Inspiring school leaders

The Inspriring School Leaders Confernece was held in Cambridge University's St. John's College on 22-24 September 2017. EPA was offered the opportunity to inspire school leaders from all over the world to engage parents for a 21st century school system.

What are young children telling us? - Think about school segregation from a totally different angle

The Serbian member of EPA, Pomoc Deci organised a very interesting event in Belgrade in the middle of September 2016 with participants from Balkan countries, Albania, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro as well as Northern Ireland. While the event had an early childhood focus, EPA was offered the opportunity to give our views on parental involvement and child participation with special focus on peace-building, as well as to hold a totally interactive workshop on active European citizenship on school level. This was also a great opportunity to pilot our ELICIT+ training material in an exciting context, the Balkans.

The most interesting presentation of the event was by Prof. Bojana Breneselovic from Belgrade University. The title of the conference was borrowed from her, and she made us change lenses and see segregation from a totally different angle. After listening to the presentation, you are likely to have realised that the younger your child is, the more likely it is they go to a segregated school. But to prove that, you need to understand what segregation really means according to the Oxford English Dictionary ‘the action or state of setting someone or something apart from others’.

Why are parents important? - Ask your teacher and publish the video on #ParentsAndSchools Day

On the second Tuesday of October, this year on 11 October, Europe celebrates the European Day of Parents and Schools since 2002. Initiated by the European Parents’ Association (EPA), this day is used to highlight the importance of parents and teachers working together for the benefit of children by parents’ organisations, often supported by their respective national Ministries of Education.

Parents’ associations gathered together in EPA want to use the occasion of #ParentsAndSchools Day to promote and advocate for the implementation of new policy messages by the European Commission published earlier this year on transforming schools to make them more attractive for students and families alike in order to achieve the EU2020 headline target of reducing early school leaving. These recommendations fundamentally build on the school community, parents, teachers and students taking ownership of learning by actively participating in transforming the school to meet the needs of today’s children as well as preparing them for the challenges of the 21^st century.

Seeds for Integration

A new initiative by OBESSU to build bridges between migrant children and their peers in secondary schools

New large-scale programmes are being developed and carried out to support migrants' inclusion by a group of EU-level organisations, EPA being one of them. One of the partners, OBESSU, in order to encourage building bridges between migrant children and their peers in secondary schools, decided to launch the project Seeds for Integration. The main idea is to provide small, medium and large seed-grants to secondary school student unions and councils, or - in case there is no student council in the school - to independent groups representing the school’s students, to come up with creative initiatives around the topic of educational inclusion of migrant and refugee children. Read on to learn more about the initiative, and inform secondary school students who would be interested in it.

We will share information on all other projects, including our own, in this cooperation, made possible with the financial support of Open Society Foundation. Follow the EPA blog for new initiatives.

Fragmented notes brought home from the Fundamental Rights Forum

The EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) organised the first European Fundamental Rights Forum in Vienna on 20-23 June 2016. The event brought together about 700 people from and beyond Europe from policy, practice, governments, civil society, research, arts and several other fields. The organisers did the huge job of discussing the issues of inclusion, the refugee crisis and digital challenges on a human rights basis by providing the organisers with an enormous amount of food for thought as well as opportunities for networking and discussion.

The following paragraphs are not intended to be a full report, but rather a collection of a few thoughts and issues that echoed in me as president of EPA, vice president of the Lifelong Learning and Social Platforms, as a child rights activist for over 25 years, as an apt reader, a Hungarian and a mother. It is unusual for this blog, but I hope they will also resonate with the readers, and given the richness of the programme I couldn’t find any other ways to make a report.

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’ contribution to the European public consultation on ‘challenges of work-life balance’

The European Commission launched a public consultation on a roadmap on ‘possible action to address the challenges of work-life balance faced by working parents and caregivers’. The roadmap openly declares that “the main reason behind the initiative is to address the low participation of women in the labour market by modernising and adapting the current EU legal and policy framework to today's labour market”. On behalf of European parents, EPA as a registered lobby organisation contributed to the public consultation emphasising that issues of reconciliation parents are facing are much broader than measures pushing women to participate at the labour market. First of all, it is important for us to demand the use of another phrase ‘work-life balance’ as it suggests that work is not part of life while it is.

Parents’ duties after Paris

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

Europe and many other parts of the world are shocked by the terror attacks last Friday, taking the lives of innocents in the name of extremist insanity. Our hearts are broken, like everybody else’s, and we also feel responsible for supporting our children in coping with the situation. We, parents are responsible for the safety, but also for the comfort and happiness of our children, and we are all aware that you cannot live a happy life being afraid. Thus we have to do our best to be vigilant, but at the same time provide our children circumstances that offer the possibility of a happy childhood, also ease their anxiety caused by the events rather than increasing it.