The European Commission has published a Communication “School development and excellent
teaching for a great start in life” just 2 days before the
world celebrates the Global Day of Parents on 1 June. While the United Nations
dedicates International Days to and puts enormous effort in families, the
European Commission has taken a huge step backwards from its 2016 policy
messages on transforming schools to achieve the EU2020 headline target for
reducing early school leaving, and instead of acknowledging students
and parents as key change-makers, it focuses on trying to impose a system on
them, on us. Parents have been committed to offer the best possible education
to their children – as individuals and through their representative
organisations -, but being solely responsible for the education of their children
it is their, our minimum demand to be involved in decisions on how education
systems supporting us in our role as primary educators should be shaped for
better outcomes. We are committed to school development and excellent teaching,
ready to contribute to their development, but we, parents are the ones to
provide a great start in life. We are aware that some parents need support in
that, and have worked for parental empowerment. School development must go hand
in hand with parental empowerment, professionals and parents need to cooperate
to really serve our children. Investing in education must mean investing in
parents as much as it means investing in schools.
The Global Day
of Parents recognizes that ‘the family has the primary responsibility for the
nurturing and protection of children’, and also that ‘for the full and
harmonious development of their personality, children should grow up in a
family environment and in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding’.
For the UN ‘families remain at the centre of social life ensuring the
well-being of their members, educating and socializing children and youth and
caring for young and old’, and parents’ associations applaud this as the right
approach.
As compared to
this, the European Commission has just reinforced its wish to put children in
formal educational institutions, that means being away from their families,
spectacularly ignoring research results as well as the open and loud wish of
parents. A good start in life depends on the home environment most of all, thus
any attempt leaving parents’ empowerment and home-school cooperation out of the
equation is deemed to fail. While the document acknowledges that schools are
accountable to parents, the solutions offered seem to ignore this.
The Communication acknowledges that ‘schools
play a pivotal role in life-long learning’, but abandons previous approaches of
demanding for schools to open up and become learning communities, and rather
narrows the approach to saying that ‘action is needed to improve the quality
and performance of school education’. To further narrow down the approach, the
Communication offers to define quality and performance based again nearly exclusively
on PISA, totally forgetting about the role of stakeholders, especially the
people responsible for education of children, their parents, in defining them.
The Communication talks about ‘working
towards a shared commitment’. This, according to the document, is meant to be a
shared commitment of the EU and Member States, but in case there is no shared
commitment of policy makers and practitioners – be them professionals, like
teachers, or parents – Europe as a whole is on its way to fail its main targets
in education, as it happened with the Lisbon Goals. Parents’ associations
gathered in EPA represent 150 million European citizens, parents, who have
expressed their views on how education should be improved together. The EC
seemed to positively react on these wishes by their policy messages in 2016 and
other recent publications. We sincerely hope the current Communication will be
reconsidered by the EC, and will also be challenged by the European Parliament,
the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of
Regions it is addressed to, taking child rights, parents’ rights and parents’
associations demands into consideration.
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