The round-table discussion “The role of pedagogical universities in realizing the National project «Education»” was held in Surgut State Pedagogical University in June, 2019. It became the platform for discussing key problems of the education system, particularly the development of the participants of the teaching-learning process and their interaction in the situation of serious sociocultural changes resulted from the active digitalization of education and other processes. The activities of pedagogical universities and their role in the development of education system and in supporting the succession of different education levels were considered in terms of two processes - training prospective teachers who are going to work in absolutely new pedagogical conditions and developing professional competencies of working teachers. The directions for developing higher pedagogical education were defined on the bases of the activity-based approach and the dialog-based strategy of projecting education. They include forecasting and specifying changes in requirements for teachers in the conditions of realizing the model of the “digital school”, improving educators’ psychological and pedagogical training in terms of cultural changes in the society and modern “network-related” personality’s needs, using the context-based education model and university best practices (introducing Bachelor’s “double major” programmes, realizing higher education programmes on the basis of nursery schools, inviting best school teachers as pedagogical university lecturers, developing pedagogical and didactic instruments for solving the problem of academic non-successfulness) in training students of pedagogical universities. In order to update educators’ competencies within the professional teachers’ community the development of the cumulative model of further professional training, the system of young teachers’ support and centres of working teachers’ lifelong learning is offered as possible solution. One of the further education courses for working teachers is about organizing the automated workplace which is beneficial in the conditions of education digitalization. Centres of teachers’ lifelong learning can be used not only as instruments of further education but as sources of empirical data for further pedagogical research as well.