Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-24-Speech-1-059"
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"en.20051024.14.1-059"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I am glad that the programme exists in its present form, having been influenced by all the experience we have had with the Socrates programme over the past ten years, and with the attempt having been made to avoid the old mistakes and go down new paths. Even so, as there are, proverbially, many roads that lead to Rome, this House has included even more new approaches, and we should try to take a good look at all of them at least once.
Let me explain, for the sake of completeness, what sub-programmes we are dealing with here: the programme has to do, overall, with general and vocational education, and it is a good thing that vocational education is now included. The programme enables everyone to take part in educational programmes virtually from the cradle to the grave.
The first programme open to all is ‘Comenius’. It is aimed at those who have to attend school in any case; to those for whom school attendance is mandatory, it gives the opportunity to discover at an early age what is meant by cultural differences, or a common approach, to particular issues in different countries.
Next comes the Erasmus programme, which gives these pupils the opportunity, once they have become students, to spend part of their course in another European country and to take their achievements there back home with them. Running in parallel to that is the Leonardo programme, which enables apprentices and trainees to complete part of their training in the form of a work placement in another European country.
The fourth programme, ‘Grundtvig’, deals with the education of adults, and the fifth, named after Jean Monnet, provides support. This involves the celebrated institutions to which you referred, and to which we want to add two more. I hope that Parliament will agree to this. We do, however, want to continue to support the Jean Monnet chairs and all those things for which your programme already makes provision.
There are also the horizontal programmes in support of these activities, which overlap with the sectoral programmes that have already been mentioned, particularly in the development of material for language learning
learning and the dissemination of best practice in general and vocational education at national, regional and local level. We have made further improvements to your proposals and have, in particular, emphasised that the Comenius partnerships should enable one pupil in fifteen, rather than one in twenty, to spend a school year abroad, which would add up to a total of 6 million pupils in junior secondary school having the possibility of spending a year as guest students at a school in another EU country.
Together with my fellow-members of the Committee for Culture and Education, I have also ensured that teachers’ European awareness can be enhanced through the new Comenius Regio programme. We have also proposed that the Erasmus programme’s mobility grant, which has remained unchanged since 1993, should be increased, for EUR 150 is an insufficient sum of money with which to go and live and study in another country, and makes support from parents, grandparents and relatives indispensable. We should, however, be enabling all students to take part in an exchange of this kind, and so we suggest that the monthly grant should be increased by rather more than the Commission has suggested.
It is of course as important to me as it is to the Commission that there should be a decent reduction in the amount of red tape involved. Administrative and financial constraints on the award and payment of grants must be commensurate with the amount paid out.
Let me briefly consider the issue of finance. Only indicative figures have been given for the financial resources we are talking about today. Nobody knows how much we will have at our disposal after 2007; that is why the figures – the Commission’s, the Böge Committee’s and our own Committee’s – are no more than indications. We have to wait and see what we will get from the next Presidency of the Council, and so the Culture Committee has taken the liberty of going beyond the figures proposed by the Commission, and also a bit beyond those agreed by the Böge Committee. We should put down a marker; education and training are a vital part of the Lisbon process. We need them, and in order to have them we need more money than the national governments in the European Union are prepared to make available. Many thanks, Commissioner, for the work your staff have done!"@en1
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