Alliance 3 - School, Family and Community against early school leaving

Abstract

This report is an assessment of the training course Preventing and combatting early school leaving, carried by the Alliance 3, that has, as coordination the Catholic Western University (French: Université Catholique de l’Ouest, UCO, France) and, as partners, Universitat de Vic (Spain), Nyborg Ungdomsskole Youth School (Denmark), and the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Hungary). This project brings together different partners who have been working for several years on issues of inequality in school, inclusive education or early school leaving. The report presents the general problematic of the project to fight against ESL. The aims of the training are the following ones: - To contribute in a significant way to improve the academic results of the young people through the improvement of their basic skills. - To reinforce the accompaniment of the students’ families to include them more within the learning process. - To train educative actors for the accompaniment of young people with less opportunities. - To contribute to the professional development of teachers, youth workers and educators. - To reinforce the family-school-community relationship through the participation of all the actors in the territory to a project, which brings a global answer to the needs of young people. - To raise awareness among the children and their families of the existence of socio-cultural and educative resources in their environment and to facilitate their daily use. - To contribute to the (auto-) critical debate on schools and their roles in the reproduction of extant social inequalities and the mechanisms which facilitate it. In order to evaluate whether the training achieved its goals, this assessment is structured as follows. First, the methodology is described (i.e. a combination of state of the art in official statistics and academic literature, questionnaires, and focus groups). Then, each part of the results is described. Posteriorly, political recommendations are listed, and a final discussion concludes the assessment.