations (European Union, 2018). Although school principals and teachers are aware of these new tasks, in many instances they are not provided with appropriate methods to assess the achievement of these non-cognitive skills. Indeed, students have traditionally been assessed at school only for their knowledge and academic performance. The Learning to Be project, an Erasmus+ Key Action 3 project co-funded by the European Commission in 2017, aims to address this issue by developing and testing a set of tools and methods that would help teachers, as well as their students, recognise and assess social, emotional, and health-related skills. Since Learning to Be is a Key Action 3 project, it consists of a policy experimentation that aims to evaluate the effectiveness and scalability of innovative policy measures through large scale field trials based on robust methodologies. The collected evidence is then used to facilitate the transnational transferability of the innovative measures (European Commission, 2017).