From the very beginning, the dichotomy between competitive or ‘sport’ chess and educational chess was noted (for example by Commission member J.C. Escriban O’Connor of Argentina in the Commission meeting during the 1985 FIDE Congress). At the time, FIDE and almost all member federations viewed ‘educational chess’ as being simply competitive chess played within an educational establishment. The magazine FIDE Forum ran from 1989 to 1996 and often carried articles about chess in schools, but the ‘competitive chess’ tone was set in the very first issue which featured an article about the Seychelles with a photo showing a large group of children above a caption “future masters.”

The question of what the main thrust of the Commission should be was discussed for many years before the concentration on ‘competitive chess’ changed and the direction of ‘educational chess,’ using chess for educational purposes among children of all ages, and also adults, notably seniors and those socially deprived emerged in the years 2012-2018. It was during the 2014 Commission meeting in Tromso that then Secretary Kevin O’Connell stated that ‘Chess in Schools’ was a misnomer, and that ‘Chess for Education’ would be more appropriate. The long overdue change of name to Chess in Education Commission was made in 2018.

As educational chess came to the fore, so it became apparent that two separate worlds are involved, the chess world and the world of education. The Commission would need to undertake the twin tasks of explaining ‘educational chess’ to the chess world and its educational value to the world of education.

The 1985 meeting saw the report by Dr Tudela of the Venezuelan chess project which compared the advancement in IQ scores of an experimental group which received methodological chess instruction compared with a control group which did not. The general conclusion was that chess tuition was sufficient to accelerate the increase of IQ in children of both sexes at all sociological strata levels. That was part of the Intelligence Project of Dr Luis Alberto Machado, Minister of Intellectual Development of Venezuela 1979-1984. Dr Machado often spoke at conferences in the educational world, but not in the chess world, and the chess world did not send representatives to those conferences which continued apace to produce research generally demonstrating the educational value of chess within educational institutions.

The not so ‘blissful’ non-interaction with the world of education continued with negligible interaction until the 2010s since when the chess world has opened up to collaboration with other organizations, for instance with the 2016 Brussels Chess in Schools Conference sponsored by the European Parliament. In 2019 the FIDE Education Commission Chairman attended the Second European Education Summit organized by the European Commission, and the following year Judit Polgar was invited to give a keynote speech on ‘The Power of Chess in Education’ at the third such summit. Representatives of the world of education are also increasingly in attendance at events which aim to provide a meeting of the two worlds, such as the London Chess and Education Conference which has run annually since 2015, Judit Polgar’s Global Chess Festival, also running since 2015, and the regular conferences in Armenia, Russia, Spain, USA and South America.

Educational chess has enjoyed some notable successes. In 2005 it was introduced as an elective subject in Turkish schools. In 2011 it was made a compulsory subject in the schools of Armenia. The education ministries of both those countries produced detailed reports which demonstrated the educational advantages that had been obtained as a result of the introduction of chess.

Chess for pre-schoolers has developed at pace, with the Commission at the forefront. In 1988 Uvencio Blanco Hernandez defined what was known as pre-chess as a “Set of pedagogical activities organized for boys and girls in the preschool level, using the pieces, pawns, and the chessboard (mural, table, or floor), with the purpose of generating connections and articulations with knowledge from the different sectors of the curriculum. Among such activities are songs, stories, poems, dances, dramatizations, drawings, paintings, puppets, Chinese shadows, etc.” It is a methodological proposal suggested to stimulate thinking and motor skills in preschoolers; as well as an approach to the rudiments and basic principles of the game of chess.”

FIDE was a stakeholder in the CASTLE project (2014-2017), which was sponsored by the EU's Erasmus+ to the extent of almost €240,000. The Commission's specific involvement was for the production of the 52 videos which became FIDE's Early Years Skills programme primarily for kindergarten children (eys.fide.com). Many more programmes for pre-schoolers have been developed, especially in Spain and South America.

In parallel with the question of competitive chess or educational chess, or a subtle blend of the two, has been the question of who should do the teaching. Should it be done by chess trainers or by the school teachers themselves? The Commission meeting during the FIDE Congress in Seville 1987 was, I think, the first to tackle this thorny question. Alejandro Nogues described a programme in Argentina that had over-stretched the federation’s resources and so, out of necessity, they had coached the schoolteachers, many of them new to chess, to do the teaching. Prior to this it was generally assumed that federation coaches would do the teaching which, as we know now is simply impractical, although it took a quarter of a century for general agreement to be reached on that point.

The Turkish experience, led by Ali Nihat Yazici, was proof of concept. In 2005 he convinced the Minister of Education that chess should be an elective part of the school curriculum and a huge training scheme was undertaken. First, the outline of the absolute basics that the teachers would need to know was explained to 100 chess trainers, then each of those trainers taught groups of 30 teachers over consecutive weeks during the summer so that, come the new school year there were some 10,000 school teachers who had acquired a basic knowledge of chess sufficient to teach schoolchildren. It was the start of a huge success – the teachers were already there and already knew very well how to teach the children, all that was needed was that brief introduction to chess, support materials and, above all, to convince the teachers that they did not need to be chess experts.

The 1988 Commission meeting was reasonably well attended, but the Chess for All sub-commission had only two attendees in addition to the Chairman and Secretary to discuss the important matter of producing a teaching programme (on a disk for MS-DOS computers, the standard of the time), the syllabus to cover just the basic information needed to play the game in order to open the door to pupils without scaring the teachers. Nothing came of that project, but materials for schools began to be produced by the Commission in the following century.

The period after 2010 was prolific for the production of training materials and training courses for teachers. This started with the introduction of the FIDE School Instructor title in 2012 and the relevant materials for what were initially in-person courses. The rapid development of the internet has seen most of these courses move online, thus solving the major logistical problems (cost, travel, etc.) of presential courses, although the latter maintain an importance for visibility by national ministries of education.

At the 1985 meeting Prof. Drimer proposed that the Commission create a pedagogical book for all FIDE-member countries. In 1989 the Commission continued to discuss production of materials and Chairman Palladino generously offered to foot the bill for printing them, but necessary financial assistance for translation was noted as a stumbling block in addition to the question of how to choose between competing materials that had been proffered, most of which were concerned more with the training of players rather than basic introduction to chess. Jacques Lambert (France) said, in the late 1980s that “the most important thing is to organize seminars and lectures, conferences for teachers, to supply them with training documents and leave each country to organize in its own way.”

In the 1990 Commission meeting in Novi Sad, Acting Chairman Faneuil Adams announced an important addition to the literature: the American Chess Foundation had prepared a booklet on the benefits of chess in schools which would be sent to all federations. There was, however, a snag, hardly any federations had anyone dedicated to dealing with chess in education, a problem that only really began to be addressed a quarter of a century later and which remains a problem today. So, most of those booklets ended up largely unread as wall ‘insulation’. Little effective work was done to solve that problem until the Chairmanship of GM Smbat Lputian and his push for continental and national chess in education infrastructure.

The debate about whether FIDE, particularly in association with UNESCO, should produce such material or whether such a one-size-fits-all book is inappropriate given cultural differences has continued down the decades. In the period 2011-2016, several works were made freely available by the Commission, including the books by Kulaç that were developed for the Turkish programme and which were translated into several languages including Marathi! Also, in that period the even more basic Planet Chess, together with a Glossary of chess terms was made available in freely downloadable PDF format in many languages including Arabic and Chinese.

Concentrating on making downloadable materials available side-stepped the logistical problems associated with shipping physical materials. An expensive shipment of 1500 boards and sets and 100 demonstration boards sent in 2013 to a country which shall remain nameless got stuck in customs from which they have never emerged.

Promotional literature, aimed at convincing both the chess world and the education world of the importance of educational chess got under way in 2012 with the publication of Chess in Schools, Our Global Future, a second edition two years later and, in 2018, the groundbreaking Chess, a Tool for Education and Health with editions also in French, Spanish and German, all of these both in print form and as freely downloadable PDFs.

The first important conference was in 2001 in Dallas, the George Koltanowski Memorial Conference on Chess and Education. It brought together the two worlds, with many speakers from the world of education as well as those from the chess world. Regrettably, FIDE was not represented there. Since then, there has been a burgeoning of such conferences all over the world, generally with FIDE in attendance. So great has been the interest in using chess for educational ends that a sub series of conferences has developed that are devoted specifically to pre-school education.

The Chess and Education conference in Istanbul during the 2012 Olympiad was the first organized by FIDE and it paid special attention to involving people from the world of education. FIDE and the Commission have since provided support for many conferences. Since its inaugural session in 2015, the London Chess Conference, with FIDE support has arguably developed into the world’s leading conference about the use of chess for educational purposes, with Judit Polgar’s festival at least a close second.

It did not come as a surprise that the Commission’s work, despite sterling support by Nicolas Palladino’s printshop, was hampered by the lack of a budget. Commission Chairman Palladino noted that the Commission needed an “adequate budget” (the allocation for the 1991-92 financial year was CHF 5,000) and the 1991 FIDE Congress in Berlin authorized the hiring of a FIDE staff member for Chess in Schools “should the amount of work warrant it”. This had been suggested by Faneuil Adams in Novi Sad the previous year, and in the 1992 Manila Congress, President Campomanes recommended hiring a FIDE staff member to work mainly on the schools program, but nothing much happened … until 2011!

So began the long and winding road from the zero budget of 1996, 1997’s budgeted 1,000 Swiss Francs (FIDE’s currency at the time) to the modern day. There was a slow but fairly steady rise and in 2010 the budget had increased to 30,000 EUR with another jump in 2011 to 50,000 EUR. Then came the munificent Rosneft sponsorship that brought almost 472,000 EUR into the coffers in addition to the budget of 2012. That enabled the Commission to start many projects, most of them with translation into all the main FIDE languages. Unfortunately, the sponsorship was not renewed and so most of those projects slowed down, a financial reserve being carefully husbanded until 2016, a year of serious financial difficulties for FIDE, when the budget was suddenly reduced to zero in mid-year, the remaining funds requisitioned to prop up FIDE overall, and the Commission reverted to reliance on the Chairman and his own resources to maintain at least a semblance of normality. Fortunately, the crisis was short-lived and small budgets were allocated in 2017 and 2018, returning to a more normal €76,000 in 2019 following the arrival of President Arkady Dvorkovich.

For many years it was difficult to gain support for attempts to convince the inside chess world both of the big differences between sport chess and educational chess, and of the importance for the chess world of educational chess. National federations and FIDE leadership alike were preoccupied with the development of competitive chess at national and international levels. President Campomanes was aware of the future importance of educational chess, but at the time of his presidency (1982-1995) the main focus was on building FIDE’s infrastructure, growing from 113 federations in 1981 to 160 in 1995 (and 201 today), uniting and reuniting the chess world through the difficulties of breakaway entities during the latter quarter of the twentieth century.

The importance of chess in school received a major boost with the arrival of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (President 1995-2018) who stated, “My main goal – chess in every school and one billion players on the planet.” It was in 2010 during the Khanty-Mansiiysk Congress that Ilyumzhinov declared that FIDE’s Chess in Schools programme would be one of his main areas of focus in 2010-2014, and it was he, in 2012 who was responsible for the Rosneft sponsorship. It was in the same year that the CIS Commission meeting at the FIDE Congress had the highest attendance of any commission, finally fulfilling Toran’s exhortation of 1986. Current President Arkady Dvorkovich in his acceptance speech after his election in 2018 expressed his desire that Chess in Education be at the forefront of FIDE’s current objectives.

Much effort has been put into growing the roots of educational chess through continental Chess in Education Commissions and persuading member federations to set up their own internal structure for the promotion and development of educational chess, all of which was one of the main objectives of GM Smbat Lputian during his chairmanship of EDU. This has been strongly supported by Dana Reizniece-Ozola since her appointment as FIDE Managing Director in January 2021, the press release stating that “The main directions Ms. Reiznice-Ozola will oversee include chess in education - an area she sees as a top priority.”

Throughout our history we have sought to find out what the state of play is with educational chess throughout the world. The Commission carried out its first survey in 1986, gathering information about the state of educational chess around the world. Responses from 76 member countries (of 124) showed that while chess was a compulsory or optional subject in schools in 23 of those countries, it was overwhelmingly an extra-curricular subject. Further questionnaires were carried out infrequently until put on a regular basis in 2010 with statistics for 113 FIDE members. Annual fact-finding questionnaires were followed by a massive multi-year survey conducted in partnership with the European Chess Union and Armenia’s Chess Scientific Research Institute which reported in May 2021 with results from 135 FIDE members (regrettably, 42 federations failed to respond), 39 educational chess organizations, and 22 private and public schools.

FIDE EDU’s principal objectives for 2023-2026 are to position FIDE as the Global Leader in Chess in Education, double the number of teachers delivering chess-related instruction (from 92,500 to 200,000), double the number of students involved in scholastic chess (from 25 to 50 million), and increase the number of participants in FIDE EDU courses (teachers and lecturers) by 20% each year. The future is bright under the current Commission leadership of Jerry Nash and Secretary WIM Rita Atkins.

The use of the word Chairmen remains correct but will surely change in the future:

• 1984-1985 Rafael Tudela
• 1985-1986 co-chairmen: Rafael Tudela & Roman Toran
• 1986-1988 co-chairmen: Panagiotis Kontos & Nicola Palladino
• 1988-1990 Nicola Palladino
• 1990-1994 Nicola Palladino
• 1994-1998 Nicola Palladino
• 1998-2002 Nicola Palladino
• 2002-2004 Nicola Palladino (resigned 2004)
• 2004-2005 co-chairmen: Goran Antunac & Uvencio Blanco Hernandez
• 2005-2006 Ali Nihat Yazici
• 2006-2010 Uvencio Blanco Hernandez
• 2010-2014 Ali Nihat Yazici
• 2014-2018 Kevin O’Connell
• 2018-2022 Smbat Lputian
• 2022-(2026) Jerry Nash