European Pillar of Social Rights - learn the basics and participate in the public consultation

On 8 March 2016, the European Commission launched its new key initiative in the social field: the European Pillar of Social Rights. Now that Europe2020 seems to be fading more and more into the background, the Pillar represents one of civil society’s best hopes of restoring the balance between social and economic goals on the EU agenda. However, at the same time, a lot remains unclear about the Pillar. What will be its legal nature? How many Member States will actually accept and implement it? What will its relation be to the European Semester? And what will it actually say?

The Commission has published a preliminary outline of the Pillar, outlining 20 key principles or ‘rights’ which should be promoted and upheld, including adequate minimum income, adequate access to essential services, and adequate long-term care. Citizens, civil society organisations and trade unions will have until the end of the year to respond to the outline and to share their perspective on what a Pillar of Social Rights should look like.

School as the training ground of active citizenship for parents and children

Report of the EPA Conference 29/30 April 2016, Dubrovnik, Croatia

EPA has started its second 30 years with a very successful conference on parental involvement and child participation as an important means of learning and practising active citizenship. The conference has proven to be very timely. The original idea behind our choice of topic was to give a parents’ answer to the challenges put forward in the 2015 Paris Declaration, focusing on active citizenship and inclusion for all. While we were preparing for the event, the European Commission published a new set of policy recommendations on Transforming Schools, mainly to offer a solution for countries to achieve the EU2020 headline target on early school leaving. The new policy recommendations are based on parental involvement and child participation, so it was evident we will link the two initiatives together. Our guest speakers set the scene for a day of discussions where EPA members and guests could elaborate on the topics of the conference, make their own advocacy plan for implementing the new recommendations, and also formulate their wishes towards EPA to support their work on national level.

Improving the Public School - reform of standards in the Danish public school (primary and lower secondary education)

In 2013 the public primary schools underwent the largest reform in many decades. The aim of the reform was to tackle some of the biggest challenges in primary education, such as too many students leaving school with poor academic results, especially children of parents with lower education. 

The three goals of the public school are:

• to challenge all students, so that they realise their full potential; 
• to reduce the influence of social background on academic results; 
• to ensure that trust in the school and student well-being are enhanced through respect for professional knowledge and practice. 

The role of parents in schools is emphasised in the reform giving the school board the task to make principles for involving parents more in the home-school cooperation. 

The reform is still being implemented, and the implementation is difficult due to challenges with financing, inclusion, changes in school structures in many municipalities, and the after waves of the lock out of teachers in 2013.

More information about the reform here. 

Playful learning rocks – Let’s enter PlayFutures together

21st century skills

This year’s LEGO Idea Conference highlighted the most important issues around quality education by revisiting two world famous oldies: Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven and Give P’s a Chance (sic!) by John Lennon. While the former relates to PISA results and equitable education systems, the latter refer to the 4 P’s of a quality learning experience (projects, passion, play and peers). The event was also the opportunity to launch the new PlayFutures network aiming at creating a world that values playful learning, and EPA is a partner in. The conference has come up with a ‘simple’ recipe for education reform: putting children in the centre of change and making them feel it is good for them.

Learning Participation - new position paper published by Lifelong Learning Platform

The Lifelong Learning Platform (former EUCIS-LLL) has published a brand new position paper on learning participation.  The paper covers a large number of topics for improving quality, access and outreach. EPA contributed to the position paper substantially as it is a hot topic for parents in Europe.

The paper starts by urging the acknowledgement of learner diversity and the importance of having a well-being focus, covering individualised approaches to teaching as well as learning environments and curriculum design. Increasing collaboration as a tool for increasing attainment is also elaborated on. The position paper revisits the important topics of transversal skills and digital literacy and urges the promotion of successful outreach strategies to raise awareness of participation in all stages of lifelong learning.

As the platform shares the holistic approach to education with EPA, details are also dealt with this approach. A comprehensive tackling of learning participation needs a holistic view including all learners, all educators (parents among them), and a change in the role of educational institutions.

New EU policy recommendations on transforming schools focus on parental involvement and child participation

On 7-8 March a conference in Brussels discussed the results of the ET2020 Working Group on Schools Policy – an expert group of policymakers and stakeholders from more than 30 European countries. The Group’s work over the last two years had focused on identifying successful policy approaches to reducing early school leaving and to raising the quality of Initial Teacher Education. The set of new policy recommendations focus very much on parental involvement and child participation, as well as preparing professionals for this. EPA was represented by Eszter Salamon, President, who was invited to participate at the closing plenary round table discussion, together with representatives of other stakeholder groups, of the event.

Parents concerns about the Skill Agenda

On 14^th March the European Commission is holding a consultation with representatives of civil society. There has been a background paper issued on the Skills Agenda that will be discussed at the meeting. As those organisations that are not Brussels based are not financially supported by the Commission to participate at the meeting, the European Parents’ Association (EPA) has compiled a position paper instead to express our concerns. We keep demanding that there must be an obligation for EU institutions as well as national governments and other decision makers to involve those most directly concerned, namely children, young people and their parents when preparing national skills strategies, action plans, and last but not least in the activities connected to the European Semester and in its annual review.

Our greatest concern is that the holistic approach to education and the network of education institutions is missing, thus it does not tackle the fact that it is schools (primary, secondary and VET) that are the cheapest and most hands on places to support the skills development for local communities, but only if education segments cooperate and manage to change the face of schools, which means to open them up to all locals as community learning spaces. Successful projects all over Europe show that this is the right approach, but it need a very strong collaboration and an even stronger political will to rejuvenate systems that have been in place for 150-200 years. As there has been a huge emphasis on higher education in EU policies, we applaud to the approach that highlights vocational education and adult education as at least equally important policy areas. Parents have been concerned that pushing higher education attainment instead of giving equal support and promotion to other forms of tertiary education may not be the real solution for youth unemployment.