Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Progress for the ESF Education Network

by Richard Hatcher  |  Socialist Resistance no36  |  page 18-19

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

The 4th ESF saw further progress for the ESF Education Network. It organised 8 'seminars' (ESF-speak for big meetings), with speakers from major educational unions (some of them representing higher education as well as the primary and secondary sectors) from France, Spain, Catalunya, Italy, Germany, Turkey and Greece, from the student movement, particularly trom Austria, France and Spain, from popular organisations in Italy and from educational movements in eastern Europe, especially Russia.

There was widespread agreement on the convergence of education policies in Europe and on the key planks of our opposition. A weakness was the absence of teachers' unions from Britain, though Birmingham NUT was represented and Christine Blower, NUT deputy general secretary, was there in an official capacity - perhaps a first step towards future NUT participation.

The seminar series closed with an Education Assembly which discussed strategic and organisational questions facing the movement. It took three important decisions:

• to support a Week of Action in the third week of November, including a Day of Action initiated by the student movement on November 17;

• to liaise with the newlyformed Public Services network, focusing not only on the week of action, but on protest against the EU's forthcoming Bolkestein directive on free trade in services, and on the possibility of organising a European Public Services Forum in 2007;

• to strengthen the network itself with an electronic newsletter or, preferably, a website.

What can activists in the NUT, the University and College Union (the merger of NATFHE and the AUT), and the other education unions in Britain do?

Continue trying to commit the unions to participating in the ESF Education Network; commit the unions and their local associations, to the Week of Action (actions can include public meetings, press statements etc - and a national conference is under discussion) and other cross-European initiatives; m

Make European solidarity concrete - through exchange of speakers and support for initiatives such as Education for Everybody in Russia.

For further information contact [email protected] Athens European Social Forum