Ghent: implementing action plans

Twelve secondary schools have been united in “Operatie Geslaagd” to jointly reduce the number of early school leavers. To support this engagement the Ghent Education Centre ran a pilot project on drafting and implementing school specific action plans.

Each school started with an analysis of the baseline position, revealing both strengths and working points, from which a selection of priorities was made. Challenges included engaging school teams to actively participate and connect to the project and translating school specific priorities into a specific and concrete action plan and implementing this plan in the long term.

The school teams have access to a range of support and participate in peer-to-peer learning and support sessions. After a second pilot, the team also introduced a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to compliment the training and development activities available to the school teams. This led to more detailed 'on the job' coaching that accompanies the work to implement the school action plans.

Ghent’s story is one of facilitating change in school contexts, to tackle the risk factor that cause early school leaving in a more effective way. These lessons learned are implemented in a new project, open to all secondary schools in Ghent.