MEPs called for additional funding for language courses for migrant children and their parents, teachers and staff who understand the children's mother tongue and extra staff and facilities for schools with a high proportion of immigrant children, in two draft parliamentary resolutions adopted by the Culture Committee on Thursday.
 
Mother tongue and host-country language
 
Member States should ensure the promotion of migrant children's native languages and cultures in their school education, states the report by Hannu Takkula (ALDE, FI) on “Educating the Children of Migrants”. MEPs insist this would facilitate the children's integration in their new environment.
 
The reference to “bilingual” teaching in Mr Takkula's report caused controversy, however, as some members feared it would provide for only one host-country language. Concerns were voiced for countries with several official languages, and a compromise was finally reached on the necessity for teachers to be equipped for “multilingual education approaches” and for children to learn all the languages of their country of residence, at the request of Catalan MEP Maria Badia i Cutchet (PES).
 
However, MEPs also agreed that “the place given to teaching in the mother tongue within the curriculum (...) must specifically be left to the Member States”.
 
Role models for all pupils
 
In another report adopted today by the Culture Committee, MEPs say schools’ staff “should reflect as far as possible the increasing diversity of European societies, in order to provide role models for all pupils”.
 
The report by Pal Schmitt (Hungary, EPP-ED) on “better schools: an agenda for European cooperation” states that “Member States should take steps to ensure that the children of legal migrants are taught their mother tongue”.
 
Migrant parents should also get language courses
 
Host-language courses should be offered by schools to the parents, and especially the mothers, of migrant children, MEPs agreed.
 
To this end, Mr Takkula's report asks for additional financial and administrative support to be provided to schools for these courses.
 
Faith-based schools
 
Four members (two Greens, one Socialist and one ALDE) abstained from the vote on Mr Schmitt's report, in protest against an amendment which underlines the important role of faith-based schools that “teach strong moral values” and recommends giving financial support to all kinds of schools “regardless of their educational philosophy”.
 
Education as a key to economic recovery
 
Education and training have a key role to play in helping to set the conditions to overcome the current economic crisis and to develop a strong knowledge-based economy, Mr Schmitt's report states.
 
MEPs agreed the free movement of knowledge is “the ideal tool for economic recovery” and called on Member States to ensure that their school curricula are “closely linked to industry, business and the labour market”.
 
“If we claim that Europe must have a knowledge-based society, then education must be a priority”, Pal Schmitt told his fellow MEPs before the vote today.
 
Undiscovered talents
 
Migration from outside the EU has steadily increased over the last decades and should continue to do so, leading to an ever-greater number of migrant children in schools. These children are often poorly-equipped to succeed because of their precarious socio-economic backgrounds.
 
If more efforts are not made to help migrant children do well in school, the EU will be wasting a formidable reserve of talent for the future, argues Mr Takkula’s report.