Opzet van 'European schools' vernieuwd (en)

Vice-President Siim Kallas as European Commissioner in charge of European Schools and the 25 ministers of the Member States in charge of the same area met yesterday in the margins of the Education and Youth Council to discuss the European schools reform process [1].

This meeting followed on from the political initiative launched in May under the Dutch Presidency of the European Schools' Board of Governors to drive the debate forward on the future of a system created 50 years ago to provide high quality education for staff of the EU institutions.

Vice President Kallas, Dutch Minister of Education Mrs Maria Van der Hoeven in her quality as previous Chair of the Board of Governors and Mr Jorge Pedreira, Portuguese Deputy State Secretary currently chairing, declared at the end of the meeting that they shared the same conviction that " Status quo is clearly not an option: in the period from 1994 to 2007, the number of Member States will have increased from 12 to 27, the number of official languages from 9 to 22, the number of pupils in the schools from 15 300 to more than 20 500 and there is a constantly increasing number of agencies in the Member States. There has been a large consensus today on key ideas to enable the system to meet the challenges of an enlarged EU ".

Towards a more diversified European schooling system based on a common curriculum to deliver the European baccalaureate

In the course of this orientation meeting, a large majority of EU ministers and the Commission agreed on the need for a more flexible concept of the European school system, which could be applied in the future to three types of schools: the existing classical European schools[2]; the national or international schools providing European education to the children of EU staff in locations where European agencies are about to be founded and that could be entitled to offer the European baccalaureate; and a third type where a Member State decides to take such an initiative independently of the existence of a EU agency or institution.

A strengthened governance

The participants to the meeting also largely agreed on the need for a reform of the governance aspects aimed to give greater autonomy to the schools balanced with greater accountability in pedagogical issues and in aspects of management and finance.

Next steps ahead

As a result of the meeting, the following political orientations were defined :

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  for all European schools established or to be established next to EU agencies or equivalent bodies, costs should be mainly born by the host country, but the Commission should be required to pay a contribution out of the EU budget which would have to be proportional to the number of EU staff children attending such schools
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  on the issue of fairer cost-sharing among Member States, notably as far as the detachment of mother-tongue teachers is concerned discussion needs to be pursued
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  the launching in 2007 of a pilot project aimed to open up the European Schools educational model to schools all over the EU. The idea is to promote the spreading of the European Baccalaureate to any school which complies with the requirements set by the European Schooling system regarding pedagogical targets[3].

These issues will now be further examined and discussed within the regular framework of the Board of Governors of the European Schools.