Education in Crisis – how does it affect?

Education in Europe is facing a historical crisis. The effects of the austerity policies and regressive measures are affecting negatively the majority of European educational systems. Although the financial and economic crisis hit the European economies more than five years ago, in the national education system the long term effects through budget cuts are now threatening education in the whole continent.

Budget cuts and regressive measures, that are surprisingly common in the majority of European countries, are in the first place damaging school students. This major awareness brought OBESSU to conceptualise and implement the event “Education in Crisis” that took place in Rome from the 5th to 10th June 2014.

The event served as a space for discussion and confrontation for the OBESSU Member and Candidate organisations regarding the educational crisis that Europe is facing today. The conference was organised in cooperation with Unione degli Studenti (UdS) – Italy, the Italian Youth Council Forum Nazionale Giovani, the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe and the Italian Ministry of Education.

Around fifty school student activists from all over Europe took part in the event. The first step of the six-day event consisted in defining the key concepts, such as “crisis”, “austerity”, “commodification of education” etc., in order to create a common ground among the participants. The same exercise was done concerning the stakeholders involved in education. Enough time of the conference was dedicated to mapping the alarming trends in the different European countries, during which the participants prepared infographics and posters showing their national realities and discussed the differences and similarities. This revealed common patterns among the various countries.

Cuts in budgets and in school staff are usually the most visible effects of the crisis on education. However, many other side effects that are connected to the crisis, in one way or another, exist. These are for example decreased participation in schools and in student unions, the rise of right-wing hate and populism, the spread of standardised evaluation and the mania of measuring education as well as the enormous step backwards when it comes to ensuring students their rights. These issues were tackled with smaller workshops that helped deepen the knowledge on these specific aspects of the effects.

One of the objectives of Education in Crisis was to connect school students with relevant stakeholders in education. This happened through three input sessions: Antonia Wulff from Education International presented the work her organisation is planning to do on the topic, in particular concerning the POST-2015 global development agenda; similarly the European Student Union contributed to Education in Crisis with Fernando Galan who reacted on various overlapping issues between secondary and higher education. Finally a round table with a special focus on Italy took place during the event and brought together the views of the Italian ministry of Education, the Italian Youth Council and the school students.

The last part of the event was dedicated to the outcomes. The first step was to revise the policy paper “Education in Crisis” adopted at the last OBESSU General Assembly by proposing changes and extensions to the already existing demands.

Eventually, from a the theoretical political analysis the focus shifted to a more practical moment: participants were asked to brainstorm 5 concrete steps that OBESSU and our Member and Candidate organisations could take in order to achieve each of the demands in the policy paper. Similarly, the organisations reflected around what they can do in their home countries and organisations, resulting in creating to-do lists for themselves to bring back home.