Equal Chances
From 7th to 10th November Stredoškolská študentská únia Slovenska (SUS) gathered school students from all around the Slovak republic for an event called Equal Chances. Equal Chances was the second SUS event organised in English and it was amazing to see so many school students speaking about their rights, opportunities and problems in English.
This event was the second Equal Chances held in cooperation with OBESSU. One of the OBESSU Board Members, Daša Koribaničová, came to talk about OBESSU and other topics such as Vocational Education and Training (VET), school student rights, forms of participations, citizenship and many other topics.
The entire event revolved around two main topics: VET and the European Parliamentary elections 2014. We were inspired by the 4th OBESSUSummer School “Learn to Change” and throughout the whole event participants worked on these topics in two focus groups, where the participants had the possibility to have debates and Q&A´s, Most importantly, the facilitators of the focus groups had the time to dive deep into the topics and give the participants the most of it. The focus group on VET tackled the situation of the VET education in Slovakia and Europe, the biggest deficiencies and discussed about possible solutions.
The focus group on the EP elections mainly discussed about the voting activity of young people in Slovakia and lowering the age of voting to 16. The participants also gained some new knowledge about the European institutions. In the end of the event both focus groups presented their outcomes as projects so everyone could see what the others did.
We are happy to announce that ŠUS is now shaping a national VET campaign based mainly on the outcomes of the focus group as well as an event which we would like to link withthe OBESSU´s campaign “Claim your voice! Stand up for VET!”.
Besides the focus groups the participants could choose from many parallel workshops on various topics such as human rights, participation, active citizenship, citizenship education, multicultural Europe, democracy and 17th November (the International Day of Students). We played many games and had a debate night, movie night and a lot of fun together, just us usual.
It is always great to see that school students are not afraid to take action and move forward with regards to cooperation between VET & academic secondary education and the cooperation between various individuals in a team.
Written by Jana Šikorská, International Officer of SUS
