SCHOOL PARTNERSHIPS - Open Schools for Open Societies. A challenging and effective path

Ulrike Storost is policy officer school education at the European Commission, Directorate-General for Education and Culture, Unit Schools and Multilingualism.

Dr. Martyn Rawson was born in Glasgow and has worked in Steiner Waldorf education since co-founding the York Steiner School in 1981. He now lives and works in Germany, teaching on the Masters Programme in Waldorf Pedagogy of the Freie Hochschule Stuttgart and is an Honorary Professor at National TsingHua University Taiwan. His latest book Steiner Waldorf Pedagogy in Schools. A critical introduction was published by Routledge in 2021. 

Since January 2022 G.P.M. (Petra) van Haren, MBA-ME (1965) is Director of the European School Heads Association (ESHA) that has its members in 23 European countries. Petra has a broad experience in the educational sector as a teacher, school manager, and executive and she was president of the Dutch school heads association AVS from 2014-2022. She also worked in the private sector. Her passion is leadership in the public domain as the development of children and schools, the quality of education and care, and the embedding of societal developments all depend on the quality of leadership. She is strongly convinced that investing in children and in their development, and by putting this at the heart of the matter in all kinds of ways, is the foundation on which our society builds its future. School heads have a pivotal role in realizing the educational care quality within the school and manage innovation; they inspire staff members and other educational partners to collaborate. School heads make sure that teachers are facilitated to do their jobs and have their professional space. School heads create room for research, experimenting, and entrepreneurship. These developments are necessary to equip the school and its pupils for a promising future.