Aims and activities

Early school leaving has been recognised as a pressing concern all across Europe for many years. The need for professionalizing the prevention of early school leaving (ESL) and early leaving from education and training (ELET) is heavily felt in every country in Europe. The EU has recognized the urgency of the situation. The outputs of this project contribute to EU policies that are to enable students to complete their secondary studies successfully.

The ESLplus project aims to reduce disparities in learning outcomes affecting learners from disadvantaged backgrounds, that is why we planned to systematically collect, analyse along standard criteria and to share knowledge, practices and applications related to the topic of reducing early school leaving at a European level.

Two main goals of the project are:

• to pool knowledge and experience with a user friendly online portal (ESL Portal) for knowledge sharing what will enable policy makers, educational institutions, school leaders, teachers and parents to identify and reduce early school leaving in their surroundings. The ESL Portal will be dynamic, interactive and fresh designed, in line with the latest trends for maximize the user’s experience. The published professional materials as well as the provided services (a structured good practice repository, professional background materials, application showing countries’ ESL related situation, interactive learning space including webinars, training courses, ESL library and personal stories of students and teachers) will be linked by an open tag-system that makes the portal user friendly and easy-researchable.
• to found a Europe wide network called the Association for Dropout Prevention in Europe (ADPE) by inviting practitioners, experts, relevant institutions, and professionals at policy and practical levels. ADPE will be a professional community of teacher educators, school workers, service providers in close connection and collaboration with other experts and networks at both national and international levels. 

The methodology was to start by a needs analysis of potential end users of the portal and other stakeholders and to build the following work on the results of the needs analysis. The needs analysis was elaborated by project partners who all have close connection with practitioners or decision and policy-makers in the field of education. The focus of needs analysis was on identifying the portal’s main target group and revealing their real needs and demands before collecting, selecting and developing the portal’s content.

One of the main parts of the portal will be the above mentioned good practice repository that will provide help mainly for frontline practitioners shared by their international colleagues. A standardized form for good practices has been developed; the aim was to create a form that helps good practice uploaders publishing their practice in a way that means real help for end users. The mentioned tag-system was developed too, the process was based on a profound literature review. 

In case of ADPE a network building has been started by direct mails and by a survey among the interested future members and ESL experts.

Primal outcome of the project is that as ESL is a complex problem only complex help, structured information and cross-sectoral cooperation can be effective if we would help actors in need. Both main outputs, the portal and the association, will serve it with each their elements.

As next steps partners has started working on designing and gathering professional content for the portal what is based mainly on the results of the needs analysis and the literature review. Partners will continue this work during the second half of the project, just like the network building for ADPE by personal invitations. Dissemination will be started too by publishing our first results. 

Look at the ESLplus portal   and explore the learning opportunities!

www.eslplus.eu