On Thursday 23 November, the European Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs, Marianne Thyssen, and the chair of CSR Europe, the leading European network specialising in corporate social responsibility, Étienne Davignon, held their first 'Business-Education Summit'. It provided the opportunity to take stock of the European Pact for Youth and launch a common appeal.
Commissioner Thyssen said that the results of the pact were positive, having created 23,000 partnerships with businesses in the field of education and given young Europeans around 160,000 quality new training and employment opportunities. She stressed that the pact had shown how businesses could work with schools and colleges. The figures far outperform the targets laid down when the pact was launched in November 2015, for 10,000 partnerships to create 100,000 training places and job opportunities.
Although the European pact has come to an end, those who took the floor noted that it will continue through the national action plans aiming to implement it. There are 24 of these. The summit attendees – around 650 in all and 50 managing directors – therefore launched a common appeal to make these partnerships “the new norm”. They call for vocational education and apprenticeships to be equal choices for young people, to make these partnerships the new European norm, anchoring education to entrepreneurship by means of training.
The Commissioner reiterated the importance of education in the framework of the European pillar of social rights adopted last week (see EUROPE 11907, 11906), stressing that the first principle is life-long education, training and learning.
This summit is the culmination of European Vocational Skills Week, which follows Discover Your Talent Week held last year. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)