Mr President, the report on the European Year of Lifelong Learning is seemingly an unimportant document, and yet it has revealed significant gaps and black spots in the European system. The report concerns a year of information and promotion in response to the Luxembourg Summit and other summits, at which tremendous importance was given to training as a means of integrating Europeans into working life, irrespective of age. The report has shown, first of all, that when money is invested in education, that money is multiplied. The Member States keen to participate quadrupled their budgets. That is, money invested in education gives the best results as it is multiplied and does not lead to fraud, or anything like that. Secondly, the European Year of Lifelong Learning highlighted the Commission's difficulty in providing information and responses and being transparent. It was practically impossible to gather all the necessary documentation, partly, it seems, because the Member States do not provide it, and partly because there are no procedures for collecting it with the necessary ease and speed. We have therefore turned the report into a response and a series of recommendations on the criteria that we think lifelong learning should meet. We found ourselves with a muddle of criteria, partly introduced by the Council, as the document published by the Commission, the proposal for the Year of Lifelong Learning, was of far higher quality. It is clear that we need much more clarity over training. However, training for integration, language teaching and recreational training for the elderly is mixed up with training for work, resulting in such a muddle that it is impossible to make an assessment or gauge the quality and know what the criteria are for good practice. So, we are asking for the educational objectives to be clearly distinguished and regulated. Obviously, education for the integration of immigrants is not the same as training for new qualifications, training for a first job or retraining, or many other types. We have therefore requested clarity and better organisation of the system as a whole. We have also requested greater lifelong learning and retraining for teachers. It is clear that, if we consider lifelong learning to be simply for unqualified groups, account will not be taken of retraining university staff and teachers at training centres, who have to be the flagship of knowledge and disseminate information in society. Finally, we have asked that it be made quite clear where the money from the Structural Funds for training, which is not monitored, is going. From our point of view, this is a key issue. What we cannot have is Europe paying so little attention to education and the education funds being used for other purposes. One of the great problems of European history stems from the fact that once social classes have fought their way up the social scale and succeeded in integrating into the ruling classes, they have imitated the faults of the aristocracy, they have become conceited and lost sight of the value of training and the fight to retain the knowledge they have acquired. So, we are living in an aristocratic Europe, which does not want to concern itself with education, which has become somewhat conceited about being European. We consider that it is enough to be a European citizen and we do not realise that if we want to have researchers, if we want to have a truly competitive Europe, we need to take care of our human resources. Europe needs to realise that, in spite of the subsidiarity principle, training people and helping them to manage themselves and their future is one of the fundamental objectives of its existence. Therefore, a Europe that only takes care of its own interests, a Europe of subsidies, a Europe with teachers who only want to reduce their teaching hours, a Europe that contemplates and confuses trade union policy with educational policy is a worrying Europe. I would like to draw attention to this situation, and I believe that we must rethink our attitude towards education, as we are talking about people and our future. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE