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With the sudden widespread closure of schools since February-March 2020 due to the physical distancing measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital competences became a focus of attention, being of central importance to the swift and equitable transition to the various forms of emergency remote teaching implemented throughout the world as a strategy to insure continuity in education. This almost instantaneous mass shift to teaching online has made transparent great disparities in how digital competences -- particularly those of teachers -- were conceptualized, taught and assessed within various educational programs. We present a comparative analysis of the approaches to teachers' learning and professional development that state and non-state actors in four Central and East European countries have articulated in the first months of COVID-19 related lockdown. We take a Critical Frame Analysis approach to exploring the roles played by state and non-state actors in the four countries in conceptually framing the relationship between the digital competences required in emergency remote teaching and teachers' learning and professional development at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. It is suggested that the educational policy debate at the beginning of the crisis rendered visible: (a) that this massive sudden shift required understanding digitalization as a complex multifaceted process requiring levels of digital and pedagogical competence teachers were unlikely to have previously developed; (b) that addressing these issues through short-term interventions would only exacerbate the risk of ignoring arising equity issues; (c) that situating emergency measures in the context of potential medium and long-term developments could open opportunities to explore mainstreaming the digitalization of education and promoting blended learning, as well as offer a better perspective on issues of digital poverty and the inequitable impact of not addressing it adequately will have in the future.

The historically high inequities in the education systems of Central and East-European countries have been further exacerbated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using critical frame analysis, we compared the education policy debates in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Republic of Moldova during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic with a particular focus on inequities. We discuss the policy frames proposed and utilized by governmental and non-governmental actors to understand their roles played in articulating policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis, and highlight the specificities and commonalities of the political language within and across the national borders of the four countries. We conclude with our findings on the dynamics and structure of the policy debate between state and non-state actors in times of crisis with a particular focus on policy spaces and policy temporalities. Two ways of constructing spatio-temporalities co-exist: one is national, state and public health centric and focuses on governing 'through' the crisis; and the other is focused on long term planning while constructing the crisis as an opportunity for decisive intervention towards more equitable education.