First meeting of Frontex Partnership Academies took place 4-5 December in Helsinki (Finland). After having finalised the process of establishment of the cooperation between Frontex and Member States’ training resources, leaders of academies responsible for border guard training from Austria, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, the United Kingdom and representatives of Frontex met to plan future cooperation and divide tasks between all partners.
Taking Epsoo Frontier Guard academy up on an invitation, participants of the meeting made precise plans for the future of educational activities. They decided, among others, on:
- development of teachers training aiming at implementation of Common Core Curriculum (academy in Finland)
- actual project meetings, multiplier trainings, ad-hoc trainings (training centre in Austria)
- mid-level trainings (academies in Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovenia and Finland)
- language trainings (academy in Slovakia)
- sea-border related trainings (Cyprus, Italy, Portugal - discussions not concluded yet)
- air-border related trainings and forged documents detection trainings (Netherlands - discussions not concluded yet)
- detection technology related trainings (academy in the UK)
- land-border operational related trainings (academy in Lithuania)
- university support meaning an accompanying evaluation of the updating process of the Common Core Curriculum (Institute for Educational Research in Jyvaskula – Finland)
Partnership academies are planned to act as supporters, certified in specific border guard training tasks, build the 2nd step in systemic cooperation (with FRONTEX’ training co-ordinators as the first step). This system on the one hand enables Member States to share and to bring in their expertise in specific areas of border guard training and to ensure the implementation as well as the development of common standards into MS’ training. On the other hand it enables to carry out ad hoc trainings when needed.
Partnership academies do not provide any training premises, they bring in their knowledge and competencies to plan, organise and carry out specific trainings and educational activities under Frontex umbrella.