[Versió oficial en anglès / Official version in English]

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
Immigrant communities' integration in Europe

European Parliament resolution on integrating immigrants in Europe through schools and multilingual education (2004/2267(INI))

The European Parliament,

– having regard to Council Directive 77/486/EEC of 25 July 1977 on the education of the children of migrant workers ,

– having regard to the Council resolution of 16 December 1997 , which calls on the Member States to encourage the early teaching of languages and Europe-wide cooperation among schools offering this type of teaching,

– having regard to the Council resolution of 25 November 2003 on making school an open learning environment to prevent and combat early school leaving and disaffection among young people and to encourage their social inclusion ,

– having regard to the Presidency Conclusions of the Barcelona European Council of 15-16 March 2002, which call for at least two foreign languages to be taught from a very early age,

– having regard to the communication of 3 June 2003 from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on immigration, integration and employment (COM(2003)0336),

– having regard to the communication of 24 July 2003 from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions entitled ‘Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004 – 2006’ (COM(2003)0449),

– having regard to the recommendation by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia that greater public support be provided in order to reduce the disadvantages suffered by pupils from migrant or minority communities,

– having regard to the conclusions of the symposium on ‘The Changing European Classroom – the Potential of Multilingual Education’, held on 10 and 11 March 2005 under the auspices of the Luxembourg Presidency,

– having regard to the conclusions issued following the Education Council of 25 May 2005,

– having regard to Rule 45 of its Rules of Procedure,

– having regard to the report of the Committee on Culture and Education (A6-0243/2005),

A. whereas migration has increased significantly since 1977, the year of adoption of the above-mentioned directive establishing the right of immigrants within the Community to be taught the language of their host country and the language and culture of their country of origin,

B. whereas migration has created new challenges in terms of identity and made integration policies one of the priorities for the EU, the Member States, and regional and local authorities,

C. whereas Europe has, at different times, seen periods in which minorities have been persecuted and whereas this chapter of European history which, it is to be hoped, has been closed for good, highlights the importance of policies to combat discrimination in the EU,

D. whereas the body of decisions taken by the European institutions seeks to establish equal rights as regards education for children and teenagers living in the EU, regardless of where they were born, where their parents and grandparents came from, or what particular legal framework applies to them,

E. whereas the Presidency Conclusions of the Lisbon European Council of 23-24 March 2000 (whereby the number of 18- to 24-year-olds with only lower-secondary level education is to be halved by 2010) imply that education needs to be made generally accessible to the sons and daughters of immigrants, and schools must be ready to promote their integration without any form of discrimination,

F. whereas the learning difficulties experienced by pupils whose families communicate in a language other than the one used at school are often combined with material, social, and psychological circumstances that militate against normal school achievement,

G. whereas the linguistic separation between the family and school environments aggravates the tendency for pupils to drop out of school and for families to become isolated from the community, and linguistic integration must therefore start early, at preschool age; whereas the measures to be promoted to that end should enable the children of immigrants both to continue to develop their knowledge of their mother-tongue – since this is crucial for their future progress at school – and simultaneously to learn the languages of their respective host countries,

H. whereas multilingual education is helping to foster understanding of differences from a cross-cultural perspective at a time when more and more young people of the second and third generation of immigrants are experiencing difficulties in coping with the many and varied dimensions that make up their identity,

I. whereas the widespread use of a lingua franca in education systems sometimes dispenses pupils from the obligation to learn their mother tongue and study their native culture as soon as they start school,

J. whereas European institutions are seeking to capitalise on the experiments in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL),

K. whereas one means of translating educational objectives for immigrant communities into practice might be through bilateral agreements which, however, are generally subject to severe budgetary constraints, if not undermined by a lack of political will,

L. whereas EU action has been brought to bear mainly in the areas of teacher training, youth exchanges and the organisation of seminars and studies; whereas this is nowhere near the sum total of measures that could serve to develop good practice and enable it to be applied across the board,

Rights of children in the school system and duties of the Member States

1. Believes that the school-age children of immigrants have a right to State education, irrespective of the legal status of their families, and that this right extends to learning the language of their host country, without prejudice to their right to learn their mother tongue;

2. Believes that even when the children and/or descendants of immigrants (second and third generations) are proficient in the language of their host country, they should be given the opportunity to familiarise themselves with their mother tongue and the culture of their country of origin, without public funding being ruled out for that purpose;

3. Stresses that primary and secondary schools must provide educational support for immigrant children, especially when they are not proficient in the language of their host country, so as to enable them to adapt more easily and prevent them from finding themselves at a disadvantage compared with other children;

4. Maintains that the integration of immigrants at school must not adversely affect the development of the language of the education system, especially if that language is itself a minority language;

5. Urges the Member States to encourage educational establishments at the various levels to take measures ensuring linguistic diversity without the choice of alternatives to the official language being restricted to the most widely spoken European languages;

6. Urges the Member States to remove the teaching, administrative and legal obstacles which, as a result of language barriers, make it difficult to achieve the above objectives;

7. Considers that such measures must be taken in such a way as to ensure that immigrant children will not have a disproportionately heavy timetable compared with other pupils, and hence will be less likely to tend to refuse to attend extra study periods;

Role of the EU in promoting good practice

8. Supports the Commission’s advocacy of education systems enabling pupils to learn two languages in addition to their mother tongue at an early age;

9. Takes note of the need to make use of different methods of promoting integration through multilingualism, such as the CLIL method, which is proven to be quite efficient both for learning the language and for the intercultural integration of children of different origins;

10. Calls on the Commission to increase its support for the specific training of teachers, particularly those who come from immigrants’ countries of origin, interested in the development of various methods of promoting integration through multilingualism (e.g. CLIL or multilingual or mother-tongue literacy) and, under the Leonardo da Vinci, Youth and Socrates programmes (Comenius and Grundtvig projects), in widening the range of target languages to cover immigrants’ mother tongues, bringing particular attention to bear on activities involving the sons and daughters of immigrants and the trainers and facilitators who work with immigrant communities;

11. Stresses that support should be channelled into educational projects which, over and above curriculum requirements, teach the language and culture of the host country to immigrants who are not of school age, and towards bridge-building projects to foster dialogue between the culture and history of the host region and the culture and history of immigrant communities; stresses also that consideration should be given especially to projects including persons with parental control, and mothers in particular;

12. Maintains that one way of translating the above policy into reality would be for the EU provide support for the setting-up of a European network of schools employing different methods to promote integration through multilingualism; believes that schools could apply to join such network, with the agreement of the authorities of the Member States, if they wished to implement educational and community projects to meet the learning, socialisation and cultural needs referred to above;

13. Recommends to the Commission that, under the 'transversal' lifelong learning programme, the 2007-2013 budget allocations make provision for support for the above initiatives;

14. Maintains that the dissemination, by the education systems of host countries, of cultural works from immigrants’ countries of origin must be a focus of special EU attention, whether to further foreign policy aims and the neighbourhood strategy or under Community programmes in the spheres of culture, education, youth or the media;

15. Calls on local authorities in the Member States to bear the above approach in mind in making their twinning decisions;

16. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council, the Commission, and the governments and parliaments of the Member States.

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