Identification of students’ at risk
Guideline for Policy Makers
6. The Implementation of the Strategy
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The strategy elaborated by the school inspectorates will be sent, in order to be implemented, to the school network.
The main directions of the educational strategies to eradicate early school leaving are: prevention, intervention and rewarding measures.
- Prevention is aimed at avoiding the instauration of conditions susceptible of fostering the triggering the process leading to early school leaving. The consolidation of participation to high quality education and caring services was admitted as being one of the most efficient measures to assure a favorable beginning in education and to develop endurance. Nevertheless, it is necessary to improve the access to education and high quality caring services meant for pre-school children.
Other possible obstacles against the success of the school performance can be excluded by means of increasing access to the educational path and improving the quality and the status of the educational professional branches.
The career and orientation counselor/the form master can contribute to preventing school drop out by making students aware of the measures (benefits) resulting from carrying on one’s education and instruction within a school (in formal environment), in conjunction with a better self knowledge of the student at school dropout risk.
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Intervention addresses the difficulties that come up at an early stage in order to stop early school leaving.
Intervention modalities at Community level
- Informing the community on the reality
- Drawing attention to the seriousness and consequences at the socio-economic level, taking into consideration that the school abandon caused by poverty will bring on poverty;
- Poor school and professional training creates premises for a high rate of unemployment and for a poor financial situation;
- Those who left school early are prone to not having moral and civic values necessary to be a parent and a community citizen.
Intervention Modalities at the level of FAMILIES;
- Creating an association of parents of children at risk of early school leaving in order to provide them with career counseling, teaching them some strategies to find a job, techniques to solve crisis situations, strategies to monitor and manage student’s educational path;
- Organizing educational seminars in order to inform the parents on the optimal ways for student’s going to school;
- Jobs fairs and parents’ orientation towards training courses for qualifications required in the labour market;
- Financial support consisting in school aids and clothes, transport to and from school;
- Undertaking social investigation and offering social assistance, if necessary
Intervention modalities at school level:
Because one of the early school leaving causes is absenteeism, the intervention strategies must have in view the school too, mainly focusing on their quality of the instructive-educational intervention, the pertinence of the contents in relation with the students’ learning needs, the relevance of the methods and didactic styles for the students’ cognitive situations, assessment system, etc.
Taking into account the intervention strategies that are required at the school level, very important to offer pedagogical counseling for teachers working with this category of students as well as training courses that aim the knowledge and use of some students’ individualized and personalized intervention plans .
- Teachers’ acquaintance with active and interactive learning techniques;
- Vocational counseling;
- Students’ classroom management;
Intervention modalities at the students’ level:
- Individual and group psycho pedagogical counseling ;
- Testing using psychological sets of tests in order to know the intellectual development level of the students’ abilities and personality profiles;
- Organizing some extra preparation activities – “school after school” – for students with learning difficulties, with lacks in education caused by absenteeism;
- The rewarding measures offer opportunities of education and training for those that dropped school early.
They can consist in a financial or other sort of support with the aim of contributing to the young people’s reintegration in the traditional educational systems or of offering a so called “second chance”.
- Each school will draw up a specific action plan according to concrete situations that will be implemented with the agreement of students and parents. The action plan will include prevention measures, intervention measures and rewarding measures.
- The action plan will be available for the school inspectorates and other external evaluation institutions.
