Right to Education: Freedom of choice

The exercise of such freedom and such right, materialized accordingly to national laws, is plural and diverse.

Following the fruitful ECNAIS seminar about How to avoid the unification of diversity? in Vienna in November 2014, and just before the winter break, let me inform you about preparations for the very beginning coming year.

We are very pleased to confirm our previous announcement and to formally invite you to a round table to be held at the European Parliament, in Brussels, on the 27th January.

You can find the programme attached and to register, please fill the form until the 10th January the latest. This form will be necessary in order to provide a credential necessary to enter the building and the meeting room.

The reason of this initiative is twofold. On one hand, we are committed to celebrate school choice on a European level, inspired by the ‘School Choice Week’.

On the other hand, it is time for civil society organizations’ to bring into the public debate freedom of choice as a fundamental value of our democratic societies andinform the recently elected European Parliament, specially its Committee for Culture, and the newly invested Commissioner.

In order to prepare the round table and to present the wider variety of organizations representing independent education, we prepared a short survey . We kindly ask you to answer until the 12th January.

The ECNAIS’ executives prepared a statement on behalf of ECNAIS under the title: Right to Education: Freedom of Choice to be delivered to the EP and its Committee for Culture and Education in order to inform these arenas of the relevance and the role of independent education.

On behalf of ECNAIS’ executives, we wish you best Season’s Greetings.

Sofia Reis,
Secretary-general of ECNAIS

Programme

Tuesday 27 January 2015
10.00	Opening Nuno Melo Simon Steen – ECNAIS Chairman
10.15 – 11.15	Round table One participant from each organization/country mirroring their own situation regarding right to education and freedom of choice. To structure this part of the program a coherent scheme of relevant data showing a good overview of the actual situation and future orientated initiatives of the independent school sector in different countries in Europe will be made available by ECNAIS. Followed by dialogue with EU MP’s and members of the Committee for Culture and Education of the EU Parliament.
11.15	Closure General statement to be sent to the Commissioner.
11.30	Visit to the Parliament

Photo by igrigorik – Licence Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)