Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-12-Speech-3-178"
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"en.20051012.17.3-178"2
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".
Mr President, I would like firstly to remind you briefly of the context in which I have drawn up this report, then to tell you about the six priorities that have guided me in producing it, and then lastly to draw your attention to six key proposals contained in it.
Finally, sixthly, this report alerts the Member States to the need to implement, without delay, more consistent national training policies aimed at improving the conditions for access by job-seekers and workers.
Finally, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that we are at a crucial time for the European Union. Recent political events have alerted us to the need to place citizens’ education and the fight against unemployment at the heart of all of our public policies. We will not have a competitive economy unless we have an adequate and competitive education and training system. Furthermore, and I say this clearly both to you and to our colleagues in the Commission and the Council, unless an appropriate budget is allocated to education at European level, there will never be any real European citizenship and it will still be just as difficult for the twenty-five countries to agree on a common European project that they can pursue together.
I am therefore counting on your support so that we can send a strong message to the Member States that they must urgently put education back at the heart of the Lisbon Strategy.
With regard to the context, I must point out that this report is intended to alert the Council to the European Union’s delays in implementing the Lisbon Strategy in the field of education and training. As you know, ladies and gentlemen, the Spring European Council of 22 and 23 March 2005 set the objective of making the European area of education and training a reality. However, the Member States must move on from great declarations to concrete measures. This report therefore defines the priority fields of action.
In a very recent working document dedicated to the progress made in the achievement of the Lisbon objectives in the fields of education and training, published on 11 April 2005, the Commission services have analysed the performances of thirty education and training systems. On the basis of the analysis of the very precise data available in this document, I would like to comment on the six priority fields in which I believe the Member States must act urgently, if we want education to keep its place at the heart of the Lisbon process.
These six priorities, which I have already listed within the Committee on Culture and Education, are the following: to reduce the high number of young people leaving school early; to tackle the need for a sufficient number of scientists; to implement lifelong education and training strategies that are consistent and that promote social inclusion; to attract more than one million people to the teaching profession over the next decade; to tackle the fact that most pupils in the European Union do not achieve the objective of learning at least two foreign languages; and, finally, to strengthen the open method of coordination and the exchange of good practice in the field of education and training. On the basis of these six priorities, therefore, and of the comments of my colleagues within the Committee on Culture, I would now like to draw your attention to six proposals which appear in this report.
First of all, with the aim of developing skills in keeping with the needs of a knowledge-based society, it would appear vital that the Member States quickly take initiatives to, on the one hand, speed up the mobility of students, trainees, workers and their families and researchers and, on the other, to develop social inclusion policies for underprivileged young people afflicted by poverty.
Secondly, this report urges the Commission and the Member States to encourage guidance for young people into technical courses of study with potential for jobs and integration. In this regard, I feel that it would be useful for us to propose that the European Union launch an information campaign to promote high-quality technical trades among young people in order thereby to remedy their often negative social image.
Thirdly, the report stresses the need for our Parliament to indicate its support for the initiative of a pilot project aimed at creating an Erasmus-type programme for apprentices in order to facilitate access by apprentices to ‘new generation’ Community education and training programmes.
Fourthly, within the framework of the budgetary debate, I feel it would be useful also to point to the need for the European Union to guarantee sufficient methods of funding for the new integrated action programme in the field of lifelong education and training. We must also ensure that the European Social Fund continues to be available after 2006 in all the Member States of the European Union.
Fifthly, the report calls on the Council to provide for an appropriate budgetary allocation in the next financial perspective for all measures relating to lifelong education and training, on which attainment of the objectives of the Lisbon Strategy will largely depend."@en1
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