Membership
Membership has been static but good new contacts have been made in Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland and Italy. It is hoped that this will lead to formal applications to join by next year's Conference and General Assembly. An updating of contact details for each member organization is currently being carried out; it is hoped to increase the proportion of e-mail contact details.
Conference 2001
The Scottish-based planning group have continued to make good progress. The programmes and application forms have been sent to all member bodies for distribution through their own channels. The executive hopes that all Board members will actively advertise and promote the Conference within their own nations. We are anxious to recruit conference members from as many countries as possible to ensure a thoroughly European atmosphere. In particular, easy booking is advertised, especially for travel arrangements, as the Edinburgh international festival will still be going on: early bookings means cheaper tickets!
CoGREE
I have attended two meetings of CoGREE (in England and the Netherlands) on behalf of EFTRE. The "reader" of articles on RE in Europe (to be edited by Prof. Terence Copley) has now obtained financing and is going ahead. Plans are still being made for an invited consultation of representatives of the six member bodies to be held in Vienna, 26-29 April 2001. There are concerns about obtaining the necessary funding. CoGREE has a small website at http://www.cogree.com
Internet
In March 2000 the EFTRE website http://re-xs.ucsm.ac.uk/eftre/ was completely redesigned and considerable expanded. We are grateful to Paul Hopkins for taking on the role of "web master". He will present this more fully in Paris: we are keen to expand the number of languages used on the site and will need assistance from each member group to achieve this. For the site to become more lively and useful to our members we need to encourage more interaction from individuals from all over Europe. It's your site - please use it and encourage others to do so.
Teacher Exchanges
Work has continued on the pilot schemes for RE teacher "fellowships" based on the model of the Farmington Fellowships in the UK. At the moment the first fellow is expected to go from Estonia to the Westminster Institute in Oxford (UK) in March 2001.
Jeremy Taylor (Chair EFTRE) - 07.09.2000