Our schools should be incubators of exploration and invention. They should be accelerators of innovation. They should promote Open Schooling. School leaders should set a vision for creating learning experiences that provide the right tools and supports for all learners to thrive. Teachers should be collaborators in learning, seeking new knowledge and constantly acquiring new skills alongside their students. A holistic approach to innovation is needed. We need to facilitate the process with a provision of the necessary catalyst: This is the foreseen role of the OSOS Coordination Action, to describe and implement at scale a process that will facilitate the transformation of schools to innovative ecosystems, acting as shared sites of science learning for which leaders, teachers, students and the local community share responsibility, over which they share authority, and from which they all benefit through the increase of their communities’ science capital and the development of responsible citizenship. In this framework the proposed coordination action is aiming to support a large number of European schools to implement Open Schooling approaches by a) developing a model that promote such a culture, b) offering guidelines and advice on issues such as staff development, redesigning time, and partnerships with relevant organisations (local industries, research organisations, parents associations and policy makers), and c) suggesting a range of possible implementation processes from small-scale prototypes through to setting up an “open school within a school” or even designing a new school while it is testing and assessing them in more than 1,000 school environments in 12 European countries. The themes of the project activities developed and pursuit in participating schools that will take place will focus on areas of science linked with the Grand Societal Challenges as shaped by the EC, will be related to RRI and will link with regional and local issues of interest.

LIGHT2015 is an ambitious, high impact EU-wide outreach and education project to promote the importance of photonics to young people, entrepreneurs and the general public during the United Nations International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies (IYL2015). LIGHT2015 will leverage the tremendous visibility of IYL2015 to ensure that the public in all member states of the EU understand and appreciate: (i) what photonics is; (ii) what photonics is used for; (iii) why photonics is important. LIGHT2015 will raise awareness of the essential role of photonics in driving economic growth and improving quality of life, and recognition of the need for continued promotion of training and education in photonics. Specific target audiences are young people, entrepreneurs and the public, and there will be special focus on encouraging careers for women and girls. The LIGHT2015 project management team includes the leadership of the global IYL2015 initiative, three members of the Board of Stakeholders of Photonics21, and Europe’s major scientific societies in physics and optics. We thus have access to an unprecedented network of contacts which will allow effective penetration of activities to the EU public. LIGHT2015 is structured in terms of three broad objectives: Explain Photonics, Inspire People and Network Europe. To achieve these, we plan a broad range of complementary actions: (i) high-profile public lectures directed to students, entrepreneurs and industry EU-wide; (ii) events involving broad stakeholder groups coinciding with major events on the 2015 photonics calendar; (iii) hand-on training for teachers and students, and the first European-scale citizen-science photonics experiment using smartphones to raise awareness of the power of photonics in daily life; (iv) leveraging the IYL2015 visibility to strengthen networks and collaborations in Europe in the fields of photonics outreach and education.

The CREATIONS coordination action aims to demonstrate innovative approaches and activities that involve teachers and students in Scientific Research through creative ways that are based on Art and focus on the development of effective links and synergies between schools and research infrastructures in order to spark young people’s interest in science and in following scientific careers. It aims to support policy development by a) demonstrating effective community building between researchers, teachers and students and empowering the latter to use, share and exploit in an innovative the collective power of unique scientific resources (research facilities, scientific instruments, advanced ICT tools, simulation and visualisation applications and scientific databases) in meaningful educational activities that build on the strengths of formal (educational field trips, virtual visits, school based masterclasses) and informal (games and student generated apps, webfests and hangouts, related artworks like science theatre or student generated exhibits, debates in the framework of junior science cafes) learning, that promote creative inquiry-based learning and appreciation of how science works, b) demonstrating effective integration of science education with infrastructures through monitored-for-impact innovative activities, which will provide feedback for the take-up of such interventions at large scale in Europe and c) documenting the whole process through the development of a roadmap that will include guidelines for the design and implementation of innovative educational and outreach activities that could act as a reference to be adapted for stakeholders in both scientific research outreach and science education policy.