OBESSU’s 40th Birthday Celebration and General Assembly in Brussels!
From the 12th to the 14th June, OBESSU celebrated its 40th birthday and organised the General Assembly 2015 in Brussels.
On Friday 12th, OBESSU organised an event to celebrate its 40th Anniversary. European school student activists from different generations gathered in Elzenhof, a cultural centre near to the European district, to share some time, memories, to take a look a the past, with an eye on the future of education.
The celebration started with some welcoming words from the current Board of OBESSU and continued with a panel discussion with Anna Barbieri from the VET Unit of the European Commission, Paulo Santiago from OECD and Luke Shore, Board member of OBESSU. The panellists and the participants discussed and debated about the developments and upcoming challenges of education in the next years. OBESSU stressed the need to create an inclusive and learner-centred educational system and underlined the importance to ensure the active participation of school students in the decision-making processes within the schools and school communities.
One of the highlights of the party was the OBESSU quiz to get to know the history of OBESSU. For example, among other facts, we learned that Paolo, OBESSU Financial Manager, is the more long-lasting staff member of the Secretariat; that already in the ‘70s OBESSU held a Study Session in the European Youth Centre of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and that the Light on the Rights road-project visited 15 different countries. It was a very valuable opportunity to meet former and current members of OBESSU, to share nice memories, old stories but also current challenges and struggles regarding school student rights.
After the celebrations, Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th were fully dedicated to the General Assembly, the highest decision-making body of the platform. Delegates from almost all OBESSU Member, Candidate and Affiliate Organisations gathered to discuss the upcoming developments of the platform and, among other things, to elect new Board members, the Monitoring Committee and to vote on the admission of new School Student Organisations.
Representatives from all over Europe engaged in very interesting discussions on the main role of OBESSU, on the views of the platform and debated, for example, about the role of private education, evaluation tests such as PISA and student income.
Furthermore, the General Assembly 2015 saw several changes in the area of School Student Structure Development (SSSD). The Union Nationale des élèves et étudiant(e)s du Luxembourg (UNEL), the Česká středoškolská unie (CSU) together with the Consiliul Național al Elevilor (CNE) were accepted as full Members of OBESSU. The General Assembly also ratified the decision of the Board to accept the Bulgarian School Student Union (BSSU) as Candidate Organisation and SV-Bildungswerk (SVB) and the Kosovar Youth Council (KYC) as Affiliate Organisations. Welcome to the platform!
During the General Assembly there were elections to the Board and the Monitoring Committee. Laufey María Jóhannsdóttir and Rūta Meškauskaitė were elected as new Board members with a mandate of two years and Nora Kleibel, Elsa Lengeler and Sasa Pesic were re-elected as Monitoring Committee for another year. Congratulations to all of you! We also take this opportunity to thank all the other candidates for the motivation, enthusiasm and will to run for these positions.
Another important point of the agenda was the vote of trust to the Secretary General, Rasmus Aberg. After his mandate the Board proposed to extend his contract for two more years and the GA approved this decision unanimously.
We would like to thank everyone for the active involvement during the birthday party and the General Assembly, for sharing good memories, for being active during the discussions and for being such a motivated group of activists fighting for school students rights every day!
Pictures from the 40th anniversary celebration and the General Assembly can be found on the OBESSU Facebook page.
