Prevent - Social innovation with OECD

If schools are not directly involved in « Job Creation », they have an important role to play creating opportunities, opening minds and may be doors, and sometimes creating links with labour market or more directly with companies.

The Europe 2020 strategy includes, as one of its headline targets, to reduce early school leaving to less than 10 % by 2020. High rates of early school leavers mean a tremendous waste of potential and, as a consequence, a major barrier to individual, social and economic development. One consequence of ESL, as highlighted in research, is a higher risk of ending up in unemployment.

Prevent Lead Expert Ulf Hägglund and Lead Partner Jean-Jacques Derrien had the opportunity to present particularly the Project during a pre-event meeting and also during anetworking session on the Urbact presentation’s stand also with the help of Urbact Communication Officer.

The PREVENT network was set up to find ways to reduce Early school leaving – with a special and in many ways innovative, ideas to better involve parents in the preventive measures.
In the OECD report “Parental Involvement in Selected PISA Countries and Economies”  the beneficial effects of parental involvement in children’s educational lives is discussed. The paper evaluates the levels of parental involvement across countries and sub-groups within countries, as well as the relationship of involvement with both cognitive (reading performance) and non-cognitive outcomes (enjoyment of reading and awareness of effective summarising strategies).

Transition periods are really crucial, the last one –after secondary school- still more essential on the way to jobs. But also it’s a very complex time for organizing dialog including teachers, students, and parents. That’s why PREVENT is based on the idea of a continuing process of prevention starting early.
But of course the special issues of teen age need attention. Even if the following approaches are not only dedicated to this time, we believe that there are particularly adapted to build up conditions of success and give all the students a chance.

• Integrate external actors within schools. Actors such as sports clubs, leisure, social actors, mediation, the police and so forth need to be integrated within schools as this will make it easier for "form" teachers to know about the activities of their students and what each actor is doing in helping a specific case of ESL.

• Provide better guidance for the students. It is necessary that youth have access to a genuine guidance and career orientation during their curriculum. To know oneself, reflect on your dreams, get involved in finding the right training programmes, be aware of the different professions and meet professionals, provide the appreciation of the long-lasting effort which any future profession will require. A regular and defined time should be devoted to orientation during the entire schooling and counselling should be given to each student by the teachers or educators.

• Develop a better assessment and recognition of competences. At present, students only receive a certificate once they finish their primary or secondary education, providing them nothing if they leave early. A Competence Certificate must be developed to provide students leaving early with an official document which acknowledges the competences they have acquired up to that point, enabling them to assert their acquired skills on the labour market but also to resume education more easily if they wish to do so in the future.

Moreover our objective in the project is to connect parents in their diversity to anything that could prevent ESL, both inside and outside so to speak… Actually parental involvement affects positively the psychosocial functioning of pupils: it concerns their behaviour, motivation, social competences, relationship with the teacher and the relationship between pupils’ (Smit, Driessen, Sluiter and Brus)

In the presentation of the findings and recommendations from the EC expert group on ESL there are some messages we would like to include, highlight, address – as they are exactly what we would like to do. It means maybe we could present a message that focuses on two parallel processes; a) support to and by students and families and b) support to ensure systems change. We have examples of both – and both are needed for sure to enhance the (educational, societal and labour market) possibilities for the young, and thus, for society as a whole.

To conclude we can say that PREVENT is about outreach on one hand and transitions (including the one from school, to job) on the other; a multilevel, action focussed learning process, both for parents, students, schools and policy makers.