FAPEL anniversary greeted by EPA

Our valued member, FAPEL is celebrating 30 years of good home-school cooperation. Their anniversary newsletter has been published in print recently. They asked EPA to send a greeting by the president. You can read it below to celebrate with our member from Catalonia, Spain. The message is valid for other members and countries, too.

A new Convention for combating domestic violence

“On 1 August 2014, a new stage will begin in the protection of human rights in Europe: the Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence will enter into force in 11 Council of Europe member States,” the President of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), Anne Brasseur, said today.

New EPNoSL publication: Promoting the policy agenda on school leadership from the perspective of equity and learning

Promoting the policy agenda on school leadership from the perspective of equity and learning is developed in the frame of the European Policy Network of School Leadership (EPNoSL) project EPA is part of. Although it focuses mostly on school leaders, head teachers themselves, it can be used as a good tool for training parents for participating in distributed leadership and school leadership in general.

EPNoSL July newsletter with invitation to Nice

EPNoSL is organizing its next Peer Learning Activity (PLA) in Nice, France at the end of September. EPA is attending the event and will report on it but all EPA members interested are welcome to join, too. The event that will be attended by members of the wider school leadership stakeholder community, including policy makers, educational leaders (school principals and head teachers, and teacher educators), researchers, representatives of professional associations, parents and students. 

You can read more about the event and other news of the European Policy Network on School Leadership in the Newsletter here

School holidays – summer agony for many parents

Organising suitable programmes for the children during long summer holidays causes headaches to many parents around Europe these days. It is difficult enough to find camps, holiday activities where the children are safe and that also have an educational value, but in Hungary two scandals are making the decision even more difficult for parents. One is a summer camp that is absolutely unsuitable for children – at least in my opinion -, the other is a 25-year-old story of abuse.

First OECD PISA financial literacy test finds many young people confused by money matters

Around one in seven students in the 13 OECD countries and economies that took part in the first OECD PISA international assessment of financial literacy are unable to make even simple decisions about everyday spending, and only one in ten can solve complex financial tasks.

Some 29 000 15 year-olds in 18 countries and economies* took part in the test, which assessed the knowledge and skills of teenagers in dealing with financial issues, such as understanding a bank statement, the long-term cost of a loan or knowing how insurance works.

Financing Schools in Europe: Mechanisms, Methods and Criteria in Public Funding

Eurydice has just published a comprehensive report that provides a framework for understanding the structure of funding systems of primary and general secondary education in Europe. It delivers an analysis of authority levels involved and the methods and criteria used for determining the level of resources for financing school education. It covers 27 of the 28 EU Member States as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Turkey. The authority levels involved in the transfers and provision of school funding is inextricably linked to the political and administrative set-up in individual countries themselves. With the help of national diagrams on funding flows, the report explains the different mechanisms, methods and priorities when it comes to funding staff, operational goods and services and capital goods.

‘So they were divorced, and lived happily ever after, as did their children…’: Beyond doom and gloom for children of divorced parents

By Shanti George, independent researcher, The Hague

We live in an era when divorce is far more common than it used to be, yet we still cling nostalgically to visions of the ‘good old days’ when couples stayed together, and relatedly we continue to stigmatize children who grow up with divorced parents (‘in broken homes’).  Why is it that we hold on to negative narratives and images despite the changing trends around couples and families, and portray divorce as unremittingly grim when we discuss children of divorced parents?  The old narratives with the happy ending ‘They were married and lived happily ever after…’ seem to retain a powerful grip on the social imagination today.