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AGENCY eBULLETIN July 2016
In 2016 the Agency is celebrating its 20th anniversary. For two decades the Agency website has been an ever growing source of information in the field of inclusive education. This summer an open call for tender was published, aiming to re-develop the website and continue providing information to all those interested in the field in the most useful way.
This issue of the eBulletin presents a new three-year project: the Financing Policies for Inclusive Education Systems. It also includes updates on the Agency’s Inclusive Early Childhood Education Project, which has reached its half way stage, and other Agency activities, such as the audit in Iceland or thematic sessions on newcomer and/or refugee pupils. The articles below contain information on new Agency materials, such as the Empowering Teachers reports, the Financing of Inclusive Education Background Information report and the Delegates’ Reflections and Proposals from the Agency’s Hearing in Luxembourg.
Read more about these topics below and follow Agency news on our website.
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Call for Tender for the Provision of Web Hosting and Web Development Services
The European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education is an independent organisation that acts as a platform for collaboration for its member countries in the field of education. Its mission is to help member countries improve the quality and effectiveness of their inclusive provision for all learners.
Providing information in ways that allow web users to access content on an equal basis with others is a crucial aspect of inclusion in education – and in society in general. The Agency’s website www.european-agency.org has been a model of accessibility and this is a priority in the present procurement process.
The Agency is looking for a partner to:
- Re-develop the Agency public website and intranet
- Host the Agency public website and intranet
- Provide continuous support in developing new website tools and databases.
Tenderers who wish to be considered for this work must be able to demonstrate their range of experience in website development. Specifically, they should be able to prove their experience in accompanying customers in the process of further developing their websites. Most importantly, they should demonstrate their understanding of and ability to implement accessibility and usability standards and maintain a high level of practical accessibility.
The deadline for receipt of expressions of interest is 20 September, 2016. Formal expressions of interest should be emailed to ict@european-agency.org by 20 September 2016.
DOWNLOAD THE FULL CALL FOR TENDER HERE.
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Financing Policies for Inclusive Education Systems
In 2015, the Agency was awarded a European Commission grant to conduct a three-year project to explore the financing of inclusive education. The Financing Policies for Inclusive Education Systems (FPIES) partnership project will run from 2016 to 2018.
This new Agency project aims to identify coherent financing mechanisms for inclusive education, examine how they operate and assess what critical levers impact upon the effectiveness of funding policy mechanisms to reduce disparities in learning outcomes affecting learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. Project activities will involve work with policy-makers for inclusive education in the 29 Agency member countries and a series of detailed case studies examining different educational funding approaches.
The project is funded by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Key Action 3 ‘Forward-Looking Cooperation Projects’ framework.
FPIES is based on direct co-operation between eight partners: the ministries of education in Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Slovenia, the Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, and the Agency.
Scoping Meeting and Country Study Visits
In March 2016, ministry representatives from the Agency’s 29 member countries met at a Scoping Meeting in Brussels to identify their specific priorities for detailed examination in FPIES. Through plenary discussions and detailed group work, the ministry representatives identified key factors to be improved in inclusive education, key questions to investigate in FPIES and the types of outputs that would best support their future policy development work.
The outcomes and proposals from the Scoping Meeting are now being used to develop the project’s conceptual framework.
Starting in late 2016 and throughout the spring of 2017, each of the six partner countries will host a Country Study Visit. The visits will examine the countries’ financing of their inclusive education systems through discussions with key policy-makers and national stakeholders as well as representatives from the project partners, using a peer-review approach.
More information on the FPIES project can be found on the project web area or on the European Commission’s dedicated project area.
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Inclusive Early Childhood Education at Halfway Stage
The Agency’s Inclusive Early Childhood Education Project (IECE) has reached the half way stage not only in time, but also in its development. The project running between 2015 and 2017 has set out to meet the following aim: ‘to identify, analyse and subsequently promote the main characteristics of quality inclusive pre-primary education for all pupils from three years old to the start of primary education’.
Starting off with the production of a draft literature review, the project work now is focussing on processing country questionnaires which will provide a state of the art account of the situation in the EU regarding national policy and practice in IECE.
Twenty-seven participating countries offered a number of proposals of good examples of IECE in practice, eight of which were selected for a study visit within the framework of the project. Six visits have already been carried out, with the remaining two planned for October and November this year.
A qualitative analysis of the example descriptions is now under way and has already provided interesting practice evidence of a number of main issues that are important in inclusive ECE settings, such as:
- adopting a rights-based approach to IECE,
- ensuring mainstream access for all,
- ensuring each child’s active participation,
- adopting a child-centred pedagogy focused on child strengths,
- ensuring quality provision and promoting collaboration.
While developing the country questionnaire and visit procedures, the Project Advisory Group also developed a ‘self-assessment tool’ that practitioners can use, consisting of sets of questions about the inclusivity of the ECE environment that focus on a welcoming climate, an inclusive social environment, child-friendly physical environment, materials for all children, language use, child-centred learning and teaching, and a family-friendly environment. This set of questions is being used as an observation tool during the visits and will be eventually developed into a self-assessment tool that the Agency will make available on its website.
All the information collected in the lifetime of the project will be combined into a synthesis report expected to support policy makers and practitioners at local, national and European levels in the promotion to IECE provisions that will ensure the necessary strong start for all children, irrespective of their family background or individual characteristics. The project will particularly highlight how ECE settings can be truly inclusive by building their capacity to educate all the children in the community with the backing of national policy and investment in this highly influential area of education.
Visit the project web area for more information and updates on the IECE project.
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Financing of Inclusive Education
The financing of inclusive education is a recognised priority at EU level and the European Commission has recently provided a lot of relevant information on the topic. Therefore, it is a topic of high interest for Agency member countries.
Within the Financing of Inclusive Education project, the Agency has been collecting information from member countries directly and via desk research, providing an update on the previous Agency financing study from 1999 and building on the findings of other Agency and international work.
This project directly supports and will inform ET 2020 strategic objective 2: improving the quality and efficiency of education and training, and objective 3: promoting equity, social cohesion and active citizenship.
Previous Agency projects, reports provided by member countries, as well as EU documents and other international organisations have been used as a starting point for developing a comprehensive Background Information Report of available research and policy information.
To support stakeholders to implement the principles of inclusive education, data analysis provides information on the ability of funding mechanisms to:
- Promote an approach prioritising the identification of institutional barriers at all levels, which takes individual needs into account by planning for a range of upfront responses (i.e. universal design) that ultimately benefits all learners.
- Promote a rights-based approach embedded in a change in an educational culture where, rather than focusing on individual support often based on a medical diagnosis, the system provides support to schools to increase their capability to respond to learners’ diverse needs without the need to categorise and label them.
- Ensure quality for all learners as part of an education system that is concerned with the principles of access, equity and social justice, democratic values and participation, and the development of cohesive communities that celebrate and value diversity.
- Develop all learners’ personality, talents and creativity as well as their mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential. Including learners with disabilities and/or special educational needs enable them to participate in education effectively.
The project’s synthesis report will build upon a literature review on financing of inclusive education and on country reports provided by 18 countries. Reports provided by countries focussed on the following six questions highlighted by the literature review:
- Does supplementary expenditure support inclusive education?
- Do funding mechanisms support inclusive education?
- Do modes of funding support capacity building of school staff?
- Do governance procedures support co-ordinated provision?
- Does financing of inclusive education support the right to education and social participation?
- Do monitoring and accountability mechanisms support effective and cost-effective inclusive education policies?
This synthesis report and the literature review will be available on the Agency website. For more information on this project, visit the project web area.
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Videos of the young people's impressions at the European Hearing
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Luxembourg Recommendations
What do seventy-two young people think the key to inclusive education is? On 16 October 2015, the Luxembourg Presidency of the Council of the European Union hosted the Agency’s fourth Hearing, entitled ‘Inclusive Education – Take Action!’. Young people from across Europe had the opportunity to discuss how their schools and communities ensure inclusive education for them. The ‘Delegates’ Reflections and Proposals’ report is based on the discussions of the seventy-two young people. Their recommendations expressed in Luxembourg have also been summarised in a flyer.
The event aimed to empower learners and ensure their involvement in shaping education policies. The 15/16-year-old learners from 28 Agency member countries presented how inclusive education is implemented in their schools and helped identifying progress in inclusive education since the first Hearing in 2003.
Several young people from previous Hearings were invited to the event to moderate the workshops. Former participants, Marina from Latvia and Elin from Sweden give a full account of what they observed during the workshops and how these events have affected their lives. Listen to their stories in the most recent videos on the Agency YouTube channel.
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Empowering Teachers:
A Project Undertaken by the Agency on Behalf of UNESCO
In the second half of 2015, the Agency worked on behalf of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to provide a suite of materials on empowering teachers. The results of this work have been summarised in three documents: a literature review, a case study and a methodology overview. A further output includes a re-designed Inclusive Education in Action website: Empowering Teachers: Empowering Learners. The site includes over 30 examples from all around the globe, focusing on teacher education and professional development.
Read more…
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Audit Fieldwork in Iceland
On 25–29 April a team of Agency staff and consultants conducted fieldwork in Iceland as part of the External Audit of the Icelandic system for Inclusive Education.
The Audit work is taking a standards-based approach. This follows a model that involves the definition of desired standards for the inclusive education system by stakeholders in Iceland and external data collection by the Agency audit team to examine current policy and practice against the identified standards.
The fieldwork week was one of the data collection activities within the Audit. The team conducted school visits, focus groups and one to one interviews in 5 regions of Iceland – Árborg, Akureyri, Borgarbyggð, Fljótsdalshérað and Reykjavik.
Read more…
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How Can Education Effectively Respond to Newcomer and/or Refugee Pupils?
“Posing the right questions may lead us to good answers. What are the challenges in education today in receiving newcomer children and families of migrants and refugees? What are the risks for fundamental rights we need to confront in view of the opportunities to seize and the benefits to reap?”
With these words Mr Miltos Pavlou, Senior Programme Manager of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, encouraged participants at the Agency’s thematic session to discuss the role of inclusive education in response to the migrant crises across Europe.
The thematic session took place in the context of the Agency’s biannual meeting in Amsterdam, the Netherlands on 25 May, and was organised by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands and the European Agency under the Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Read more …
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