Lifelong Learning Project - School Inclusion - Preventing Early School Leaving

In-Contro Project - Together against early school leaving

Katia Scannavini

Arti Grafiche Agostini

Save the Children Italia Onlus, June 2011

Report

Italiano

English

The “In-Contro project”, presented in this report, was conceived and realized in 2010 by Save the Children Association in collaboration with the city of Rome. It appears to be a pilot-project that aims at concretely contrasting the scholastic drop out phenomenon. Before describing in detailed what it is about, the author introduces the reader on the early school leaving problem, analyzing it in the Italian context in particular. Initially she reflects upon the lack of a shared definition at literary level of the concept concerned, then she reviews the definitions adopted by different schools of thought on the theme. The author then focuses on the various laws and provisions that the Italian State adopted to reduce the scholastic drop out problem: these legal instruments have had an important function of deterrence on students more likely to abandon school, thanks to didactic programs and other related activities. This report contains some figures that illustrate the Italian situation region by region, ending with a more specific analysis on the city of Rome. The remaining part of the document contains a detailed presentation of Save the Children’s proposal and its application steps. This project provides for intervening not only on the single person that feels the distress, but also on the socializing process that he/she experiments and that involves a series of other actors (the school and the family in particular). The results of this project are extremely positive and encouraging. To conclude the report the author quotes the real stories of some students that felt the difficult experience of the scholastic dropout in first person.

The “In-Contro project” is an interesting proposal conceived to face the early school leaving problem. The structure of the present report is built in a coherent way and it lets the reader deeply understand this phenomenon in the Italian context. In the document the legal framework, as it was elaborated over the years in Italy, is drawn; that allows the audience to have a useful normative basis through which it can look at the theme. The main subject, the project of Save the Children, is described in a detailed and comprehensive way: its purpose is to give an adequate protection to the minors in order to tackle the possibility of dropouts. To reach this goal the project has been made up of several strategies, each of them acts directly on the students’ lives and on the group of actors involved in their socializing process. The activities and the programs contained in the project could serve as inspirations for societies or organizations that have to coexist with this dramatic phenomenon. The last part, in which the dropping out experiences of lots of minors are reported, let us perfectly understand how much complex is this problem and how can it destabilize the life of a child that, because of various factors, has to leave his/her studies too early.

http://images.savethechildren.it/IT/f/img_pubblicazioni/img147_b.pdf

Sara Ciabattini

Pixel Association

Project Assistant