Early school leaving: working group meets at AER plenary

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The first presentation on the working group meetings in Timis was about the efforts and achievements to combat drop-out in Catalonia by the representatives of the Employment Service of Catalonia (ES). This regional organization is also a partner of the Erasmus+ JET CD project. Catalunya also chairs the AER Subcommittee on Youth.

Report on JET-CD project

The presentation and discussion on the regional experiences were followed by an update on the ERASMUS+ poject “Joint Efforts To Combat Dropout”. Ilona Novak, the project Co-ordinator presented a summary of the results and achievements from the start of the project regarding the following intellectual outputs

O1 – Study reports on dropout in regional context and about the result of the inventory work regarding best practices for prevention, intervention and compensation measures;

O2 – Joint methodology to prevent dropout by cross sectorial cooperation;

O3 – Joint methodology to detect early school leavers and to identify their needs for re-motivate and re-engage them and

O4 – Joint methodology and solutions for compensation measures to re-enter early school leavers in the education system.

The intellectual output about compensation measures raised particular interest among the group of AER member regions.

Upcoming outputs of the JET-CD project

The recent work in the Erasmus + project on the toolbox was presented in details. This toolbox will gather the joint methodologies for prevention, intervention and compensation measures from the participating regions and will be presented during the dissemination final conference in Hampshire 21st of June. The policy recommendation to combat school dropout, will be published before the project closure in the end of August this year. Members of the AER working group members were invited to attend the final conference in Hampshire.

Final output of working group

In the last part of the working group meeting the participants discussed and agreed on the final output of the AER working group on Combating school drop-out. The final output of the working group will be a “Handbook on regional best practices to combat school drop-out” which will be an inventory of regional good practices. They also agreed to use the same template which has been used in both the working group and in the project for best practice case studies to allow for comparison and benchmarking. The handbook and the EU-project results will be presented on the occasion of a joint conference, potentially during the spring AER Committee meeting 2017.

Links between the working group and the JET-CD project

Within the AER Committee on Culture Education and Youth the Subcommittee on Youth initiated work on combatting early school leaving. To facilitate the exchange of experiences and engage in mutual learning a working group was created in April 2013 under the leadership of the region of Västernorrland.

The JET-CD Erasmus+ project represented an opportunity for regions already involved in exchanging experiences and working together to improve policy making on the topic within the framework of the AER working group on early school drop-outs, to deepen this cooperation in a very concrete way.

The working group follows the progress of the JET-CD project via its regular meetings. The JET-CD outputs are shared both via the meetings and via social media and the AER website. News articles are regularly published on the homepage to ensure wider outreach of the JET-CD findings. Members from the project also benefit from feedback and experiences from other members in the working group, ensuring a constant flow of knowledge between members involved in the project and the wider group of regions interested in combatting school dropouts.