Lifelong Learning Project - School Inclusion - Preventing Early School Leaving

Guidelines on Identifying Young People at Risk of Early School Leaving

School Development Planning Initiatives

School Completion Programme (Funded by the Department of Education and Science under the National Development Plan with assistance from the European Social Fund)

January 2007

Project

English

English

The project here presented, called the School Completion Programme (SCP), was adopted within the European Union and deals with the theme of early school leaving. The main goal of this project is to identify the possible factors that can be seen as responsible for the scholastic dropouts. The coordinators want the project to give the effective tools to prevent and tackle students from early leaving school. The document concerned contains a brief presentation of the content of the program. It is divided into four sections, each of them addresses a specific topic. The first section identifies a rationale for targeting resources to children at risk of dropping out. The project falls into the category where the school is targeted as a number of children from disadvantaged backgrounds exceed a particular threshold. The second section lists the possible causes at the basis of the dropping out decision: age, sex, ethnicity, capacity, family structure and employment are some of the factors concerned. The third section proposes to find out the models with which to target young people at risk of dropping out. In the fourth section the reader is given the guidelines resulting from the questionnaire, sent to SCP Local Coordinators in January 2007, on identifying people at risk of early leaving school.

The most important feature of the School Completion Programme (SCP) is the attempt to find explanations to the problem of early school leaving. The original causes identified within this study should permit to prevent, or at least reduce, the rate of early school leavers. This is a serious object to be considered: every country facing the same problem should be actively involved in this kind of projects. The promoters outline an exhaustive rationale for targeting young people at risk of dropping out from school. Then the project explicitly addresses the causes for this problem, which are to be found in the personal background of the students and in the features of the world surrounding him. The working method is well explained in the project, with a presentation step by step. A questionnaire was organized and from its results some guidelines were drawn in order to prevent the risk of scholastic dropouts. The project is of extreme importance, not only because it deals with an urgent theme, that still today affects many developed and industrialized countries, but also because it sets itself in the right approach. The goal of the project is to tackle early school leavers. This process will take a long time, but the pathway chosen by this program will certainly bring to positive results, because it starts from the roots of the problem and carries on plans to avoid the emerging of bad situations in an individual’s life.

http://www.sdpi.ie/SDPI_DEIS_Docs/SCP_guidelines_identifying_young_people_risk_early_school_leaving.pdf

Sara Ciabattini

Pixel Association

Project Assistant