N/A
Start date: Jan 1, 2014,
End date: Dec 31, 2014
PROJECT
FINISHED
The presented activities follow our 2013-2014 Work Plan, adopted by our member organisations at the General Assembly in May 2012 and slightly modified at subsequent statutory meetings. It follows the objectives defined in our Statutes and the political stands expressed in our Political Platform. All these documents have been drafted, discussed upon and adopted by our members, which guarantees a substantial amount of ownership in the work. Some of these activities (Education in Crisis, Right to Representation) will be quite big with 50-60 participants, while others will be smaller. Some of them are one-off activities while others (Working Groups, campaigns, external representations) cover the whole year. Target group The target group for most of our activities are school student representatives, most of them belonging to our member or candidate organisations. Being the only organisation representing school students on European level, we can contribute with perspectives on education which would be otherwise not brought up. For certain activities our reach goes beyond our members. In the local training sessions we will provide trainings for school student activists in Kosovo, Latvia and Czech Republic (only the latter is a candidate member of OBESSU); the Study Session will also reach out to activists from youth organisations working with LBTQ rights; the campaign for 17th November will also target higher education students (this will be a joint campaign with the European Students’ Union); the “Education, we have a problem!” campaign targets stakeholders in education more broadly (for a list of partners, see obessu.org/inclusionpartners); and the activities to be held at the European Youth Event target all the 8000 young people who will be in Strasbourg for the event. In general, our work also aims to address other organisations working in education, in order to make sure that we can contribute to the development and improvement of education policies in as many platforms as possible. ResultsThe results that we will get from our activities include the following: school students’ perspectives are taken into account for several very important policy discussions related to education (for example ESL, VET, social inclusion); school student representatives – and, by extension, thousands of school students at national level – are interested and learn about European-level educational policy; the European dimension of school student structure and representation is strengthened; school students all over Europe get informed in and participate in the European Parliament elections. In the long run our work also leads to concrete outcomes such as reduced early school leaving, a more inclusive educational environments and increased quality of VET and work-based learning. Methodology OBESSU’s events are always very participatory by nature. We typically have a prep team consisting of representatives from our member organisations together with at least one Board member and one member of Secretariat. (The Secretariat member is focused on the logistical aspects). All members of the network can apply to the prep team through an open call. Sometimes one of the prep team members comes from our Pool of Trainers, consisting of trainers/facilitators with more experience. All the activities follow the pattern of preparation-implementation-evaluation-follow-up, contributing to constant evaluation of the work as well as increasing the quality of activities