Ei-iE

The 6th World Congress of Education International (EI) meeting in Cape Town, South Africa from 22-26 July 2011, 1. Notes that the current school model should provide a social, cultural and territorial backbone, focussing on the correction of social inequalities of origin and provenance. 2. Defends integrating, compensatory, intercultural, secular, participative, democratic and co-educative schooling. 3. Advocates an education centre model which includes schooling from infant education until post-obligatory education, with modern infrastructures and sufficient human resources; including new professional figures and a teachers training day on top of the centre training day. 4. Understands schooling conceived as a public service. 5. Urges governments to make schools accessible, especially in and to poor communities so as to turn them to centres of community development activities and provide much needed social, educational and recreational facilities to address social problems and provide opportunities through sport and cultural activities to the youth and communities members. 6. Considers the search for motivated, well-paid teachers with training suitable for the new demands required by the school and with recognition of their authority and social prestige to be essential. 7. Is in favour of Education Centres with high pedagogical, organisational and economic management autonomy, in order to incorporate greater adaptive flexibility in the immediate environment which surrounds them and which they form a part of. 8. Advocates, ultimately, an education understood as a basic pillar in the fair, free and quality welfare state: based on the equality of opportunities, which offers the same opportunities to everyone, without any kind of discrimination. Therefore, the VI World Congress of the IE, 1. Urges governments to consider education as an investment in the future to the benefit of social progress, equity and equality of opportunities which provides an unquestionable yield for the society as a whole. 2. Encourages the development of measures which respect the growing multiculturality in our societies and our schools from an intercultural point of view which respects the diversity from within a common framework of values. 3. Defends the need to drive for an alternative economic growth model based on knowledge, which assures sustainable economic development and increasing prosperity through social cohesion. A change which educationally demands reduced failure in obligatory schooling, improved levels of professional qualification while reducing drop outs, empowering innovation and development policies where the universities have to play a predominant role, supplying human material to a market in constant and growing demand for highly qualified personnel. 4. Encourages governments, despite the delicate economic situation, to guarantee public financing of the education system as an investment in the future. 5. Invites the national political parties to recuperate the educational consensus as a unique model for planning which focuses on the future avoiding the ups and downs of political change. 6. Special emphasis on attention to diversity, the reduction of profits, thinning of classes, increased focus on languages and new technologies, the drive for Professional Teaching and the introduction of new professional profiles.