The PIC meeting was scheduled a month before the EMINENT conference with the purpose to contribute to the discussion on political priorities in education.  Amongst the issues mentioned was: "Making innovation in schools happen on a large scale". Innovation itself cannot be the goal of action in education, but rather a possible path to attain educational and societal goals.

The meeting took the form of a discussion divided into three parts. The first part dealt with the changing role of schools and how they could respond to the current challenges. To complement the discussion there has been a summary of questionnaire result which was sent out beforehand. The conclusions of the questionnaire were drawn from answers of PIC members as well as P2V partners. The questions were based on the eight challenges facing schools raised by the European Commission’s Working Paper entitled “Schools for the 21st Century”.

There were many issues on the agenda like collaborative learning, form of assessment, and others. The main conclusion one might extract is that today there are various techniques and practices. The search for new practices or search for innovation does not mean necessary radical change. New ideas have to be more like an addition to what it has been already done. In other words they should have complementary role rather than a replacing one.

The second part of posed the question of how should one understand ‘innovation at large scale’. Two major trends emerged – a top down approach which allows applying policies at national level; and a bottom up approach as requests from agencies, school or even individual teachers. The conclusion deriving from this discussion was that the scale of innovation is extremely difficult to define and reach agreement upon it – is it a cultural impact, is it the number of schools or the number of teachers, is it by regional, national or EU level and others.

Nonetheless all participants agreed - schools should be allowed to be able to innovative. In other words, it is more about allowing than facilitating schools to innovate. This means giving the opportunity for schools to experiment and to fail, and not being punished about that.

Part three explored what policies and strategies can ministries and agencies contribute to ‘making it happen’? The major focus was on sharing good practices. There were several practices shared from Norway, UK and Italy. The initiative undertaken by Data Inspectorate, the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training and the Norwegian Board of Technology drew a lot of attention. The project is called "YOU decide - Thoughts and facts about protecting personal information" and it started in January 2007.

It is an educational campaign about raising young people's awareness of the need to protect their own and other people's personal information. The main message to the audience is 'you alone decide what you want to share, and who with'. Instead of adults advising why young people should not displace their personal information online, students themselves make videos build on possible scenarios of how such data may be used and abused by others. 

The project also involves students making short films based on their own everyday experience. The winners have been announced at the beginning of December. Well-known national media personalities took part in the event, and there has been coverage on national TV and in national press.

A copy of short movie will be distributed to every school across the country in spring 2008. More details about the campaign and also the finished films is made available on http://www.dubestemmer.no/english.php.