Strasbourg, 18/12/2002 (Agence Europe) - The European Ombudsman, Jacob Soederman has asked the Commission to promote good administration by the European Schools. In a draft recommendation, the Ombudsman urges the Commission to describe the concrete measures it intends taking in future to achieve this. The Commission's reply is expected by 31 March 2003.
The Ombudsman's intervention follows a complaint by 50 parents of schoolchildren in the European Schools in Brussels, concerning the way in which places have been allocated between the three Schools for the academic year 2002-2003, the procedure having led to 200 internal appeals. According to the parents, the distribution among schools without a thorough evaluation of the children's needs, was an example of the worst administrative practice. The Commission argued that Schools had made every effort to take parents' choice of school into account and that many of the individual appeals had been successful. The Ombudsman notes that "the Commission's response to the events in this case fails to show that it fully recognises its responsibility to promote good administration by the Schools," and stresses that "when a particular area of administration generates an unusually large number of appeals it is good practice to examine whether there is an underlying problem and, if so, to take measures to deal with it for the future". The Ombudsman's draft recommendation is available on his Internet site.