CoE Report – From practice to policy
A research, rooted in focus group interviews that took place at EuroClio’s Bratislava Annual Conference in 2025, travelled through a year of expert collaboration to emerge as a unanimously adopted resolution and recommendation of the Council of Europe’s Congress of Local and Regional Authorities.
The focus group interviews, done and analysed by Angelos Palidikis, generated findings that fed directly into the explanatory memorandum prepared for the Congress Rapporteur Peter Drenth (Netherlands, EPP/CCE), who spoke at the EuroClio conference. The resulting recommendations and resolution, titled Squeezed out: bringing regional history teaching to the fore, are available in English, German, French and Italian.
“History, memory and attachment to democracy are all connected and deeply rooted in the communities in which we live. So we need to teach regional history effectively, steeped in European values.”
— Peter Drenth, Rapporteur, Council of Europe
When the vote came, the result was unambiguous: 100% resolutions adopted, 100% recommendations adopted, no amendments tabled.
The substance of the report
The report identifies a structural deficit across European education systems. Regional history, which aims to connect students to local communities, cultural heritage, and shared environments, is consistently crowded out by national and global narratives, particularly in countries with centralised curricula. Teachers face overloaded programmes, scarce resources, and limited guidance on teaching regional history. The problem, the report argues, has been getting worse, not better: since the Council of Europe first championed regional history teaching, a deliberate drift towards national and global framing has eroded the space for the regional lens.
The report’s use of the term “regions” is deliberately broad, as it encompasses not only formal subnational entities but also transnational areas sharing ethnic, linguistic, or historical ties across present-day borders, such as the Saami peoples of the Nordic countries or the historical region of Thrace, divided today between Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria.
The resolution calls on local and regional authorities to collaborate with national partners to ensure sufficient time, resources, and teacher training for regional history within school curricula. The recommendation urges national authorities to formally recognise regional history as a complement to national, European, and global history, and strongly advocates cross-border cooperation in developing teaching materials and digital archives.
EuroClio’s role
Presenting to the Congress on behalf of EuroClio, Executive Director Steven Stegers traced a partnership with the Council of Europe stretching back to 1991, when the Council first convened history teacher associations from across Europe. This gathering directly gave rise to EuroClio, the European Association of History Educators, itself.
Stegers was direct about the stakes of the current moment. The misuse of history by the Russian leadership to justify its war against Ukraine, heard in testimonies earlier that same day in the chamber, illustrated what was lost when young people lacked the tools to critically evaluate historical narratives. “Education, especially history education, if taught well, is the best antidote we have,” he told delegates. The research that informed this report helped identify the precise gap to be addressed: regional history’s absence from curricula has consequences for democratic resilience, minority recognition, and civic belonging.
The debate that followed was rich. Delegates and Youth speakers from Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Poland, Malta, and Ukraine all took the floor, drawing on the report’s framework to illuminate their own regional contexts.
“Regional history is the memory underpinning our regional culture,” said a representative from Bavaria (Germany). The delegate described Bavaria’s existing institutional infrastructure, including a new history app and a direct link between local history and difficult chapters, such as the Nazi period, as evidence that the report’s recommendations were both necessary and achievable.
Another representative from North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) described how 18 million inhabitants were brought together from two entirely different provinces under British occupation, which shaped a distinctive regional consciousness that schools must now convey.
Coming from Friesland (Netherlands), Ms Volker spoke to the inseparability of regional history and the Frisian language (now mandatory in Frisian-region curricula) as a model of how language, identity, and history can be taught together.
A Youth delegate from Norway stressed that “the beauty of local and regional history is that it is inherently connected to people, places, and practices.” The delegate described school visits to Norway’s first retirement home, originally a farm, as an example of how human-scale regional history generates dialogue on dignity and the foundations of the welfare state.
Another Youth delegate from Albania stressed that memory can either divide or heal, depending on how one chooses to approach it. Drawing on the experience of the Western Balkans, the delegate argued that regional authorities are uniquely positioned to act now, without waiting for national curriculum reform: “You can fund local history projects today. You can open archives to students.”
The Maltese delegate called for the cooperation envisaged in the resolution to extend beyond institutions to young people themselves as “active partners in how regional history is documented, interpreted, and carried forward.” She also invited EuroClio and the Observatory of History Teaching in Europe to include young people’s own experience of regional history as a specific focus in future research, a call that Steven Stegers agreed to.
Lastly, the Ukrainian contribution carried particular weight. The delegate described how Russian-imposed textbooks on occupied Ukrainian territories distort, erase, and weaponise regional history. For instance, presenting the 1933 famine as a “shared Soviet tragedy” and re-labelling Kyivan Rus to erase Ukrainian origins. The contrast with the quality of post-independence Ukrainian history textbooks made the point about what is at stake when regional history is done well or done badly.
What makes this significant
Unanimous adoption of a Council of Europe Congress recommendation is not unusual. What gives this particular outcome its distinctive character is the provenance of the research that underpins it. The focus groups at EuroClio’s Bratislava Annual Conference represented practising history educators, the people who actually face the curriculum squeeze in classrooms. Their experiences and perspectives incorporated into rapporteur Peter Drenth’s explanatory memorandum gave the final text a grounding in practitioner reality that is often absent from policy documents of this kind.
In his closing remarks, he thanked Angelos Palidikis for his contribution to the preparation of this report and for the support in this process from EuroClio, the Council of Europe History Education Division, and the Observatory on History Teaching in Europe (OHTE).
For EuroClio, the outcome is a demonstration of what its model is designed to achieve, not only training teachers and developing resources, but feeding practitioner knowledge into the institutions that shape the conditions under which educators work. The debate produced a direct invitation from Youth delegates to co-design future research into young people’s experience of regional history, and with young people themselves leading the inquiry.
The collaboration between History Co:Lab and EuroClio aims to construct the essential missing components in European civic education by aligning the science of youth development with classroom practice and policy design. Based in the findings of the Mapping Report, the project seeks to transform learning into a systemic ecosystem that prioritizes student agency and belonging, ensuring every young person can develop into their full civic self, through precise education tools and accurate policies.
For EuroClio, this is the kind of work the organisation exists to do, not only supporting teachers directly, but helping ensure that what teachers know and experience finds its way into the broader conversations that shape the conditions of their work.
