Bearing in mind the objectives of the Europe 2020 Strategy to reduce early school leaving to less then 10%, the European Priorities in the national context, as announced by the National Agency from Romania and the national statistical data regarding this topic from Romania (18.1%), Spain (18.3%), Italy (14%) and Bulgaria (12.7%) (Eurostat – Statistics explained, 2018), our project decided to tackle early school leaving (ESL), being mindful of its significant social and economical consequences for students, as well as for the economy and the society as a whole.
The objectives of our project are:

  1. To develop 3 skills that prevent students to become early school leavers (decision making, problem solving and effective communication) for
    1 000 students from 5 partner schools.
  2. To improve 1 000 students’ self-esteem and self-efficacy from 5 partner schools.
  3. To raise the awareness of 1000 parents from 5 partner schools regarding early school leaving.
  4. To develop one model of good practice regarding the effective prevention of early school leaving.
  5. To strengthen the capacity of 400 teachers to prevent ESL, whilst promoting participatory approaches, game based learning and ICT – based methodologies.
    The participants who will benefit directly are: 1000 students (with disadvantaged backgrounds and fewer opportunities, who face personal, social, family, economic or school-based problems), 1000 parents from 5 partner schools and 418 teachers from the local community.
    Our project aims to offer an innovative and creative approach to ESL, stimulating the students to engage in more attractive formal and non-formal education, in order to reach the desirable level of knowledge, skills and competence and to increase their commitment to quality, as well as their interest to learn, achieve and become active and responsible members of our society, actively engaged in the labour market. We plan to encourage students to develop personally and socially, with a particular focus on their self-esteem and self-efficacy in order to become more resilient, aiming to address the identified problem by using a structural, school based and person centered strategy that involve: a) to raise students’ aspirations and to motivate them to develop personally and socially, b) to encourage a proactive multi-agency approach to ESL, c) to increase parental involvement in motivating and supporting the students and d) to strengthen the teachers’ capacity to work with potentially school leavers and to offer a more attractive teaching and learning environment, using participatory approaches, game based learning and gamification and ICT-based methodology.