Imagine that an educational institution sets a calendar at the beginning of the school year, clearly detailing the start, holidays and end of the course, but that one month before its end, announces that the course will be cut by two weeks, without any explanation.
You can stop imagining because this surreal situation is actually going on at the European School of Ixelles in Brussels. On 4/05/2022, the school notified that pupils from S1 to S4 would end their school year on 21/06/2022 instead of the planned date, 1/07/2022. The European School of Uccle in Brussels also announced it on 13/05/2022, at least providing an explanation: they need the full school and all the teachers to organize the Bac oral examinations. Continue reading Unreliable European school calendar
It is April and the 
We are in April and DG HR has not yet provided competition planning (provisional or otherwise). We do not think that this will change any time soon. Even if the planning was to become available now, the ongoing exclusion of certain staff categories (16 000 potentially eligible staff) from internal competitions requires action and the most recent example of this is the internal competition published at the end of the last year (
The new home leave decision 2022[1] will provide more days of leave to official, temporary agent and contract agent colleagues who are employed 2001km or more away from their official place of origin[2]. Generation 2004 thinks that this decision will have a far from solid impact on the general purpose of having a good work-life balance and the time to connect with friends and family, not to forget all the inevitable administrative work one needs to do when back in the home country. 
*Update 15.01.2025, Here’s our December note on 
16 March 2022: exactly 2 years since 100% teleworking became obligatory for almost everyone at the Commission. On that first day in 2020 some of us did not even have an internet connection at home or a computer. Nevertheless we did what we could with what we had and ensured business continuity at the Commission in the face of a global pandemic. We bought computers, got the internet connected, used our own mobile phones, joined work whatsapp groups, 