The generation of the competence education idea in Ukraine based on the EU benchmarks is studied. The authors state that the transformation of the national education into the competence base is a component of Ukraine’s European integration. The authors conclude that the Ukrainian education has gone from proclaiming the idea of the competence education, its conceptual justification to implementation. It is emphasized that the support of the competence idea at the level of educational policy is the most successful in Ukraine. At the same time, the implementation of the competence idea creates a number of challenges due to the novelty of a clear correlation between strategic, didactic and methodological levels. The problem of the formation of key competences, firstly of transversal or cross-curricular ones, remains underdeveloped; the aspects of cross-curricular links and integration of the education content requires further development; the level of assessing younger students in competencies is even more underdeveloped. The example of primary education concludes that the development of the competence education in Ukraine is a continuous process contributing to the synchronization with EU standards.