Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou Visits REF Sites in Hungary and Romania

The Roma Education Fund regularly hosts delegations and organizes study tours for educational experts and strategic decision-makers.

The Roma Education Fund regularly hosts delegations and organizes study tours for educational experts and strategic decision-makers. Among its most recent visitors was Androulla Vassiliou, Member of the EC in charge of Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, who visited the sites of several REF projects in Hungary and Romania in mid-March. 

Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou travelled to Bucharest, Romania to discuss the education and employment prospects of Romania’s young people on March 10, 2014. Accompanied by the Chair of the Open Society Foundations, Mr George Soros, she visited the village of Jilava during her stay.

Jilava has been long been synonymous with incarceration and punishment and remains to this day the site of a large Romanian penitentiary. A short commute from Bucharest’s center, and flanking the city’s ring road, Jilava also has a large Romani population who until recently did not have equal access to early childhood education and care services for children under age six. With support from the Roma Education Fund, the NGO “Matias” opened a daycare center in collaboration with School No. 1 to address this gap in public services.

Recently renovated, a community building has become a learning center and study hall for local Roma children that until very recently had few opportunities to learn. Managed by the Matias Association and providing social and educational services, the center is currently used daily by 25 preschool children, 30 primary school students and three high school students. Parents are often also invited to attend as part of educational and counselling campaigns. Preschool children attend Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and primary students come at least once a week.

Such has been the success of children attending the project, that word of mouth has convinced some non-Roma parents to also send their children to the center, and Mrs Vassiliou chose to visit this important site where inclusion and innovation are driving integration in local classrooms.

Official photographs of her mission in Romania can be viewed here.

Later in the week Mrs Vassiliou came to Budapest, Hungary on March 13 for the launch of Erasmus+. In her free time visited an after-school study hall (tanoda) supported by the Roma Education Fund and run by the Community Association for Chances in Budapest’s ninth district.

The Ferencvárosi Study Hall supports the enrollment of the children to secondary schools and works to decrease the drop out of the secondary school students; the study hall emphasizes the involvement of the parents in their children’s education and provides tutoring, mentoring, leisure time and career orientation activities.

The study hall is also the location for the Roma Education Fund’s most recent video campaign, Knowledge is Power (A Tudás Hatalom), which advocates among Romani children to stay in school and finish their studies.

Official photographs of her mission in Hungary can be viewed here