Lifelong Learning Project - School Inclusion - Preventing Early School Leaving

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Training Package / Introduction

Welcome to the training section of the ‘School Inclusion’ project!

The course ‘Prevention of School Early Leaving’, is intended for use by secondary school teachers, to help them to identify which of their students are at risk of early school leaving and to provide them with some useful skills to prevent or reduce the problem.

The course is organized in 5 modules:

Module 1:

Identification of Students at Risk
aims to help teachers and other educational professionals to identify young students at risk of dropping out of education.

Module 2:

Communication
provides practical proposals on how to facilitate communication with students, parents and colleagues in order to decrease the drop out rate at school.

Module 3:

Teaching methods
focuses on effective teaching strategies that foster the active involvement of all students in educational pathways.

Module 4:

Educational Evaluation and early school leaving prevention
focuses on Educational evaluation because teachers need to be acquainted with the modern meaning of evaluation, evaluation types and forms, models, techniques and tools in order to become able to use them effectively in their school classes to achieve, among other educational objectives, the prevention of early school leaving.

Module 5:

External support and cooperation
examines external resources and supports available for teachers and students to help them in the prevention of early school leaving.

As an integration to the course, the following services and materials are available for the teachers involved:

1. Teachers Forum to comment and receive further information on each of the modules. Teachers are invited to use the Forum to contact the authors of the course. On the Forum, the authors of each of the course modules answer questions and provide clarification or further information about the contents of the module they have developed.
2. Reports on Early School Leaving Issues reporting the situation on the current educational systems, current ‘drop out’ situations and the current ‘drop out’ national trends, in five European countries, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom. Each report identifies the recognised causes, current preventative strategies in operation or planned, and best practices identified, in respect of early school leaving issues.
3. Reviews of Publications a database of relevant material available in 4 different European countries on the topic of early school leaving. The reviews of books, studies, educational papers, statistics, official documents, web sites etc., were produced by the partners and experts involved in the School Inclusion project.
4. Presentation of Case Studies focusing on real life examples of young students who abandoned school before completing their compulsory education or achieving a leaving certificate. Each example is presented with an introductory description followed by an analysis of the causes that led to the early school leaving by the student, the strategies adopted to try to deal with the problem and the successful solutions (if any) identified.
5. Interviews were undertaken, in five different European countries, with councilors in charge of educational policies, Headteachers, teachers, students and parents / carers on the subject of early school leaving.
6. Description of Experiences of teachers in dealing with the problem of early school leaving. This interactive space provides teachers with the opportunity to share their experiences and to learn from the approaches and techniques used by other teachers facing the same problem of students at risk of dropping out.