Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-12-Speech-3-185"
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"en.20051012.17.3-185"2
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".
Mr President, this report is full of good suggestions, and I hope that as many as possible of them will be put into practice. There are just two aspects that I want to highlight – one is vocational training and the other is mobility.
Let me start with vocational training, and a brief account of an experience I had. An Italian policy-maker in the educational field was boasting to me about how his region produced more people with advanced school-leaving certificates than any other, so I asked him two questions – firstly, what all these people do with their qualifications, and secondly whether it was difficult to find tradesmen if, for example, you had something wrong with the wiring at home. Yes, he told me, both these things were major problems; many of these people were out of work or spending years ‘out of the action’ at university, and practical people, people who were skilled with their hands, were hard to come by in his part of the world. That is an example of the wrong-headed education policy that is pursued in many parts of Europe, where vocational training is seriously neglected, with the consequence that there are lots of young people out of work at the same time that there is a serious lack of skilled workers.
Secondly, there is mobility; it is a matter of complaint that only 1.5% of Europe’s workers are resident in a Member State other than their own. One very useful means of training them and updating their training would be for them to serve as apprentices and journeymen, a practice that goes back to the Middle Ages and should be revived. Socrates and Erasmus have injected life into Europe’s schools and universities with splendid success. Apprentices and vocational trainees, young professionals and people undergoing practical training still need much more to be done to get them on the move.
When, though, we see how negligently and half-heartedly the Commission has been preparing itself for 2006, the European Year of Mobility, and knowing as we do how much effort has been required on the part of the Committee on Budgets, and how difficult it has been, over the past few days, to extract even a mere EUR 4 million for this special initiative, it is clear that something is wrong here. No real initiative is in sight, unfortunately."@en1
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