Laudatio der Jury - Alcuin Award 2002

Honoured guests, EPA conference participants....


I am very honoured to give you the report of the Jury for the 2002 Alcuin Award.
The Jury members are:

• Mrs. Elisabeth Rehn, Former Minister of Defence and Equality of Finland and UN Expert.
• Mrs. Maria Barroso Soares, First Lady of Portugal represented by Maria Boleo Tomé.
• Mrs. Anna Costa Rosa, Regional Counsellor, Italy
• Mr. Dominique Bariller, EPA Executive Committee assistant to the Jury

The EPA Administrative Council chose from 25 projects these 5 nominees for 2002:

• "Campagne Ecole Parents a(d)mis", Ministry of Primary Education, Belgium
• "Hand in Hand", Parent learning support through after-school family literacy clubs, Ministry of Education, Malta
• "Valuing parents as co-educators", Teacher-parent partnership in the primary school classroom, Ministry of Education, Cyprus
• "Dzav Keren", SRRZ, Slovakia
• "Compassion", Socially aware learning and action at school and in society, KED, Germany

The Jury was impressed by all five candidates, by the work and the enthusiasm and that all five promote the cooperation of children, parents and teachers.

We estimate that the By-law of the Ministry in Belgium welcomes parents as friends to school and brings the parents\' organisations together.

We appreciate the EU-Grundtvig project "Hand in Hand" where Malta is coordinator and worked out a home-school literacy programme.

We admired the personal initiative of two projects:

First the project from Cyprus, which values the parents as co-educators.

We admired especially the ROMA project, a personal initiative without any help from institutions in Slovakia. Here we hope that this project can continue and come again as a candidate.

But finally, we have voted for the German candidate "Compassion", a project for social learning in school and society. Compassion started as an idea in 1992 and now ten years later we have still the evaluation and a successful project. Compassion is going on. Young people spend 2-4 weeks for social practica in hospitals, senior citizen centres, homes for the disabled, special schools or kindergartens. These practica were discussed at home with the parents and evaluated in the classroom.
This incorporating of the experiences of the practica into the regular teaching process and the atmosphere and cooperation in class and in family impressed us.
Compassion fulfils all criteria of selection of the Alcuin Award and represents an inspirational example for other European countries.
The Jury took the decision also because the human and humanitarian involvement and the increasing of social sensibility and responsibility in our today\'s EGO society are so important!

Hilde Hawlicek, Former Minister of Education of Austria
Alcuin Jury President