The European Commission has published the Digital Education Action Plan (DEAP) 2021-2027. The new Plan has two strategic priorities.
The first is to develop a high-performing digital education ecosystem. This entails focusing on infrastructure, connectivity and digital equipment, ensuring effective digital capacity planning and development, achieving a digitally competent and confident teaching force, and providing high-quality learning content, user-friendly tools and secure platforms which conform to ethical standards.
The second priority is enhancing digital skills and digital transformation competences. This part of the DEAP emphasises the importance of both basic and advanced digital skills. The basic digital skills and competences must be fostered from an early age. This includes computing education, good knowledge and understanding of data-intensive technologies, and skills of recognising and fighting disinformation.
An equally important aspect is advanced digital skills, which produce more digital specialists and ensure that girls and young women are equally represented in digital studies and careers, and, in this way, the amount of ICT professionals in Europe is increased to meet the rising demand.