Teacher and Education Leader Perceptions of Digital Competences and Barriers to Digital Transformation of Education

Abstract Digital transformation is reshaping teaching and learning worldwide, yet its benefits remain unevenly distributed and the competences it demands of educators are still contested. This article asks how different educational stakeholders conceptualise the competences required for effective digitalisation of teaching and learning, and what they identify as the principal obstacles to it. The study forms part of an international Erasmus+ Teacher Academy project using a shared interview protocol across partner countries; this article reports the Latvian data. Thirty-two participants - pre-service teachers, in-service teachers and educational leaders, took part in semi-structured interviews, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Four findings stand out. First, the competences participants named varied systematically with their position in the system: pre-service teachers emphasised operational skills, in-service teachers pedagogical integration, and leaders strategic change management; strikingly few future-oriented competences were technological. Second, language operated as a double constraint, with English proficiency governing access to tools and professional learning while a scarcity of high-quality Latvian-language resources limited classroom use. Third, artificial intelligence was experienced primarily as a challenge to assessment rather than to teaching. Fourth, barriers internal to teachers fear of error and a perceived generational divide, persisted even in well-resourced schools, and change was carried largely by early-adopting colleagues rather than institutional mandate. Together these findings indicate that investment in equipment alone will not deliver digital transformation, and that professional development, resource policy and assessment design need to be addressed as a single problem rather than three separate ones.