On 17 and 18 June I joined the important Agency project kick-off meeting on Raising the Achievement of All Learners in Inclusive Education in Athens as an event within the framework of the Greek Presidency. The participants were school leaders and researchers from our member countries and they discussed the content and design of the 3-year project that focuses on bringing together these two communities who are usually not in direct contact.
The goal of this project will be to implement recent research findings in the fields of pedagogy, ICT and leadership into educational practice. The conference started with contributions from the European Commission, the Greek Presidency (Ministry of Education), professor Bengt Persson from the University of Borås, Sweden and Dan Habib, from the University of New Hampshire, USA. Dan Habib's work (famous for his movie 'Including Samuel') has significant implications for the work the Agency will undertake in this project. The findings of the SWIFT-project (SchoolWide Integrated Framework for Transformation) were presented to the audience and he argued that the combination of achieving excellence and equity can go hand in hand (see the website http://www.swiftschools.org/).
This is exactly the focus of our Agency project. We strongly believe that the wish for a more inclusive educational policy and practice does not conflict with the overall ambition to increase educational achievement for all pupils. On the contrary, equity and achieving excellence facilitate and boost each other! In this project we will demonstrate that there is evidence that the improvement of educational practices from the perspective of inclusion will also lead to an increase of achievement.
This focus on the 'How' side of the inclusion debate (as opposed to the discussions about the 'What' and 'Why' questions in relation to inclusion) is completely in line with the aim of the Agency's new long term programme, which aims to provide evidence-based data on how inclusive education is best implemented.
I hope to inform you regularly about the progress of our work on this area.
Cor J.W. Meijer
Agency Director