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Conference Report 

 

 

The 11th ESC was held in Vienna (Austria) and organised for ESIB by ÖH. At the European Council (ie the heads of state and government of the member states) in Lisbon in March 2000, the heads of state and government of the member states decided the following overall goal for the European Union:

“to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.”

Six years, this overall goal is still the drive of every European Union initiative. Even though far from being achieved, the European Union believes that EU members should put an even stronger focus in their education policy on increasing the attractivess and competitiveness of the European education system.

More than 100 student representatives from all over Europe participated and discussed the effects of the Lisbon Strategy for higher education from their perspective. Thus the Student Convention helped ESIB redefine it's position on the implementation of the Lisbon Strategy, how national student unions should deal with the process and what role should the student play within it.

 

Three panel sessions were held:

 

 

This workshop examined the latest policy in the field of financing within the Lisbon Strategy implementation. The country reports for Lisbon on 2006 were used here and checked with reality. Participants also learnt about voucher-financing. What is this financing model and what does it mean for students? The ever-interesting topic of tuition fees was tackled from the institutional perspective. In what way are tuition fees spent inside the university: do they give us better education? Also, the question needs to be answered why governments and institutions rather invest in top research programmes and nice buildings instead of student grants.

Mobility is the issue that covers more than only EU unions and is therefore useful for all of the ESIB members. Especially since the TEMPUS programme, which covers countries outside EU, is now under discussion. Also the issue of brain drain will be tackled here under the aim of attracting top researchers to the European Union. The workshop focused on recent developments in the mobility programmes of the EU: which regions have a focus? What is this ‘lifelong learning programme’ really abouit? The CEEPUS project will explained as an example of good practice.

Workshop 3: Influencing the Lisbon process
The past years made it more and more obvious that the Lisbon Strategy has a direct impact on the role and provision of higher education. While the direction for educational reforms is drawn on the European level and translated into concrete measures and benchmarks, the national education ministries are in charge of implementing the Strategy in their education systems.

In this process, the involvement of students is less than sufficient, both on the European level as well as in the national policy making.

Apart from this lack of possibilities to influence the development of higher education, the main focus of critique attacks the core of the Lisbon Strategy: It looks at education through the glasses of economic competitiveness and argues the need for changes from a one-dimensional economic approach, ignoring the multiple roles of education in society.

For us this raised a central question on how to tackle the process: Should we put the focus on trying to increase students’ involvement on a micro-level, meaning that we try to influence parts of the process, such as for example policies on lifelong learning or financing models and their implementation – even if we only have the chance to achieve minor changes? Or should we rather focus on the process as a whole – through campaigns that attack the core idea of Lisbon for education? And is there a chance at all to push the huge Lisbon-ship into a different direction?

The basic question of the workshop is: How do we raise the students’ voice in the Lisbon Strategy – both as ESIB and as NUSs: Dialogue, campaign or fight? This also includes looking at approaches and claims of other stakeholders and searching for possible cooperation with school students, universities, teachers and rectors, with trade unions and industry.

This workshop not only discussed those questions but also include a training for student representatives for developing political strategies, strategic cooperation and networks.

 

Download the Report of Workshop 3 

Workshop 4: Quality Assurance markets
Quality is at the heart of the Lisbon Strategy and at the work of the European Union concerning education. The first priority for the strategy was to make European higher education a world reference of quality. Therefore, the Commission is a very active promoter of European cooperation in quality assurance.

This workshop discussed the future developments of quality assurance in Europe. It started with a recap from the Bologna Process: what is Europe pushing for? It then continued by discussing the European Standards Procedures and Guidelines proposed there and the latest decision of the European Parliament concerning quality assurance. These documents were be linked to the developments in some countries, such as Slovenia where no quality assurance system will be set up, but the market will decide what is good and bad. What can be the impacts of market-type quality assurance? What can student unions do about quality assurance and this European influence?

The convention was supported by AK Wien, Bawag PSK and Aids Hilfe.