Giovanni Hoepli, IPA Vice President, and José Borghino, IPA Secretary General, attended the meeting of the Federation of European Publishers (FEP) in Bratislava, Slovakia, from 15-16 June. Chair and Vice Chair of the IPA’s Educational Publishers Forum (Christoph Pienkoss and José Manuel Anta) also attended the meeting, as did IPA Executive Committee members Fernando Benzo (Spain), Jessica Sänger (Germany), Renaud Lefebvre and Catherine Blache (France). The meeting focused on the wide range of legislation and other directives being discussed at the European Parliament and Commission and explored how publishers could re-think and reinforce the narratives we use in lobbying and advocacy.
IPA reported on the intense recent activities of our Committees and encouraged FEP members to attend the upcoming IPA Congress in Kuala Lumpur. After the meeting, we also spoke with senior representatives of the Slovak Ministry of Education centering on concerns about their new plans for curriculum changes. In this, we partnered with FEP, the Slovak Publishers Association, and individual Slovakian education publishers that are members of the Educational Publishers Forum. The results of these discussions were positive and we await promised modifications in the next few months.