SEARCH FOR A GOOD PRACTICE

The root of the problem was that many upper secondary high school students did not finish their diploma on time. School leaders and governance recognized that students who were struggling were in need of a different type of support than the pedagogical support traditionally offered in the school. Students were in need of a more holistic support targeting students’ well-being and situation as a whole. Management decided on implementing a new function at the school, a student coach. The coach provides holistic support for students at risk of not completing their educational programmes, especially students in need of motivational support. The coach collaborates with the class teachers (mentors) and the student health team (usually counsellor, special education teachers, school nurse, psychologist, educational and career advisor etc) to coordinate the interventions and support, and provide support of a holistic nature. The coach provides a support that reaches beyond the pedagogical support traditionally provided by the student health team and teachers in the school.

Beda Hallberg Upper Secondary School – starting a new school with flexible arrangements based on students’ individual courses of study. The idea is to start a school based on many of the “school success factors” where the staff is working to meet the individual needs of students: Provides an alternative upper secondary school format with: Flexible individualized, inclusive structure, student-centered, holistic instruction, formative assessment approaches. Staff focus not only on the student, but on the whole human being and his/her well-being. An underlying organized principle is that trust-based relationships with students have a major impact on educational performance. The relationship between teacher and student is at the core of all instruction/education The school is mainly targeting two categories of students; firstly, those who are looking for a small, local, municipal alternative and who apply directly after finishing lower secondary school and secondly young people aged 16-20 who want to return to their studies again after having dropped out of school. Some of them are referred directly from the other schools while others have been identified by “the municipal information responsibility”, in cooperation with social services, employment services, NGOs and other actors. The school targets students who, for various reasons need a more flexible school format. Some students are pursuing an athletic career alongside with their academic studies, and others need a slower/faster pace of study due to their life situation or learning disabilities etc. The results are manifold: the school which started in 2013 is implemented in the municipality and has grown to encompass a student population of about 90 (2015), and today is an important part of the municipal strategy to support all young people to finish their upper secondary education.

The project is developed in the cooperation of NGOs from Hungary, United Kingdom, Italy, France and Spain. Its main aim is to contribute to the reduction of early school leaving and to improve the school retention rates of the participants. Their special target group is those young people who face with social barriers and disadvantages hence they are at risk of early school leaving. Youth community centres help to reach the target group. The project partners use alternative methods which serve as basis of the project: Forum Theatre and Community Reporter methodology. Both methodologies help to discover, analyse and understand personal and social problems in informal learning and teaching forms where collaboration is essential. The project ended in August 2017 hence you can find several results on the website: - videos, stories and blog. - video lessons which give overview of the methodologies uses in the project - As for the outcomes, the partnership created an online booklet where they summarized what they learned and how they learned. The booklet contains short description of each workshop which uses the two mentioned methods hence the reader can have an overview from different point as the video lessons. - As part of what they learned the partnership identified 5 categories (relationships to peers, teachers, personal factors, economic situation and representations of the school) that can affect staying in school. They also identified those factors which drive away from school and their counterparts which help keeping youth in school. Regarding the process of the workshop another chapter summarizes how they worked and how they could handle difficult situations such as participants were constantly talking and interrupting the trainer or even being destructive (both physically and mentally). - As a part of the above-mentioned booklet they also compiled recommendations on How to create a school that students would not want to leave? Key words: Forum Theatre methodology, Community Reporter methodology, factors of leaving school, handling difficult situations, workshop methodology

Springboard Programme was a Hungarian national pilot programme which was commissioned by the state secretariat responsible for education (now within the Ministry of Human Resources) in 2007. The Springboard Programme’s target group was those young people, who failed during their school career (did not obtain any qualification or left school before their compulsory education) and who had little chances in the labour market and set the objective to lead them back to education or the world of work. The scope of the programme was to develop a one year curriculum and teaching materials suitable for the individual development of 14-24 year old young people with learning difficulties, and to prepare and support the teachers and leaders of those vocational schools that joined the programme.

Hungarian project helps poor to climb the social ladder. The comprehensive “You have the ladder in you” project, co-financed by the ESF, aimed at helping very poor and disadvantaged inhabitants to take their lives into their own hands. As it can be seen it was a comprehensive program which covered all relevant aspects of problems due to poor social-economic backgrounds and its consequences. The focus of development was the family itself and its members. Personal development plans were created and programs were differentiated by the family members’ needs: vocational training and labour force development for the adults, after-school activities for the children. It provided destitute locals with a way back into work, helped their children perform better in school and rehabilitated the run-down district where people lived without electricity and running water. Since the main reason behind social exclusion is the long-term unemployment, adults were given vocational training as forest rangers or builders while those without elementary education got help to finish their studies. As for the children of the area, specialists helped them stay in school and gave them career advice. In total, 109 people participated in the project; all of them were given a personalized development program - a guide to the next phase of their lives. The program was supported by 5 social workers, so called case-managers as well. The main aim and outcome was the strong involvement of the locals and the families’ active contribution. The project did not target only one or some elements of social exclusion but made efforts to cover its all aspects and involve all the relevant stakeholders.

TThe project funded by the Seventh Framework programme for Research and Technological Development is an ongoing international cooperation of the United Kingdom, Sweden, Portugal, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Hungary and Austria and planned to be finished in January 2018. The project focuses on researches and its main outputs will be project papers, publications and working papers. The project targets the topic of education systems in the 21st century, since the participating partners believe that the high rate of ESL in the EU is a symptom of the traditional education systems inability to adapt to new circumstances. When a pupil decides to leave the school or training before getting a qualification is interrelated to several individual, institutional (school) and structural/systemic failures. The researches plan to make visible these three levels (individual – micro, institutional – meso, systemic – macro) resistance to change and failure to adapt to and to overcome these social transformations. These transformations are the changing labour market conditions, demographic changes or migration. The project aims: - to provide insights into the mechanisms and processes that influence a pupil’s decision to leave school or training early; - to provide insights into the decision of school leavers to enrol in alternative learning possibilities. - to focus on the pupils that left education or training early, and are identified as NEET. - to identify and analyse the intervention and compensation measures that did succeed in transferring knowledge and in keeping pupils in education or training - to uncover specific configurations of variables and contexts influencing the processes related to ESL which may led to formulate conceptual models useful for the development and implementation of policies and specific measures to influence ESL.

The project funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission was an international cooperation of Italy, Greece, Spain, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Turkey. The project gathered 45 youth workers from the above-mentioned eight European countries The overall aim of the project is to enhance the development of new non-formal teaching methods in different field of studies. The project aimed generating new experiential learning techniques that education practitioners can use in order to develop new trainings meant to facilitate youth access to labour market in the form of a 7-day-long seminar. Participants who were involved in this project are able to create and deliver trainings in the field of intercultural dialogue, young entrepreneurship, early school leaving and human rights in an innovative way and with greater impact in youth development. The project has led to the development of a new design of international educational pathways in line with students need. The main tangible result of the Easy Learning project was the ELC (Experiential Learning Cycle) Toolkit called Easy Learning Toolkit. The Toolkit is developed as a brochure that can be used by trainers, professors, youth workers and other professionals when designing trainings for youth.

The project is an ongoing strategic partnership project for school education, funded by the Erasmus+ Programme and was carried out in international cooperation of Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Poland and Ireland. The project intended to finish at the end of 2018. The objective of E-EVALINTO is twofold. On the one hand, it is intended to promote peer mentoring actions addressed to both reduce early school leaving in migrant student’s population (secondary school) and to acknowledge the value of interculturality itself as part of an active and responsible European citizenship education. On the other hand, E-EVALINTO is aimed to develop an ICT framework for assessing, managing and developing activities for intercultural contexts, with particular focus to taking decision processes and the identification of different patterns that may be induced from the variety of potential situations to be analysed.

“Team cooperation to fight early school leaving, Training, Innovative Tools and Actions”, is a project dedicated to trainers, practitioners and stakeholders to provide scientific support, tools for action and training in order to prevent Early school Leaving from Education and Training (ELET). Three countries of the consortium (France, Luxembourg and Switzerland) are implementing local and multi-professional teams’ schools to set up measures addressing emerging difficulties at an early stage. Promoting the development of these teams appears to be one of the keys of successful strategies to reduce early school leaving (ESL). It is therefore necessary to follow the experiments, analyse the difficulties, the successful levers and the impact of teamwork on reducing ESL, and widespread the results of analyses, good practice and recommendations. The project funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission was an international cooperation of France, Spain, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Hungary and Switzerland.

The project funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission was an international cooperation of Bulgaria, Estonia, Romania, Latvia, Turkey, Denmark and Poland. The project was carried out between 2014 – 2016. The objectives of the project are to build entrepreneurial skills, raise students’ awareness of their character and abilities, to improve their IT skills while working on various projects, to raise attainment of under-achieving students, to get to know the labour market and broaden their horizons about the variety of jobs available as well as to learn more about the jobs in the area. Attached to that objectives, online open courses were developed in the project partners’ languages and covered the topics mentioned above. Besides that the project aimed to raise the quality of career counselling by improving students’ self-evaluation skills and their ability to assess their suitability for a particular job, to raise students’ awareness of the demands, requirements, problems and offers of the European labour market, to develop the English language and assimilation skills at all schools. Hence a career orientation activity guide was developed which consists of 13 activities which can be used for students between 14-19 years old.