Commission takes parents’ side in crowded schools row

By Martin Banks

Date: 23/06/05

The European Commission is protesting to the management of Brussels's European Schools about instances of children from the same families being split between schools.

In a letter to Commission staff, Claude Chêne, director-general of the Commission's administration department, said that, "in our view, it is not acceptable to split families with young children between different schools".

He said that the cause was a limit on the number of places available at the Woluwe and Ixelles schools, but he criticised "the blunt way" in which the limits were being implemented.

Woluwe school has 3,150 pupils while the school in Ixelles has about 3,000 children. Both were designed to accommodate 2,400 pupils.

Chêne said that some parents with children at the nursey and/or primary schools at Woluwe and Ixelles were being obliged to enrol them in the third European school at Uccle.

He said that the presence of a brother or sister in the school should be "the first criterion for admission".

And in cases where the families had to be split up, transfers should be allowed in the following year.

Parents say the overcrowding problem has been made worse by the closure of two nursery classes at Woluwé and Ixelles. They are demanding that the nursery classes be re-opened and that a temporary school is opened ready for the 2005-06 academic year.

Plans are in the pipeline for a fourth European school at Laeken, but this is not scheduled to open until 2009 at the earliest.

In his letter to staff, Chêne sought to calm concerns that classes for particular language groups would be transferred from the existing schools to the Laeken site. No decisions had been made, he said.

Olga Profili, president of the Commission's trade union staff committee, which represents 7,000 civil servants, many of whom have children at the schools, described the current situation as "absurd and distressing".

"It is affecting a large number of our colleagues who do not know how they will be able to reconcile their private and working lives in the next school year," she said.

"Parents of four- to five-year-olds living in Woluwe and Ixelles could legitimately expect to be able to enrol them at the nursery in the same school as their brothers and sisters.

"However, at the start of this month parents were told that, unlike in previous years, there would not be two nursery classes at Woluwe and Ixelles for the 2005-06 school year since space was available at Uccle.

"This means that children as young as four will have to make long bus journeys, morning and evening, shunted from one end of the city to the other." She is seeking an urgent meeting with Chêne to highlight the committee's concerns.

In his letter to staff, Chêne stressed that the Commission had only one vote out of 29 on the board of governors of the European Schools, which is composed of representatives of member states, the Commission, parents and teachers.

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