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Towards greater equity in higher education  May 2008 witnessed the launch of a major new ESU project on improving equity in higher education with an important European seminar entitled, 'Now for real - Equity in Higher Education.' Hosted by the town of Brusno, Slovakia, 150 participants from national students' unions (NUS') across 38 different European countries came together for 3 days of lively discussion and debate and to kickstart the campaign.
Equality for all is a core, cross-cutting value that underpins all of ESU's work. And increasing equity, fairness, in higher education structures, policies and practices is the key to realising this ambition. But to make real progress, it needs to have attention and a momentum all of its own. This is what this new project, 'Equity From a Student's Perspective,' will seek to achieve, in collaboration with our partners Scienter and Menon, as well as the NUS' from Austria, Romania, Slovakia and Estonia. The seminar played a major part in providing a baseline and a launchpad for the project. Through a series of workshops, critical issues were explored such as:
- How to increase equity through different methods of funding.
- How can the competing interests of equity, efficiency and quality be combined?
- Whether empowerment tools can be used as a tool to fight inequalities.
- Whether increasing flexibility in higher education structures and having more student-centred learning increases equity.
- How equity can be ensured in an integrative system of lifelong learning.
There was also agreement on a set of cores values which will define the campaign. These are: - That everybody has the potential to achieve at the highest level - it is a question of having the tools, resources and environment in order to fulfill that potential.
- There is a great deal that can be done in order to reduce inequality in higher education and increase opportunities.
- The focus should not just be on wasted talent in economic terms, but also on the kind of society we actually want to create and live in.
- Tackling inequality and increasing equity in higher education is a matter of political will rather than of limited resources.
And this seminar has much just been the start. A major focus is going to be on providing training to NUS' to increase their capacity to work on equity issues within their own country. To this end, a trainers' pool was launched in August in Barcelona, and there are now five trainers in that pool who are going to be working on the Equity Project. Three regional training sessions are being scheduled for next year, and an e-learning platform is in development which will enable student representatives to follow a modular training programme to build up their skills. The full text of the 'Now for real - Equity in Higher Education' seminar report by Anita Līce can be found here:
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