European Trade Union Committee for Education

The European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) adopted its recommendations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations on 16 April 2015. The CULT opinion stresses the need to clearly protect public quality education in the framework of the TTIP negotiations. The opinion also makes unequivocally clear that TTIP must ensure that under no circumstances can government subsidies or support be challenged under the treaty.

Following the adoption of the opinion Mrs. Helga Trüpel, the CULT rapporteur, stated: "The CULT opinion on TTIP underlines the critical importance of education and culture and emphasises therefore that these sectors must be protected from liberalisations in the context of TTIP."

Martin Rømer, ETUCE European Director, congratulated Mrs. Trüpel, CULT rapporteur and said: "The CULT opinion adopted today sends the message that CULT parliamentarians are unified to safeguard public quality education and TTIP should therefore explicitly protect public quality education."

The CULT opinion will now feed into the European Parliament's recommendations on the TTIP negotiations.

"The next step is to ensure that the CULT opinion is well reflected in the European Parliament's recommendations on the TTIP negotiations. This means that the battle is absolutely not over and we have to carry on ensuring that education is truly protected," stated Martin Rømer.

The Committee on International Trade (INTA) is responsible for the recommendations, but in total 14 other committees are involved in the process. The INTA draft recommendations have received nearly 900 amendments.  Following the high number of amendments, the planned votes for the European Parliament's recommendations have been delayed. The vote in INTA is now scheduled for 28 May 2015 and the Plenary will possibly vote during the second week of June 2015.

More information on education and TTIP is available here