Can the Higher Education experience and environment be inclusive without students engaged in deciding how?

Following the success of the 2023 Student Essay Competition, the Magna Charta Observatory (MCO) is pleased to launch a new call for essays from university students worldwide. This year the MCO is inviting students to take the helm as coordinators of their study programs, and reflect on how access to education, with diversity and inclusivity anchored in principles of equity and fairness, can prevail.

The Magna Charta Universitatum 2020 speaks about the critical role of universities in acknowledging that individuals and communities, often due to inequitable circumstances, have difficulty gaining access to higher education or influencing the modes and matters of academic study.

The MCO will deliver a webinar with the Global Student Forum (GSF) and the European Students’ Union (ESU) on the 13th of May to make a case for the need and role of students in deciding how the higher education experience and environment is made to be inclusive.

By launching the student essay competition during this webinar, the MCO would not only like to give more substance to the topic of inclusion but also strengthen our commitment to increasing and raising the profile of student involvement in universities.

14.50 Opening access to participants at Zoom

15.00 Welcome and Introduction by the moderator

Martina Darmanin, Member of the MCO Governing Council

15.05 Keynote

by Graeme Atherton, Head of the Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up (CEILUP) and Director, National Education Opportunities Network (NEON)

15.20 Keynote

by Angel Mbuthia, Secretary for Gender and International Relations, All-Africa Students Union

15.35 Q&A

15.45 Launch of the 2024 Student Essay

by David Lock, Secretary General of the Magna Charta Observatory

16.00 End of the webinar