This symposium presents infrastructures with different focuses, functions, and construction phases as well as national contexts in Europe. European societies are facing numerous societal challenges, including demographic changes and the ecological crisis. The symposium integrates four presentations that highlight current European infrastructures, including those from Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, which are relevant for supporting educational research, development, and practice. 

The role of research infrastructures is focal in facilitating high-quality research. In Europe, research infrastructures form a significant whole, both quantitatively and economically. Substantial sums have been invested in them, and they support extensive international research cooperation. Research infrastructures are seen as a key factor of the Europe 2020 strategy, where they support excellence in research, innovation, open science principles and researcher mobility. (Toom & Miller, 2018.)  Indeed, research infrastructures havethe potential to improve research opportunities and open science by bringing together discipline-specific data,research facilities, and actors in the scientific community (Fabre, et al., 2021). Typically, research infrastructures have been systematically developed in natural sciences. However, in educational and social sciences, infrastructures have been scarce. Hence, it is important for the scientific communities and research infrastructures to collaborate to strengthen the development and networking in the field of educational science. 

Finnish Teacher Education Database, FinTED, covers Finnish teacher education and brings together all national actors, data, and activities. The Norwegian Teacher Education Panel Study (TEPS) is a scientific, systematic, and longitudinal database and a national research infrastructure for teacher education in Norway. In Sweden, the initiative ULF (Education, Learning, Research) is a collaboration for long-term research infrastructure as an ecosystem for research–practice partnerships. It provides an organisational and financial framework for practice-based research collaborations between schools and higher education institutions. Switzerland presents multi-level education data infrastructures consisting of the following two pilars: the Federal Statistical Office (FSO), and the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS).

In the symposium, the following questions are dealt with

• Why and how was the infrastructure built? 
• What is the focus, functions, and construction phase of the infrastructure?
• What is the role of the infrastructure on facilitating research, research-based development, and practices on national and European level?
• What are the future directions and collaboration possibilities for the European infrastructures?

Pedagogical implications of current infrastructures to develop the research-based educational research, and, also, future directions and collaboration possibilities for the European infrastructures are discussed. In the current challenging times, European research collaboration is vital.

Fabre, R., Egret, D., Schöpfel, J., & Azeroual, O. (2021). Evaluating the scientific impact of research infrastructures: The role of current research information systems. Quantitative Science Studies, 2(1), 42–64. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00111 Toom, K., & Miller, P. F. (2018). Research infrastructure. In J. Andersen, K. Toom, S. Poli, & P. F. Miller (Eds.), Research management: Europe and beyond (pp. 205–212). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-805059-0.00009-2