E.5

European Added Value
The bid consortium covers a range of EU countries in location, size, and language. They come together with complementary skills and linguistic capabilities - in particular in the world languages of English, French and Spanish as well as many EU languages. The mix of institutions - school, universities, consultancy companies, European networks and national agencies facilitates engagement with a wide range of stakeholders and provide a strong level of dissemination both at European level and at national level.

VISCED leverages from a range of national projects (UK and Estonia especially) and international projects (Re.ViCa especially but also Learnovation, OECD and UNESCO projects).

The project creates a cross-European inventory of Exemplars, Case Studies and innovative practices: our global but culturally sensitive viewpoint will help to ensure that the European ones will be transferable "within" Europe as well as the non-European ones being transferable "into" Europe under appropriate circumstances to be detailed. In particular those countries, institutions and teachers at an earlier stage of development will be able to learn from pioneers without going through all the pain of pioneering themselves.

The European added value applies also to the specialist area of success factors where there is scope to integrate a so-far UK-originated analysis into a wider more "European" scheme (EFQUEL) of quality and benchmarking.

Another key aspect of taking a global viewpoint is that European debates in education and e-learning can become constricted and bitter because there are only a few examples of specific types of provision within Europe. This is of course true for virtual schools but also for discussion of private-sector provision and learning support services. Also, one has to take a multi-polar global viewpoint as otherwise the debate can again constrict into "Le defi americain" dialogues. Thus European discussion of issues is actually easier in a wider context.

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