Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-15-Speech-1-077"
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"en.20010115.7.1-077"2
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"Mr President, today we are discussing a draft recommendation to the Member States on quality evaluation in education which may bring some worthwhile innovations to the working methods of the European Union and a project which has already made good progress at grass roots level. As far back as 1998, at a conference in Prague attended by 26 European countries, the national Ministers for Education agreed to implement a system of common indicators for their methods and results. First of all, they had to establish a common language and then compare results in order to share experiences, whilst leaving each Member State with full responsibility for its own education system.
We will find this an interesting initiative as much from the point of view of its motives as the method used. As regards motives, on the one hand, education is obviously a key factor in the age of the information and knowledge society, for both human development and economic competitiveness. We should, therefore, ensure that we get the most from the inevitably limited resources available to us. So we can only be surprised at the size of the gaps between the Member States of the European Union which are emerging, in particular, from the first set of statistics published by Eurostat last July.
For example, while the average level of public spending per pupil in secondary education in Europe is 100, Germany spends 84.9 and France 131.6. The difference is thus quite considerable. Moreover, it does not always work the same way and depends on the circumstances. That is why it is in all our interests to share our experiences.
The advantages of doing this seem particularly obvious in the case of France, which has a very inflexible education system that would benefit from being more responsive to the needs of the ‘education consumer’. However, it is difficult to carry out any reform precisely because of this inflexibility.
As regards the methodological issues, on the other hand, the new cooperation in evaluation of education systems could, in fact, lead the way to a new, wholly beneficial, method. It involves implementation of an open method of coordination, which has already been touched upon at the Lisbon European Council and which, if it were developed, could introduce a divide between working methods in Europe. It would not be a question of setting targets with a view to obligatory harmonisation. In any case, Articles 149 and 150 of the Treaty establishing the European Community do not give the Community competence in this area. It is simply a matter of together finding out the best practices, without
setting targets in precise detail beforehand and of allowing each country to draw their own conclusions.
This new method of coordination will create a networked Europe, which organises interaction between the various seats of power, i.e. the national Ministries of Education, rather than a centralised Europe. This networked coordination is more decentralised and flexible and more liberal than the standard harmonisation directive. In addition, it can easily extend beyond the Union’s borders to bring together 26 or more Member States, rather than 15. Mr President, we believe, for all these reasons, that this new and different method of cooperation seems to have great promise."@en1
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