Dear EASSW members,

After the conference held in Paris last week I want to thank you for your participation and your overall contribution. For more than 18 months we (Executive Committee of the EASSW and UNAFORIS team) were preparing this gathering of social work teachers, researchers, students, social workers  and service users. Now we can say that these efforts resulted with the bigest European social work education conference ever that could become an important milestone for our common work towards better social work education. Upon all conference activities that were done and upon preliminary evaluation we can conclude the following:

1. The conference was successful as in terms of organization and participation, as well as in terms of content that we covered. Although the evaluation questionnaire is still ongoing we informally collected appreciations from many of participants, regarding the different aspects of the conference: keynotes, master classes, presented papers, off program etc.
2. The conference provided special opportunity for the French social work community that was present with so significant number of participants (450 out of 1200). With this, EASSW continues its aim to contribute on special way to the strenghtening of the social work education in the host country.
3. Paris conference was the biggest european social work education conference ever that brought together 1200 participants from 40 countries. The participants came not only from Europe but also from Africa, Asia, North America and Australia.
4. Beside social work teachers, students and service users also more than 50 volunteer students from all over France were included align with 12 teachers that formed so called WIPA (Welcome in Paris group) to welcome and help you.
5. During the conference, a total of 450 speakers participated in more than 140 parallel sessions, symposia, key notes and master classes, plenary sessions, posters, video presentations and more.
6. Before and during the conference the organizers (EASSW and UNAFORIS) have established broad cooperation with different partners including: UNESCO, Council of Europe, Power Us, IFSW Europe and IASSW. Also, active support to the conference was given by the French Ministry of Social Affairs, City of Paris, University Rene Descartes and others.
7. We can inform you that the conference materials (presentations, pictures etc.) will be published on the conference web site and partially also at the EASSW website.
8. At the closing ceremony we adopted Final Statement available below this article. We kindly ask you to further distribute it across your networks
9. We invite those of you who want to publish your full conference paper in the special issue of the International Journal of Social Work Education to submit the abstracts until August 1st according to the informations provided in the conference materials
10. This year we invested in the new EASSW website (www.eassw.org): this will become an important meeting place for EASSW members only if members actually will use it and make it come ”alive”. It is as having a beautiful house that needs to be furnished and inhabited. And we know that the website will only be used as far as you will consider it useful and that it will meet your needs as social work educator.  We have tried to do our best, however your contribution will make the difference!  It is important that members visit the website, comment and propose. The following two months (July and August) will be put in a “beta-phase”’ in order to find improvements: please register so you can access the member area (there is a video on the web site that instructs how to do it), build your profile. Tell us what are the bugs, what are your wishes and suggestions for improvement. Tell us  if you are interested to some special forum or activities and if you want to collaborate more actively. To boost the website, we decided to offer free access to member activities untill December 2017 using this code: free2017.
11. We remind you about the possibility to use the EASSW funds (up to 6000 EUR) for your collaborative projects. The propositions for this you will find also at the web site: www.eassw.org
12. The EASSW can contribute to the quality of social work education in Europe by the strenght of its members. Currently our membership includes more than 300 social work schools. We invite you to continue to be our members and to invite your partner schools to join us. During the EASSW General Assembly held on June 27th we adopted new Statute of the EASSW that will be published very soon also at our website.
13. The next EASSW conference will be held in the middle of 2019 and we already started with the selection of the next host. The final decision will be made during the next Executive Committee meeting in November this year.
14. Finally, we cordially invite you to send us your initiatives, proposals, opinions but also critics if you have. This conference shown very clearly how important is to build strong and productive networking among the social work schools to be able to develop social work education as well as social work profession in whole toward direction which this amazing profession deserves

Nino Žganec, President of the EASSW