A MAJOR three-day conference on child and education-related issues has started in York, attracting hundreds of people to the city.

NEEC 2010, formerly known as the North of England Education Conference, is Britain’s biggest education conference and is being hosted by City of York Council at the Royal York Hotel.

Hundreds of professionals from children’s services, along with those involved in research and higher education and senior politicians, are attending the event.

As she officially opened the conference yesterday, Kersten England, chief executive of City of York Council, said they had come close to calling off the event due to the snow.

She said she was “delighted” and “relieved” to welcome the delegates to York and hoped they would succeed in achieving the conference’s goal of working out how to unlock children’s potential.

She said: “If we don’t get this right, the future of our communities is diminished. The sobering reality is that across Europe, Britain is at the bottom of the league table that ranks the well-being of children. That is an urgent agenda.”

In his address, conference president Sir Michael Bichard, who chaired the Soham murders inquiry, said education should be about the “whole being”.

He said: “It’s about socialising and civilising, it’s about enabling people of all ages to realise their personal potential. “The basic skills and the teaching of core knowledge are essential, but education must also be about helping children to appreciate how others have gloriously applied these basics. “It’s about helping them to develop their own creativity because all human beings need to have a creative output to feel fulfilled. “Sadly, too often our education system does educate people out of their creativity and that is partly because the arts – by which I mean, art, music, dance and drama – are too often still at the bottom of the list.”

As part of yesterday’s programme, conference delegates were treated to entertainment from York’s young people, including Fulford Drama Group and York Youth String Quartet.

In the evening, they attended a civic reception at York Minster, where 500 pupils from 12 schools across York gave a singing performance.

The conference was due to continue today, with the last day on Friday, when a number of senior politicians, including Vernon Coaker – the Minister of State for Schools and Learners – are due to address the conference.