Will Brehm  1:51
Sebastian Berger, welcome to FreshEd.

Sebastian Berger  1:53
Thank you very much for having me.

Will Brehm  1:54
So, we met in Paris at the Transforming Education Pre-Summit, which was held at UNESCO’s headquarters in late June. Can you just tell listeners exactly what this idea of Transforming Education Summit is? What is that Summit? And what is UNESCO doing with it?

Sebastian Berger  2:13
So, the Transforming Education Summit is being convened at the initiative of the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, as part of his common agenda reports that serves more or less as his vision for international cooperation and effective multilateralism. In the Summit itself, the organization lies within the hands of an interagency secretariat hosted by UNESCO and under the leadership of the assistant director general office for education. The objective of this Summit and the initiative is to mobilize greater political ambition for actions to reverse the slide on SDG 4 but also compensate for learning losses of COVID-19 in line with the reimagined education initiative to accelerate progress on SDG 4 and the 2030 agenda in the little time that is left to achieve it.

Will Brehm  2:56
Okay. So, this is a high-level UNESCO-managed event, let’s say, connected to the general secretary’s office at the UN. And this event in Paris was the pre-Summit. So, when exactly is the Summit itself?

Sebastian Berger  3:10
The actual summit will be taking place in New York in September, at the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, I think in an attempt to elevate education to the top of the political agenda and to maximize the public awareness and engagement. So, the high-level segment will take place, I think, on the 19th of September in New York.

Will Brehm  3:28
Transforming Education Summit is obviously a high-level event taking place during the General Assembly as a side event or, you know, concurrent event. Obviously, it is going to be made up of many heads of state, many nation states, many member states. So, that sort of begs the question, what exactly are you doing at this Transforming Education Summit, and in particular, this pre-summit where we met in Paris in June?

Sebastian Berger  3:54
I was at the pre-Summit in Paris in my capacity as director of the Global Student Forum. It’s an extremely important opportunity for us as a movement since the early 90s of the past century. After the International Union of Students got dissolved, learners did not have a democratic and independent global union to advocate for their interests. That was the institutions of the international community and the education sector, specifically, with UNESCO being at the heart of the policymaking there. So, we are trying to develop pathways for advocacy for student unions to influence these important processes and the Transforming Education initiative with the pre-Summit and the actual Summit taking place in New York done this year is an extremely important opportunity for us to lobby policymakers, to be in contact with other allies in the education sector, and bring the representative voice of students to the table.

Will Brehm  4:43
So, you bring up some really interesting sort of issues here. I mean, I guess the first one is to me, what’s the history of students and youth being involved at these high-level events because UNESCO obviously has been working on education since its founding. But have youth always been involved? Have students always been involved?

Sebastian Berger  5:03
Definitely not always. I think that this strong focus on youth participation is a relatively recent development within UNESCO, which we definitely applaud. So, there was also a very strong youth focus at the TES pre-Summit. What we would like to see is stronger engagement of students’ unions, of representative and democratic movements that represent the interests of learners. And our experience stemming from the revision process of the Global Education Cooperation Mechanism in 2021 was the following: We were lobbying heavily together with our civil society partners and some progressive member states to create a student’s seat in the SDG 4 high level steering committee in the Sherpa group. Because in the previous architecture, there had been a youth seat for an individual that was selected and appointed by UNESCO. But unfortunately, our lobby efforts and appeals to UNESCO through its political leadership were neglected and remained unsuccessful. And instead of allowing us as student unions and learners’ representatives to elect our own representative in this important committee like it is the case for private enterprises, foundations, as well as civil society and the teacher trade unions, UNESCO moved forward with creating a mechanism called SDG for Youth Network that would serve as a legitimization for the top-down appointment of the youth representative into the high-level steering committee. And we were directed to apply for membership in this network instead of being given the chance to have a student representative that is accountable to the constituency in this space.

Will Brehm  6:25
You know, why did UNESCO decide to go down this route of a top-down selection of a youth representative legitimized through this Youth Network rather than engaging with student unions?

Sebastian Berger  6:37
I personally think that the strong focus on youth in the United Nations is not a mere coincidence but rather a result of long negotiations between state representative on how to categorize or limit the participation of young people. In that case, a categorization which purposely lacked representativeness and accountability. And the categorization which is broadly based for some states on the intention of excluding student movements from participating in UN organs. As you know, democratic student unions have throughout history often been very critical voices and a force against national governments. Many of them, I think, are to this point, not willing to give that group the opportunity to also take a stance and criticize them in international fora.

Will Brehm  6:37
In your work -in your experiences at the pre-Summit, but also, of course, over the last few years as you’ve been very involved in this sort of process of bringing student and youth voices into these high-level meetings and sort of this global architecture of education- have you found that there’s sort of disagreement among youth themselves as to how best this should look within the global architecture? Rather than just some sort of contestation with the UNESCO powers that be? Like, is there any disagreement internally among students and youth?

Sebastian Berger  7:57
I would not necessarily say disagreement. I do think that there is agreement that both groups need to be represented because both groups represent a completely different demographic with a very different way of organizing themselves and with very different inputs that they can bring to the table. And particularly one of the positive takeaways for me personally from the pre-Summit was the youth consultation. Not because it was so well organized from the SDG for Youth Network side but because other grassroots youth representatives were strongly in favor of many progressive positions. Among others, the need to include student representatives and student unions in education policymaking as a tool to democratize education and making sure that it’s not the people in power who pick people who sit on the decision-making tables but rather young people in education themselves.

Will Brehm  8:40
It seems like such common sense in a way. I guess, I’m going to ask maybe a slightly stupid question. But maybe then again, there are no stupid questions. What is the difference in your mind between students and youth?

Sebastian Berger  8:53
So, the difference between students and youth, I think, is first of all, a demographic one. In times of lifelong learning and in times of economic distress where many students have to work to finance their education, not all students or young people. The same applies to young researchers, to PhD students, many of them do not fall within the margin of the youth category. On the other side, when we talk about representation, once again, it’s a big difference of being elected to represent a group, a very specific group that has a democratic accountability framework, or just being a member of a group. I’m also under 30. So, in theory, I would be a youth representative. Whether I have the mandate to speak on behalf of youth just because of that is a very different story. So, I think it needs both. It needs both, these brilliant individuals that are being selected by UNESCO to come to these spaces and put their input on the table, but it also needs elected and representative accountable spokespeople of education unions. So, both has its legitimacy, but you cannot just focus on one and neglect the other.

Will Brehm  9:51
And so, in a way this would mean potentially having two seats at a minimum of Youth and Students on these SDG committees?

Sebastian Berger  9:59
Very much so. As I said previously, I think that both groups bring distinct added value to the table. And we’ve been in conversations with UNESCO recently and had a mighty positive reception to the idea that the second seat would be created at a later point. And for now, we hope that the high-level steering committee will decide to grant an observer status to an elected student representative in the high-level steering committee and the Sherpa Group.

Will Brehm  10:21
Wow, I mean, that’s fantastic sort of progress in a way to hear that students may actually have a seat or a space at the table, so to speak. Another question that comes to mind is student union groups are, of course, locally organized potentially, nationally organized, and then perhaps in some regions, like the EU, where you have participated quite extensively, there are regional bodies. So, how can a global sort of body of students come together to elect, in a representative way, someone to sit at that table with UNESCO? How does that actually work?

Sebastian Berger  11:00
I think on all levels of education governance and policy, in most parts of the world, it is very clear that student involvement is a fundamental value that is shared by stakeholders, by university leadership, by governments on the institutional level, on a national level but also, as you were saying, on the regional level. If you look at the European Union, and the Bologna process, where students have a very prominent role in leading on the development of education in Europe, but also in other regions of the world if you look at the African Union. What is important to ensure legitimacy is that these people who are representing the voice of students in these spaces are actually elected. And I think that’s what the student movement has established in a way that only is comparable to the way that trade unions are organized. We have this bottom-up multi-level democratic governance structures where students elect their representative on an institutional level, on the national level, and then through the regional federations, on the regional level. There are regional student unions in Africa and Latin America and Europe, through the Commonwealth Students Association also in Asia. We are currently building regional student unions, so trying to reactivate it in the Pacific region with our colleagues in New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. And now we do that on the global level through the global student forum. And it has taken decades without students having a voice to create the structure. That’s how it works. The regional and national unions elect their representatives into the steering committee of the Global Student Forum that holds the democratic legitimacy and takes the decisions on behalf of the international global student movement.

Will Brehm  12:25
It’s quite amazing. So, I want to actually dig into what the Global Student Forum is a bit more. So, these representatives get elected at these multiple layers, and then they end up getting put into representatives into the Global Student Forum. So, do these students then continue to be students themselves wherever they are located, and then just participate virtually? Or how does it actually work, like the Global Student Forum as this global entity?

Sebastian Berger  12:52
So, definitely the elected student leaders continue to be students but as it is the case in other student movements on a national and regional level, they often turn down their progress on studies for the sake of being activists and doing their political work, which unfortunately, since the student movement generally is underfunded, it’s not really an endeavor that helps them in their economic situation. But they do take on their responsibilities as a part time volunteering role. And at the moment, due to COVID, mostly the engagements were by digital means. But now that conferences are taking up again, and meetings are taking up again, we hope that we have the chance and also find more funding to really create the movement bringing people together and allowing student representatives to be in the relevant advocacy spaces.

Will Brehm  13:34
So, how many students are represented by the Global Student Forum? Like how many different unions are involved? What’s the size of this organization?

Sebastian Berger  13:44
So, we started out with around 180 national unions represented through the five regional federations but since then grew to 202 national regional unions from 122 countries and territories. I think what is important to point out is that we both encompass secondary level unions, so school student unions, and tertiary level student unions. And at the moment, we represent approximately around 200 million learners.

Will Brehm  14:10
It’s incredible. And it’s amazing to think that it took decades, as you said, to sort of get to this point. I mean, you’re working at the secretariat for the Global Student Forum in Brussels? And so, you’ve been involved with student unions in Austria and the EU for a long time as well. Looking back on your own history, but also, knowing that the longer history of student union participation at the global level and building this architecture very slowly and over decades, are there particular reasons why you think this took so long? Or is it just part of the process of actually doing this in a more democratic way that it just takes time to sort of build up these structures?

Sebastian Berger  14:52
It was a tremendous amount of work that has been done in the lead up to establishing the Global Student Forum in 2020. To try and find consensus on the political nature and the organizational governance of the initiative, ensuring bottom-up democracy but also ensuring that these different ways of working, these different organizational cultures can come together and work on certain issues that are relevant to them and we found out quite quickly that the problems that students are facing are, of course, different regionally. But holistically speaking, if you take a look at the macro perspective, are quite similar. It’s high tuition fees, its violence in institutions, it is the decline of democracy, it is environmental justice issues, it is things that cannot be solved within the thinking of regional and national boundaries. So, I think that’s the reason why we managed to establish this alongside another very fundamental issue that was there before. We had the chance that we had great allies and the political window of opportunity with COVID, I think, plus funding. So, there were previous attempts but without any funding to establish organizational structures, or secretaries, etc. It’s really, really hard to put this together. And the student movement itself historically has very little funding because students do not have much money themselves to support their interest representation structures.

Will Brehm  15:59
Does it get problematic having sort of a high turnover of students, right? I mean, because students are quite transitory. They are students for a particular number of years, they might take a year or two off to participate in these activities. But they are changing quite rapidly and quickly and only have, like, a short window of opportunity to be involved in some of these student unions in particular. So, does that also make it difficult to sort of build some of these lasting structures that are beyond any one student, let’s say?

Sebastian Berger  16:27
Yes, very much so. I think you’ve identified one of the most crucial flaws by default in our movement, that we have a high turnover. People stay in universities, in schools, for a very limited amount of time, and then usually move on with their lives and have very little to do with the students’ movement once they are alumnus and graduates. So, what we need to do as a movement to grow stronger is creating mechanisms to preserve organizational knowledge and have effective handovers from one generation to another. And I think one thing that can guarantee it is having professional secretariats that support elected student representatives in executing their political agenda and attaining their goals. So, that’s once again, a question of funding. But I think that’s where it’s moving towards great structures that allow to combat the negative effects of the turnover we have in the students’ movement.

Will Brehm  17:12
I wanted to ask a question about -you just previously said something about COVID gave you this political opportunity. How did COVID enable the Global Student Forum to sort of have a political opportunity? What happened in particular?

Sebastian Berger  17:26
So, I think there are two layers to this. On the one hand, COVID impressively showed that we live in a highly globalized world and that issues that start somewhere very regionally can become issues of global concern. And I think that is the same mechanism as for climate change, and many other global crises. And it gave us also the opportunity to convene students with very little funding. So, there was no other opportunity to meet, than via Zoom, and that is relatively cost effective. While it’s getting harder and harder to bring a big amount of people on to Zoom calls now that we are more or less hopefully, on the way to recovery and ending this pandemic. It was, for us, very easy to convene loads of meetings to create momentum for the movement and bring together people for the idea of starting the Global Student Forum.

Will Brehm  18:09
It’s such an interesting sort of story that the long history of the struggle for student movements and unions to sort of work together and build together these regional and global networks and structures. And this sort of the structuring that you’re talking about the actual process of doing it, but then having these political opportunities like COVID that allowed online meetings and sort of a new urgency that gave new life in the sense to this organizing. And now to hear that the students themselves have been given a potential seat at the table at this UNESCO level. It’s just quite an amazing story to hear about. I want to go now less on the governance of student unions and the global architecture and more on what are some of the demands that students are going to try and make with UNESCO or on UNESCO? You’ve mentioned things like the environment and tuition fees and violence. So, how do you see some of these interests and issues that students holistically or globally are identifying? How do you see them translate into the Sustainable Development Goals, this notion of transformative education and just UNESCO generally? What does the Global Student Forum want, in a sense?

Sebastian Berger  19:27
So, what they’ve been trying to do since the outset of the initiative is to hold as many consultations with national unions and regional unions as possible concerning ministerial declarations of the high-level political forum but also G7 and G20 meetings, the World Higher Education Conference and now again, relating to the Transforming Education Summit. And the demands from the student’s constituency are very clear in relation to pushing back the privatization of education, pushing for a clear commitment and increased funding for education as a public and freely accessible good. It also relates very much to the students’ movements’ aspiration to make education more accessible for people regardless of disability, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs. So, first of all widening education but then also making education fit for purpose to combat the crises that we are facing. And specifically, one thing we’ve been focusing on also in cooperation with the teacher union, Education International, is that we have an urgent need to implement quality climate education. There is no quality education at this point of the crisis without transmitting the necessary knowledge to learners to understand the urgency of the climate crisis and find solutions among other issues like global active citizenship education. We believe that it’s really, really important that we have a clear commitment from governments that education is not only market serving but aims at raising active citizens that are capable of participating in the democratic discourse and shaping future societies in a manner that benefits the greater good of the population. Last, but not least, one of the things obviously that we are lobbying for is ensuring student participation through democratic unions. I think that is a tool to get into the rooms and push many of the other policy demands that are important to us relating to academic freedom and human rights but also to making sure that the digital transformation of education that we’re currently seeing is happening in the interest of learners in respect to the data of students and in respect to the fundamental principles of what education should look like.

Will Brehm  21:34
So, as we head into the August sort of holiday for many people in Europe and in the northern hemisphere, and it gives us about another six weeks or so before Transforming Education Summit kicks off in New York City. What sort of message do you want to tell policymakers and other global actors that are going to be involved in that Summit? What would your message be to them heading into the Summit?

Sebastian Berger  22:04
So, it is evident that without a fundamental reimagination of education alongside exceptional and immediate investments in education, it will take us decades to make up for the learning losses caused by the pandemic and we need to find ways to combat the trend to be on track to fail on all most education goals set up by the 2030 agenda. Our constituency -students and learners- are suffering from the direct fallout but even more so now from the economic crisis that stems from the pandemic which is putting further pressure on educational budgets. And as always, it’s hitting the most marginalized and poorer countries the most because richer countries have means to compensate. But in relation to financing, we urged the global North and high-income countries to show solidarity now in these grim times and substantially increase that development spending instead of cutting it down. Also in line with education in emergencies contained and ECW replenishment, it is important to take action. When spending targets on education reflects the global consensus, most governments do not even meet the target on spending 20% of their budgets and 6% of their GDP on education while these targets anyhow under underestimate the need. So, I think that investing in education means investing into our collective future. And now is the time to do it.

Will Brehm  23:21
Well, Sebastian Berger, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Best of luck in September at the TES. And please stay in touch and give us another update on how students are involved and the successes the students have at the global level in education policy. Thanks again for joining.

Sebastian Berger  23:36
Thanks so much, Will.

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Mentioned Resources

Transforming Education Pre-Summit

Transforming Education Summit

Youth Declaration Consultation Process

Calls to Action

2030 Agenda – SDG 4

Global Student Forum

Transforming Education Initiative

SDG for Youth Network. 

The Bologna Process

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