Brussels, 3 December 2025

Launching HERMMES for schools, parents, and policy-makers

2025 was both the end and beginning of HERMMES: the EU funding period ended in March but dissemination and use of the HERMMES approach only began.

Sharing HERMMES with the world

On 20 Feb­ru­ary in Brus­sels, we host­ed a full-day con­fer­ence with 105 par­tic­i­pants: pol­i­cy­mak­ers, researchers, dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion experts, teach­ers, par­ents, EdTech devel­op­ers, and HERMMES part­ner organ­i­sa­tions to launch the HERMMES results and dis­cuss the future of edu­ca­tion in the dig­i­tal age. The title was Books or Tablets? Help­ing chil­dren Nav­i­gate the Dig­i­tal World. Some of the dis­tin­guished speak­ers were Mar­ta Markows­ka and Leonie Bul­tynck from the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion Unit, Clara Cen­teno from the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion Joint Research Cen­tre, Mark West from UNESCO, Ahmet Murat Kil­ic from the Coun­cil of Europe, Michal Rybar from the Slo­va­kian Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion, Jan De Crae­mer from the Flem­ish Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion, and the keynote speak­er, Mie Oehlen­schläger from Den­mark. The day was full of pan­el dis­cus­sions, work­shops, and time for infor­mal exchange between par­tic­i­pants. Watch a short video of the day.

Sharing HERMMES with policy-makers

The HERMMES approach has been designed to align with the Euro­pean Dig­i­tal Com­pe­tences Frame­work for Cit­i­zens, offer­ing an adap­ta­tion tai­lored to chil­dren and young peo­ple. Thanks to the advo­ca­cy efforts of HERMMES part­ners it has been includ­ed in the EU Dig­Comp 3.0 and study on Pro­mot­ing Well-being in Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion, both pub­lished in Decem­ber 2025. This year, we also con­tributed to the Euro­pean Year of Dig­i­tal Cit­i­zen­ship Edu­ca­tion with the Coun­cil of Europe by pro­vid­ing HERMMES input for their con­fer­ences held in Stras­bourg in Jan­u­ary and May. Build­ing on the HERMMES frame­work, we sub­mit­ted con­tri­bu­tions to the Euro­pean Commission’s call for input on action plan against cyber­bul­ly­ing, and pre­pared pol­i­cy papers for Mem­bers of the Euro­pean Parliament’s CULT Com­mit­tee work­ing on two new reports: (1) the impact of social media and the online envi­ron­ment on young peo­ple and (2) a new strat­e­gy for media lit­er­a­cy and dig­i­tal learn­ing. Through­out the year, we pre­sent­ed the HERMMES approach at major inter­na­tion­al events, includ­ing UNESCO’s Dig­i­tal Learn­ing Week in Paris in Sep­tem­ber and UNESCO’s Media and Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­a­cy Week in Colom­bia in October.

Sharing HERMMES with schools, teachers, and parents

As part of the HERMMES in Action pilot project that began this school year, 12 schools are par­tic­i­pat­ing in a struc­tured one-year pro­gramme sup­port­ing their use of the HERMMES mate­ri­als to devel­op their own school-lev­el approach­es to media edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal lit­er­a­cy. A broad­er ped­a­gog­i­cal audi­ence is also invit­ed to join the HERMMES learn­ing jour­ney online, which launched on 4 Novem­ber with 322 reg­is­tered par­tic­i­pants from 58 coun­tries across five con­ti­nents. Fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of the orig­i­nal Eng­lish ver­sion in Feb­ru­ary, HERMMES mate­ri­als are now being trans­lat­ed into 11 addi­tion­al lan­guages, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, Ital­ian, Lat­vian, Ger­man, Sloven­ian, Hun­gar­i­an, Man­darin Chi­nese (Tai­wan), and Nor­we­gian, to be pub­lished on the HERMMES web­site. An in-depth HERMMES ambas­sador train­ing pro­gramme is planned for 2026.

Further reading