The educational systems around Europe are facing increasing challenges: we live in a period of growing school autonomy and the parents’ roles in their children’s lives have been weakened.

The British Council is undertaking a project — Challenges in Schools — to help schools deal with new emerging political, economic and societal phenomena, such as violence, bullying, drug abuse, the increasing usage of virtual communication and diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

This British Council project is undertaken in partnership with ministries of education, leading educationists, and representatives from schools in the UK and central and northern Europe. The project was launched in the winter of 2007 in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic and the UK.

The British Council is well positioned to make a difference in this area — we already have an excellent track record of working in the education sector, especially in developing school links and leadership and in supporting English language teaching.

We will work with the next generation of European influencers — innovative school students, teachers and education professionals — to develop a vision of ‘the school of the future’ — which will:

• use ICT tools extensively
• teach foreign languages effectively
• teach the skills of negotiation, co-operation, tolerance, and intercultural awareness that are needed in the new European environment
• secure a friendly and constructive learning environment.

The vision of the ‘school of the future’ will be developed by the project participants — international school clusters (four schools from different countries, including one school from the UK) led by local and UK experts and presented to other project participants and stakeholders for further development at an international conference in April 2009. The final visions will be shared with Ministries of Education and other schools in Europe through national conferences.

We believe that the blueprint of the ‘school of the future’ will have a potential to positively influence the decision-making processes in ministries of education and that the principles of the ‘school of the future’ will have a chance to be embedded into national education systems.