The previous thematic network ‘Innovation in Higher Arts Education in Europe’, co-ordinated by the Hogeschool Gent, Belgium, has developed a strong ‘Bologna’ platform for exchange in arts and music education. Broad European working groups in fine art, dance, music, and theatre identified, compared and described core competencies/learning outcomes for the first and second cycles of higher arts education. The working groups defined their own methodology and entered into a process similar to the ‘Tuning project’. The ‘European Dialogue on Bologna in the Arts’ in Vienna in 2003, where national ministries for Education and Culture, art schools and students discussed Bologna, marked the shift from the ‘why’ to the ‘how’. All this hard work opens up the possibility of real transparency and mobility and recognition in the arts education sector on a scale that seemed impossible only a few years ago.

In October 2004 a new phase for the thematic network, called INTER-ARTES started. Co-ordinator is the Aleksander Zelwerowicz State Theatre Academy, Poland with the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA) as lead partner. It brings together 50 arts institutions across Europe and all 350 ELIA members are associated to the network. Full of new plans, the network will work in relatively independent strands. The ‘learning outcomes’ approach will be further developed, involving more new EU member-states and candidate countries. New and more specialist subject areas such as jewellery will work according to the ‘tuning methodology’. The ‘quality’ strand will organise peer support in the field of self-evaluation, possibly leading to an independent voluntary European network for quality in the future. The European Commission’s request to identify ‘hidden’ knowledge and skills really struck a sympathetic chord in the higher arts education community. The network will identify examples of ‘disappearing’ pedagogical, artistic and cultural expertise as well as examples of ground breaking new knowledge in higher arts education. Closer contacts with the professional world, also in relation to the learning outcomes approach, will be organised. The network hopes that the two enthusiastic European groups of art students resulting of the previous TN will flourish and grow in the coming period.

Go to www.elia-artschools.org for the handbook ‘On the Move, Sharing experience on Bologna in the Arts’ and other outcomes.