Brussels, 16 May 2023

Our two policy events featured at the Lifelong Learning Week 2022

In the week of the 28th of November to the 2nd of December 2022, the Lifelong Learning Platform provided space and visibility for its members to connect with the policy makers in Brussels. ECSWE took this opportunity and organised two events.

Educational pluralism and public funding of education go hand-in-hand

The free­dom of par­ents to choose the pre­ferred edu­ca­tion­al approach for their chil­dren, is in many Euro­pean coun­tries pre­vent­ed by inad­e­quate pub­lic fund­ing. This often forces schools to charge sig­nif­i­cant school fees which in turn makes these schools only acces­si­ble to a select­ed num­ber of fam­i­lies, and pre­vents edu­ca­tion­al pluralism.

The analy­sis of this issue was at the heart of the pol­i­cy event on the 29th of Novem­ber, which we organ­ised in coop­er­a­tion with the Euro­pean Coun­cil of Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tions of Inde­pen­dent Schools and with OIDEL. Dur­ing the event, a mes­sage of sup­port for achiev­ing more edu­ca­tion­al plu­ral­ism came from MEP Isabel Ben­jumea (EPP).

MEP Victor Negrescu hosted our event on digital media education

As the ini­tia­tor of the Par­lia­men­t’s 2021 report on Shap­ing dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy, MEP Negres­cu (S&D) showed his appre­ci­a­tion for our advo­ca­cy for an age-appro­pri­ate media edu­ca­tion by host­ing our event on Media Matu­ri­ty and How to Build It. The event took place on the 30th of Novem­ber in Brus­sels, and was co-organ­ised with our part­ners from the Alliance for Child­hood, on whose behalf Cristo­pher Cloud­er did the mod­er­a­tion. The event was also attend­ed by a del­e­ga­tion from the Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion Unit of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion on whose behalf Simona Petko­va gave a reflec­tive speech at the end of the event.

What were the key messages? Take a look here:

Media maturity as the goal of digital media education

The keynote speech was deliv­ered by Prof. Dr Paula Bleck­mann from the Alanus Uni­ver­si­ty, who pre­sent­ed the find­ings of her 2022 Ger­man-wide MünDig study. The study cov­ers media edu­ca­tion prac­tices in alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion­al set­tings, includ­ing Stein­er Wal­dorf schools and kinder­gartens. Accord­ing to the study, teach­ers are start­ing to build media matu­ri­ty from a young age by intro­duc­ing ana­logue media tools, and only after mas­ter­ing ana­logue tech­niques are the pupils intro­duced to dig­i­tal media tools.

Már­ti Domokos pro­ceed­ed with pre­sent­ing the aims of the HERMMES project that is based on the need for the whole school com­mu­ni­ty approach to media edu­ca­tion, includ­ing par­ents. Arja Krauchen­berg from the Euro­pean Par­ents’ Asso­ci­a­tion stressed the need for in-per­son teach­ing, active involve­ment of par­ents and the cru­cial role of teach­ers in build­ing media maturity.

Further reading