Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-12-Speech-3-212"
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"en.20051012.19.3-212"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I should first like to thank the shadow rapporteurs who helped to put together this report. Their amendments enabled the text to reach plenary with a clear majority in the Committee on Culture and Education.
A further comment before I start: education policies fall under the exclusive responsibility of the Member States. This was not my decision but is enshrined in the Treaties currently in force. In any event, it is possible within the current rules to do more and much better to aid the integration of immigrant communities through our education systems. This is the purpose of the report before us.
Mr President, migratory flows, from both within and outside the Community, cannot be stopped, even if politicians would like it that way. Migration has in recent decades created new challenges in terms of identity. The worse the living conditions of the new communities and the poorer their level of integration, the harder it will be for them to overcome those challenges. What is more, unemployment in Europe has given rise to a feeling of insecurity among Muslim communities. There is little need to explain that the number of immigrants does not affect unemployment rates and that it is the immigrants who carry out the building work in which our nations take pride.
In a context of spiralling war and terrorism, considered, rational debate loses its teeth. We are living in times of demagogy, populism and fundamentalism, and it is, accordingly, the job of Europe and the Member States to pursue policies aimed at integration. Such policies are the only valid alternative to ghettoisation, on the one hand, and to attempts, on the other, at the forced assimilation of communities whose behaviour and customs differ from those in the host country.
The proposals in this report are thus based on a simple idea: everyone who lives in our societies – irrespective of colour, sex, language, creed or legal status – has the right to an education, a policy recognised in the corpus of decisions taken by the European institutions. Schooling systems are required to ensure that immigrants and their children learn not only the language of the host country but also their mother tongues. In 1977, a directive established this right for immigrants from within the Community. The time has now come to extend that right to communities arriving from other parts of the world.
Mr President, I shall now turn to good practice. The children of some Members of this House study in European schools created by the Union to facilitate the integration of its employees. The accent in these schools is placed on integrated learning of languages and content; the pupils think and study in both the language of the host country and their mother tongue. I believe that everyone is proud of this multilingual education, which prepares our children to approach the future without fear. This is the way it should be. Yet what we want for our children must not be a luxury for privileged immigrants, but, rather, the norm across the board for Europe’s education systems.
On a visit to Hamburg I was able to see how this system has been successfully applied to state schools. Nine primary schools have classes in which German children mix with children who have a different mother tongue. The teaching is conducted in both languages with two teachers per class. Five years on, immigrant parents make strenuous efforts to get their children into those classes, even if they live on the other side of the city. Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Turkish people have enjoyed the benefits of this pilot project, and it is bearing fruit. Although this teaching project cannot be implemented right across the board, and is not the last word in multilingual education, it does point the way forward. It is this view to the future that forms the basis of my report.
The third important proposal in this report is the creation of a European network of schools to which integrated language and content learning projects can apply to join. The problem is that bilateral agreements between Member States have to battle against swingeing budget cuts and even major shortages of political will. Providing for a budgetary appropriation in the ‘lifelong learning’ programme, specifically geared towards boosting the network, will stimulate interest and give added impetus to multilingual-based education. This is the least we can do!"@en1
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