Students from disadvantaged backgrounds will be supported in postgraduate study with up to £125 million of extra funding, Universities and Science Minister David Willetts announced today.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) are focusing on increasing access to postgraduate education, which has been identified as a potential barrier to social mobility. An initial £25 million fund will distribute grants of between £500,000 and £3 million to universities and colleges to attract and support disadvantaged students into postgraduate education. 
After studying its success, the Government will then invest an additional £50m in removing financial or cultural barriers to participation in postgraduate education, as announced in the Spending Review. Extra funding will be expected from universities and businesses, bringing this to around £100 million. Read more...

"Erasmus+" est sur le point de devenir le prochain programme de l'UE pour l'éducation, la formation, la jeunesse et le sport, suite à un accord conclu entre les négociateurs du Parlement et du Conseil ce mercredi. Le budget global pour le nouveau programme dépend de l'accord sur le cadre financier pluriannuel (CFP) pour la période 2014-2020.
"Dès le début, le Parlement a toujours cherché à avoir un programme facile d'utilisation et nous sommes clairement parvenus à atteindre cet objectif", a déclaré Doris Pack (PPE, DE), qui a mené les négociations pour Parlement.
"Ce programme m'est cher. A l'avenir, les étudiants qui n'ont pas pu obtenir de bourses auront la possibilité d'obtenir des prêts à des conditions favorables pour étudier pendant une année ou deux de leur master dans un autre pays de l'UE."
"La dénomination "Erasmus+" montre que ce nouveau programme couvre davantage que la simple mobilité des étudiants. Nous avons renforcé les activités à destination des jeunes et pour la première fois, il y aura une ligne budgétaire séparée pour le sport", a-t-elle ajouté.
Informations générales
Le nouveau programme est composé de trois piliers principaux: l'éducation et la formation, la jeunesse et le sport. Sur l'enveloppe totale, 77,5% seront alloués au secteur de l'éducation et de la formation, 3,5% au mécanisme de garantie de prêts. Le secteur de la jeunesse bénéficiera de 10%, le sport de 1,8%. Les trois institutions se sont accordées en faveur d'une augmentation substantielle du budget du programme mais les chiffres finaux dépendent de l'issue des négociations sur le CFP.
La commission de la culture doit se prononcer sur cet accord et le texte final sera ensuite mis aux voix en plénière probablement en octobre.

Young people have long been an important focus of policy at EU level and this is particularly true today. The current EU Youth Strategy (2010–2018) has the challenging objectives of:

• providing more and equal opportunities for young people in education and in the labour market;
• encouraging young people to be active citizens and to participate in society.

Addressing the youth employment crisis is at the top of Europe's political agenda, giving rise to the European Commission's Youth Employment Package and the Youth Guarantee from the European Parliament and Council of the EU, among other measures. The strategy is committed to evidence-based policymaking and Eurofound's mission to provide knowledge to assist in developing social and work-related policies is highly relevant here. Eurofound's four-year work programme 2013–2016 includes as a priority 'Youth in Europe - improving prospects for all'. Read more...

Welcome Croatia! The European Union welcomes its 28th Member State
On 1st July 2013 Croatia joins the European Union, increasing the number of EU official languages to 24. DG Translation is welcoming the new Member State with a flag ceremony in Luxembourg (12:30-13:15), which will be webstreamed live.
Androulla Vassiliou (Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism, Sport, Media and Youth), Rytis Martikonis (Director-General of DG Translation) and Miljenka Prohaska Kragović, (Director of the Translation Centre of the Croatian Ministery of Foreign Affairs) will provide the official welcome, accompanied by representatives of the Croatian diplomatic corps and the staff of the European institutions.
To start and end the ceremony, Nikolina Korečić (translator at DGT and professional opera singer) will perform the Croatian and European anthems.

On 1 July 2013 Croatia becomes the European Union’s 28th Member State. To mark the occasion Cedefop has prepared a statistical overview on vocational education and training (VET) and lifelong learning in Croatia.
Selected for their policy relevance and importance to achieving the Europe 2020 strategy’s objectives, the indicators quantify key aspects of VET and lifelong learning and relate Croatia’s performance to the EU average.
The indicators are those in Cedefop’s recently published country statistical overviews updated for Croatia with the latest available data. The full publication, provides data on other European countries, defines the indicators and explains other data issues and is available at: http://www.cedefop.europa.eu/EN/publications/21408.aspx
Access, attractiveness and flexibility
Indicators in this area show participation patterns in initial and continuing VET training by various groups such as age, gender, educational attainment, working status and type. Participation patterns are used as proxies to indicate the attractiveness of VET as a learning option. Read more...

French leading telecommunications operator Orange is developing a platform to unite universities and graduate schools in a francophone Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platform that will be launched by the end of this year.
In a recent interview at L’Etudiant Thierry Curiale, Digital Education and MOOC Marketing Director at Orange, revealed his company’s plan to launch a francophone MOOC platform to address the growing need of lifelong learning tools in order allow citizens of all ages to acquire new skills and knowledge. According to Curiale, MOOCs big players like Coursera or edX, based in the United States, “have not yet invested in the Francophonie, even though there will be 700 million French-speakers in 2050, mainly because of the population explosion in Africa.” With the creation of a platform dedicated to promote MOOCs in French, especially in Africa, Orange aims to contribute to the widespread adoption of ITC in education. Several first-class publishers, universities and higher education institutions based in France and Africa have been approached to take part in this project and offer the first MOOCs of the platform, due to see the public light in the fourth quarter of 2013. The target of the project are French-speaking learners, but Curiale points out that they are not excluding the possibility of integrating MOOCs in English or any other language in the platform. More information.