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A panel discussion on 14 July brought together Education International (EI) President Susan Hopgood, EI General Secretary Emeritus Fred van Leeuwen, and EI co-founder Robert Harris to reflect on the creation of Education International and take stock of the progress accomplished by the global federation representing teachers and education support personnel, as well as the way ahead towards quality education for all.

Fred van Leeuwen, former EI General Secretary and International Federation of Free Teachers' Unions (IFFTU) Secretary, and Robert Harris, former EI Executive Director (Intergovernmental Relations) and World Confederation of Organisations of the Teaching Profession (WCOTP) General Secretary, discussed the efforts that led to the merger of the WCOTP and IFFTU at a convention in Stockholm to form EI in 1993.

For Hopgood, “the success of Education international was never inevitable”.

There were practical and political reasons for the creation of EI, highlighted van Leeuwen. We created EI to be the voice of the teaching profession in the international community, he explained.

“30 years ago, globalisation and neo-liberal policies started to have effects on national education budgets. And we thought that it was important to help our member organisations cope with these international developments. There were also structural development policies imposed by the World Bank on low-income countries which devastated entire education systems in these countries. This led to the idea of bringing our two organisations together.”

There was also the staggering illiteracy rate, he recalled. “Millions of children unable to go to school, and governments and the international community not really doing their work in our opinion. So we thought that we needed a strong, powerful instrument do deal with all these matters, and we thought that we were in a good position to do that because our organisations were already present in the intergovernmental bodies supposed to deal with these issues.”

Another reason was a financial one: “We saw the work expanding and we realised also that for each international federation individually it would be very difficult to get the required resources.”

“Prior to that era, for about a hundred years, various groupings of teachers were trying to work out how they could develop unity, and often that failed. There were four international organisations in the eighties. We used to meet to organise a common statement to the international meeting of education ministers in Geneva every two years. That was not enough. There was much more to it. We had to develop resources, concentrate our resources, overcome competition, which was consuming resources which were better directed towards advocacy on behalf of teachers and unions generally. In the late eighties, we saw this window of opportunity and we all thought it was time to go for it. That’s what we did,” Harris noted.

Agreeing on the new organisation’s structures

“We took elements from our two internationals,” van Leeuwen added. “It was not easy to get to get an agreement on the final draft of that constitution, because every participant in the meeting thought that the structure of their national union or their national association was the best there was. For example, concerning the roles of the President and General Secretary: Should the General Secretary be elected or appointed? Another hurdle was: Should there be regional structures and should these structures be independent? There was also the question of term limits.”

Need for clear membership criteria

Another very important issue was setting up membership criteria, the conditions for membership of the new global union federation, he said.

“There was no difference of view on that the organisation should be democratic and independent from governments, political parties, the Church, etc. But the question was how do you determine whether an organisation meets those standards?

“EI Founding President Al Shanker came up with the idea that this was not something that we could actually determine ourselves, to leave that to a group of wise people, the Committee of Experts,” van Leeuwen said.

Then the Committee of Experts was set up and chaired by the former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Harris added. The committee advised the organisation’s board, made clear recommendations and came up with a clearly defined set of criteria that enabled the new organisation to grow, he continued. Finally the World Confederation of Teachers (WCT) ended up joining EI in 2006.

According to van Leeuwen, “everybody on the interim Executive Board, which served from 1993 until the First World Congress in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1995 was very aware that success was not a guarantee, and that we had to operate very carefully. We needed to learn to work with the ideological diversity that this new organisation represented, and it was in the beginning quite breakable, it was not a given that it would work, and particularly difficult was the establishment of regional structures.”

“We had to develop our advocacy with international agencies – United Nations, International Labour Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), UNESCO, the World Health Organization, among others – and it is just fantastic to be here today and hear about the UN Panel on the Teaching Profession. This is the culmination of work done and needs to be carried forward into the future,” Harris also stressed.

He noted that, “at the same time, the new organisation had to develop its services for members, addressing current and serious issues, and the new organisation had to be able to provide the solidarity to address that. So it was working at both levels.”

Harris was noted that civil society was very active around the time when EI was created.

By the turn of the century, he reminded, the 1995 Copenhagen Social Summit developed the concept of the Millennium Development Goals that were adopted in the year 2000 “at the greatest meeting of world leaders ever held under Kofi Annan as Secretary General of the United Nations, and there was at that time a sort of optimism that we can actually move forward on some of the big issues of poverty and justice and the future of the planet.”

However, he warned: “Then we had 9/11, we had the Iraq war, we had a whole series of things. So history does not just go in a straight line. Unfortunately it has ups and downs and I think 30 years later it is much more challenging actually than the time when EI was created.”

A democracy factor

“I do believe that it is very important that we have been able to change the narrative about education and teachers in the international community,“ van Leeuwen further emphasised.

“We have successfully achieved that education moved to the top of the international agenda. This has been very essential because it ultimately led to the United Nations adopting education as an important Millennium Development Goal and, 15 years later, a Sustainable Development Goal.”

“And let's not forget the breakthrough in development of democracies the Arab Spring, he went on to say. “Teachers’ organisations played a very important role in the Arab Spring and the influx of teachers unions from the Arab world in Education International.”

For him, when we look at the future, one of the most important challenges is to protect democracy. “I believe that protecting democracy, helping our children to understand how important democracy is, is possibly one of the most important tasks that we have today.”

“Mary Futrell said at the beginning: ‘The struggle never ends’, and that's truer than it ever was. Thirty years later, we have to have to keep struggling. And beyond,” Harris echoed.

A gender equity champion

Asked by EI President Susan Hopgood if, for women, EI now is a different organisation, a better one in relation to women's participation, than it was 30 years ago, van Leeuwen observed that in terms of numbers, the participation of women in the governing bodies of Education international is much higher than it was at it in 1995.

“There has been a lot of progress, but the important point is that you need to have young women joining the ranks of women currently running union decision-making bodies.”

He also said that, beyond supporting women and gender equality, EI has been among the first international organisations to clearly support also minority groups, such as the Indigenous peoples and the LGBTI community.

Harris also said that for WCOTP and some of its major affiliates, it was critical to have guaranteed positions for women so that we have gender balance on the world executive.

“It's almost one of those self-evident truths, and I think it is part of our DNA now as Education International. That is one of the major issues on our agenda - at the Executive Board, the World Congress and at the national levels. And that's the way it should be.”

He added: “Shortly after the creation of Education International, a World Bank’s report, based on solid research, said that if there is any single investment that can be made for a country, the best investment of all is in the education of women and girls.”

Read Fred van Leeuwen’s reflections on EI’s 30th anniversary here.

EI President Susan Hopgood also shared her thoughts on the role of women in their unions and in Education International in the past three decades. Read her article here.