With “A New Skills Agenda for Europe”, the European Commission [EC] doubled down on its push towards more skills-based education as “[…] pathway to employability and prosperity” (EC, 2016, p. 2). In the EC Agenda, the term ‘skills’ is defined broadly as what a person knows, understands, and can do. Emphasis on skills-based approaches was initiated in mid-90s by UNESCO under Jacque Delor leadership (Delors, 1996), followed by OECD’s Definition and Selection of Competencies (DeSeCo) project, which then led to The European Reference Framework of key competences (Official Journal of the European Union [OJEU], 2006). This paper aims to problematize and show the complexity of developing 21^st century skills or dispositional learning outcomes (DLEs) by focusing on conceptually addressing the role of learning environments and policy contexts in realizing DLEs in the European context.

We frame the discussion on the potential of education systems to realize DLEs around Curriculum and Didaktik traditions as per Deng and Luke (2008), where curriculum is elaborated along the lines of four main overarching perspectives, namely academic rationalism, social efficiency, humanism, and social resconstructionism, and Didaktik as European-based framework for curriculum making at the classroom level. Next, we turn to trans-national policy flows and how they have affected national education policy contexts.

The paper employs document analysis to address two main research questions: first, how do trans-national policies affect national education and curriculum policies? And second, how do different curriculum theoretical underpinnings affect the potential to realize DLEs? The document analysis will focus on two European national contexts – one EU (Sweden) and one non-EU (Kosovo) member state. The paper will primarily focus on dissecting policies related to curriculum, teacher education and assessment in the two countries.