This EPS-sponsored symposium followed on from a Round Table conducted at the EPS forum in Paris in 2022. We consider physics teaching in schools from a Europe-wide perspective and examine issues in teacher professional development. We present views from the Physics Education Division of the European Physical Society, the Young Minds initiative of the European Physical Society, various sections of which actively work with schools around Europe, and the Teacher and Student Programmes section at CERN, which has been conducting many different Physics Education Research projects over the last ten years. We discuss in particular the origin of the research-practice gap in schools and consider ways in which schools might better utilise the outcomes of Physics Education Research. We explore briefly the possibility of a European initiative in school-university collaboration.