A school training plan based on DigCompEdu

How most plans come about

A school's training plan is often built like this: look at what accredited local providers offer, pick the courses that seem most useful, check the budget adds up. The result is a defensible list disconnected from real needs.

The problem is not course quality: it is the direction of the reasoning. You start from supply and arrive at need, instead of the other way round.

Building it the other way round, in five steps

1. Measure, do not estimate. DigCompEdu supplies the scaffolding: 6 areas, 22 competences, six progression levels from Newcomer to Pioneer. A tool like SELFIE for Teachers returns a profile for every teacher who completes it. The condition for it to work is individual anonymity: if teachers suspect the profiles will be used to appraise them, the data becomes useless.

2. Aggregate by area, not by person. What a head teacher needs is not who is behind: it is which areas are uncovered across the staff. A school whose digital assessment area is stuck at A levels has a structural problem, not an individual one.

3. Read the last area as an indicator. If "Facilitating learners' digital competence" is systematically lower than the others, digital tools are improving teachers' own work without reaching students. It is the most common case, and no tools course fixes it.

4. Choose by gap, not by availability. Training goes where the distance between measured and expected level is greatest. If the most exposed area is assessment, one more course on digital resources is money badly spent, even when it is free.

5. Measure again later. Without a second profile you do not know whether the plan worked. A year is the minimum useful interval.

The level changes the kind of training

DigCompEdu distinguishes six levels, and the distinction has direct operational implications.

At A1-A2 structured training is what is needed: content, support, protected occasions to experiment.

At B1-B2 lecture-style training yields little. What is needed instead is joint design, peer observation, time to revise your own practice.

At C1-C2 training is no longer reception: progression requires sharing your practice with colleagues and questioning it. A teacher at Leader level grows by training others, and that has to be recognised in the plan as an activity, not as volunteering.

Hence the most expensive mistake: sending a B2 teacher to a basic course and an A1 teacher to an advanced one produce the same result, which is none.

What to add to the grid

DigCompEdu covers a teacher's digital competences, but not the whole need. For the artificial intelligence part there is now a dedicated reference -- the UNESCO AI CFT framework -- and for the transversal competences any teaching innovation requires, the reference is LifeComp.

Browse the 6 areas, 22 competences and six levels on the DigCompEdu portal at ExplorerHub.