Open Schooling as an approach that creates an engaging environment for children’s learning while strengthening links to local communities has proven to be an effective approach to address the challenges of the Global Learning Crisis that has also been addressed by recent EU policy. Local expertise and experience incorporated into learning at school, making links to the real world offers ways to learn more meaningfully and leads to better motivation of learners, but also of teachers. Thus, Open Schooling approaches can contribute to the creation of an education environment that provides the quality and inclusion demanded by the commitment EU Member States have made. This commitment is also present outside of the European Union as it is in line with Sustainable Development Goal 4.
Parents International has been a partner and advocacy lead in the PHERECLOS H2020 project. The basis of the policy recommendations that you can download from here are built on the step-by-step approach of PHERECLOS. The foundation is a thorough analysis of research on Open Schooling and science capital, accompanied by a review of international, European and national policies. Based on this, six main advocacy areas have been identified, and described in a series of Policy Briefs. The PHERECLOS partners have collected and analysed Open Schooling case studies and this analysis formed the first round of bases for policy recommendations. The model of Open Schooling with schools in the centre, but the activities coordinated by non-formal education providers – in this case Children’s Universities – was piloted in six different educational and geographical contexts in so-called Local Educational Clusters. The consortium also published an open call for establishing Transnational Education Mentoring Partnerships, and ten such partnerships, coordinated by various non-formal education providers, not only Children’s Universities, were established in order to have a wider sample that can validate the approach.