OBESSU Welcomes European Parliament report

On the 9th of September the European Parliament approved a resolution on “Empowering girls through education in the EU”, also called the Rodrigues report.

The Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions (OBESSU) welcomes this report, which is a step forward towards the inclusion and the recognition of a strong gender imbalance in the education and labour field.

We, the school students of Europe, constantly call for inclusive education environments, free of discrimination of any kind, and we believe that acknowledging the diversity of our schools is the only way we can progress in making schools real laboratories of active citizenship and participation.

We endorse the report, above all when it comes to speaking of quality education and the need to invest in this sector. We cannot hope to create inclusive environments without starting from the need to finance education and teachers’ training on the topic of equality, anti-discrimination and gender sensitivity. We further welcome the statement that school students should be “participating in the democratic governance of their schools”; indeed this is an extremely important component in preparing school students for becoming active citizens in the future.

School students demand education and curricula shaped without gender stereotypes, gender roles which foresee girls in a particular position and guys in a different position. Moreover we acknowledge the need to exit the binary vision of our society, and we feel the need to include young people as humans and not as genders, and in order to achieve this vision we agree on the need to foresee sexual education in the formal school curricula.

We are worried by the amount of votes against this report and by the raising of many movements against the free expression of each individual in the school environment, as this leads to bullying and violence of many kinds. Schools are open spaces in our opinion, and we believe this report should be put in place to guarantee equality, inclusion, free expression and liberation of each and every student in Europe.

For more information, please contact the Board of OBESSU at board@obessu.org.

Download this reaction as a PDF here.