Greenwich, 21st — 23rd February 2020

Council meeting in London: Quality care was our focus topic
The key themes covered in this meeting: Quality care in English and European Waldorf settings, the situation of the English Waldorf movement and the follow-up to the celebratory Waldorf 100 year.

The main event of this meet­ing was the Con­fer­ence “Between Form and Free­dom – Teach­ing and Account­abil­i­ty”. It focused on the uni­ver­sal chal­lenge that appears between the oblig­a­tion to meet reg­u­la­to­ry require­ments and the need to ensure a dynam­ic and cre­ative cur­ricu­lum in Steiner/Waldorf schools. The for­mat com­prised keynote speech­es and work­shops explor­ing the sit­u­a­tion of the Eng­lish school move­ment, qual­i­ty care in Wal­dorf schools, plan­ning of the learn­ing process, for­ma­tive and sum­ma­tive assess­ment as well as cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment and expectations.

Meet­ing for the first time after the cel­e­bra­to­ry 2019, the ECSWE rep­re­sen­ta­tives joint­ly reviewed the Inter­na­tion­al Fes­ti­val on 100 Years Wal­dorf Edu­ca­tion in Berlin, from 19th Sep­tem­ber 2019 and the ECSWE Con­fer­ence on “The Art of Edu­ca­tion” in Brus­sels, 7th Novem­ber 2019. Small work­ing groups then deep­ened this work by eval­u­at­ing their nation­al activ­i­ties on Wal­dorf 100 and the var­i­ous impuls­es that had derived from the cel­e­bra­tion, both with­in Wal­dorf insti­tu­tions and in the public.

The meet­ing also fea­tured advo­ca­cy reports intro­duc­ing the ECSWE response to the UN con­sul­ta­tion on the Cul­tur­al Dimen­sion of the Right to Edu­ca­tion draft­ed by Dora Šimunović, the ECSWE con­tri­bu­tion to the EU Commission’s con­sul­ta­tion on the Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion Action Plan and the Work­ing pro­gramme of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion and the Croa­t­ion EU Coun­cil presidency.

Fur­ther­more, the board report­ed on its ideas for becom­ing a car­bon neu­tral organ­i­sa­tion, staff train­ing mea­sures and impor­tant changes in the next ECSWE bud­get with new bud­get lines sup­port­ing activ­i­ties in our main work­ing fields.

A question? Please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Georg Jürgens