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Sixteen Ministries of Education, one question: How can we make Europe’s strong but scattered STEM and sustainability initiatives work together?
Sixteen Ministries of Education. Three projects. One shared question. The Scientix® MoE STEM Working Group's April 2026 workshop explored how Europe's STEM and sustainability initiatives can stop running in parallel and start working as a system.
During its April 2026 online workshop, the Scientix® Ministries of Education STEM Working Group took up a deceptively simple question, one that sixteen Ministries then tested against the realities of their national systems. The meeting also welcomed two new members to the Working Group: Slovenia and the Netherlands.
Three project-led sessions anchored the conversation. BUSTIC EDU, together with the Scientix® Collections, examined how curated, competence-linked resources can scale from single classrooms to whole-school practice. NBS Academy traced the move from a Community of Practice to a broader Landscape of Practice around nature-based solutions in teacher education. OUTSTE(A)M set out how outdoor learning, sustainability, playful STE(A)M and age-appropriate technology can form a coherent ecosystem for children aged 2–9.
What emerged was not a list of new programmes to launch, but a sharper reading of the ones already in place. The Scientix® Collections, the Communities of Practice, the toolkits, the recognition schemes, and the national initiatives Ministries shared all exist already. The harder, slower, more rewarding task is connecting them so that what runs in parallel starts to work as a system.
The discussion also surfaced the real-world tensions that shape that task: teacher time as the binding resource behind every other one; the "golden thread" that makes interdisciplinary learning visible to students; child-protection frameworks that can either enable or block outdoor pedagogy; the boundary between nature-based solutions and sustainability education more broadly; and the question of when formal language helps young children learn science, and when it quietly extinguishes the very curiosity we claim to be cultivating.
Read the full meeting summary on the Scientix Resources Repository to explore what each project brought, what each Ministry of Education added, and the complex questions the Working Group chose to hold open rather than close prematurely.