The ECNAIS 2011 AGM conference was hosted in a lively Madrid. It was a very inspiring conference.

With the struggle for life we addressed the developments in different countries towards their right to existence and the space they need and have to realise appropriate education for their pupils. As well as the social responsibility they are willing & taking and have to show as part of their pedagogical entrepeneurship in a divers socieity. In Eastern & Southern European countries they face a decreasing financial contribution of the government, whereas in Denmark they rather don’t have a equal financing because the incentive for more regulation will be then more easy to overstep.

With Creating the future we addressed the perspective that independent schools are a huge contribution to the educational landscape, because they in most cases are at the forefront of educational innovation. We experienced that also in practice to, while visiting different independent schools in Madrid like the Colegio Maria Inmaculada, and heard of innovative approaches of independent schools by example about sex-education which were adopted on national scale (although adopting from top-down doesn't garantuee the same results). We learned from schools where grandparents are part of the educational community and schools are really communities organised around learning, learning communities with close relations with researchers of applied sciende. We were surprised by the effort they stake to develop their own education and reflect on it. See for a nice example of an learning communitie a video of the mentioned Colegio www.minmaculada.org.

Below you can find a selection of some photo's.

The presentation of Luisa Ribolzi & Chris Sigaloff:
Luisa Ribolzi: Diversity in education: Struggle for life & its challenges for independent schools
Chris Sigaloff: Co-creating the future: tapping in to our social capital