Our consortium members - 15 partners from the public, academic and non-government sectors from 7 EU countries - believe there are shared structural challenges related to the teaching profession in school systems across the EU. Unless adequately addressed, these challenges might jeopardize the achievement of the ambitious EU 2020 strategy education goals. These threats include: incipient teacher shortages that will worsen over the next 5-10 years; decreasing quality of teaching due to non-rigorous selection for teacher candidates and lengthy, highly theoretical initial teacher training; lack of tested innovative policy experimentations in the field of teacher training allowing for scalable and transferable measures across the EU. We aim to address these challenges by introducing alternative pathways to the teaching profession as an experimental policy measure across the consortium. The new ways into teaching allow professionals without prior teaching experience to become effective and motivated pedagogical practitioners. The project entails the design, implementation and evaluation of the alternative pathways to teaching in 5 of the consortium countries. A shared model of the alternative pathway will be designed, comprising a set of core elements across the countries while allowing for flexibility, autonomy and adaptability depending on the national context. The experiment’s impact and effectiveness in bringing quality new entrants into teaching will be evaluated through the use of robust evidence both nationally and trans-nationally. Thus, governments across the EU will gain useful recommendations on how to transfer and scale such measures. The project outcomes will deliver a wide array of tested tools, practices, case studies and guidelines for innovative programs for teacher candidate recruitment, selection, initial training, on-the-job coaching and formative assessment.