Brussels, 05/06/2002 (Agence Europe) - By end 2006, each of the 150,000 secondary schools in the EU should conclude an Internet twinning agreement with one or more schools in other Member States, or even third countries, as part of the dialogue between cultures. Such is the proposal made by the European Commission in its report on "European secondary school twinning via Internet". The Commission suggests that the possible themes for twinning, which aims to allow the development of common teaching projects, should include language learning, cultural exchange, European citizenship or environmental education. The report, that the Commission has just adopted at the initiative of Commissioner Viviane Reding in agreement with President Romano Prodi, will be presented to the Seville Summit. The Commission awaits the Summit's support for implementing the project that involves the local, regional and national authorities and Community institutions, in respect of the principle of subsidiarity and ensuring complementarity of effort.
The report proposes that a support framework be set in place at Community level allowing each young European pupil in secondary education to take part via Internet in an educational project in agreement with teachers and pupils in other schools in Europe. In order to generalise twinning in a consistent manner, the Commission identifies the following conditions: 1) the relevant public authorities in all Member States should achieve the aim of having an Internet-connected PC for every 15 pupils by the end of 2003 and should also provide an annual budget for future twinning partnerships of from EUR 1,500 to EUR 10,000 per secondary school (to cover, for example, the cost of visits by teachers and pupils, equipment maintenance and communications); 2) training courses need to be provided for secondary school teachers everywhere, not just to show them how to use the Internet and the associated hardware, but also how to incorporate the Internet and the twinning schemes into their teaching approaches; 3) structures will have to be set up to advise and assist schools, in particular school heads, on how to set about arranging European twinning partnerships. "By proposing a scheme to generalise Internet school twinning, as asked to do by the Barcelona European Council, the Commission is making a new contribution ensuring that our European economies and societies make a successful transition to the knowledge economy, especially in the education field", commented Viviane Reding, who added that an eLearning programme to play a major role in helping such twinning links will be adopted in the near future.