About ECOC

Europe's Children Our Concern (ECOC) is a voluntary based organisation which helps children and young people with learning difficulties living within Europe.

An ever-increasing number of people in Europe live outside their country of origin. Many of these people - adults and children - form part of an estimated 10% of Europeans who have some form of learning difficulty. For these people, living in a country where the education system is not in their mother tongue, finding help can be complex.
ECOC aims to help these children and their parents by:

• Organising training sessions for parents, teachers and other professionals, on detection, assessment, support and therapy.
• Running a dedicated help line so that anybody - parent, child or teacher - who needs help or information about learning difficulties has somebody to listen to them and offer advice if that is asked for.
• Providing information on matters such as finding therapists, support groups and other resources, and the availability of support and learning programmes in the different schools.
• Informing parents, children and teachers of important events in the field of learning disabilities as well as keeping people up to date with developments in the field through the twice-yearly ECOC newsletter and the monthly Online News
• Running a Special Needs Library, open to all.
• Organising an annual multilingual training conference.
• Carrying out research into best practice in this field throughout Europe , with a view to disseminating this information through organisations such as the European Agency for the Development in Special Needs Education.
• Working with other organisations to raise awareness in society of learning difficulties and the impact of 'hidden' disabilities on the education and lives of those children and young people who learn differently.
• Encouraging change in the way learning difficulties are perceived in society so as to promote inclusion and enable as many children and young people as possible to reach their full potential in mainstream education.

ECOC was established in 1993 and whilst we are primarily active in Brussels we have an extensive network of connections with like-minded organisations across Europe, particulary in France, Luxembourg, Germany and the Netherlands.

Europe's Children Our Concern is run almost entirely by volunteers. Therefore, funding provided by sponsors and donors directly supports our activities supporting children and young people with learning difficulties.

For more information do contact us.