Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to make four points. Firstly, I should like to say that the ambitious goal Socrates has pursued for years, the creation of a European educational area, is now almost reality – and I hope it will soon be embodied in the texts. The Council, the Councils of Feira, Lisbon, Stockholm and now also of Nice, have stressed the importance and role of education and training in society and for the knowledge society. I should like to underline that today education and training are, first of all, the European Union’s most important political priorities; secondly, they are a political challenge and an economic challenge, because we all know that without education and training we cannot offer young people training places. Thirdly, they are an opportunity to further develop Europe’s linguistic and cultural heritage and give it European added value. The second point I want to address is that the Commission and Council really seem to be both maximalists and minimalists. Maximialists in the strategies and political ambitions they develop on paper. On the other hand, however, the European Union and, above all, the Council, is a very great minimalist when it comes to actually giving these great projects financial resources. Then it is always the Commission or Parliament or whoever that come in for criticism, but never the people who with great pomp and ceremony announce to the great councils how important training and education are. If they would provide the money for it the next day, we would all, especially our citizens, be very grateful. The European Union has, in fact, always been mean in the budgets for education. I should like to remind you all of the dreadful Conciliation Committee marathon over the little bit extra we wanted for Socrates. I hope that the revision of this Socrates programme that will probably take place within the next two years will also bring Socrates a little more money. I am pleased, and Parliament can be pleased, that there is now an e-Learning initiative. We have heard, as Mr Costa Neves has said, that Parliament, represented by the Committee on Budgets, is pressing for this not to be at the expense of any existing programme. These programmes have their purpose! They have the financial resources for that and nothing else! I therefore believe that if we say that e-Learning is important, and we stress that it is, then there must also be a programme with the proper financial resources. The third point is that I regret and deplore the fact that we were not sufficiently involved in the general matters; I said so earlier on Mr Gargani’s behalf. We really must be responsible for the system’s specific objectives, we must help to bring this about and inter-institutional cooperation must be ensured. I assume I am reflecting what you said, Commissioner, you understood it that way and you will include it in future. My fourth point is this: In view of the debate on enlargement and the forthcoming Intergovernmental Conference, we need our work in this European Union to be genuinely visible, we need a European educational area that is visible to the citizen. This means it must be really accessible to the citizen himself, and the citizen needs to be permanently involved in these programmes through the representation of his MEPs. We need the directives, we need ambitious objectives, we need measures, we need action programmes, with their own funding, of course, and if we do all that in education, then we shall not need so many Commission and Parliament information campaigns any more because we shall have reached the citizen where he is. I hope we can go this way together.

Political group: PPE-DE