5.2. Мрежи от заинтересовани страни

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and school shutdown in Portugal, the Boa Água school has initiated a number of new pedagogies to support student learning, including mixed commission, interactive groups and dialogic gatherings. These new methods had been introduced as part of the INCLUD-ED project, which the school joined in 2017.

Guiding Cities joins policy makers and education stakeholders to map policy and guidance and create coherent policy to respond to the complex needs in the fight against ESL.

The project aimed to:
• Analyse guidance actions in 4 countries through country-based focus groups including stakeholders in education and guidance.
• Develop a Guiding Cities Model and Checklist mapping different possible actions, actors community needs relative to guidance and lifelong learning.
• Establish and manage Working Groups and a survey of best practices (involving at least 40 stakeholders).
• Publish online the GCities Model and links to resources and practices for each type of action and/or each target group. The GCities tools will be available in 6 languages (EN, ES, CAT, IT, EL, RO).
• Test the GCities Model and Checklist-benchmarking tools with at least 40 communities or organisations.
• Improve professional development of local service providers and school guidance practitioners.

През учебната година 2015/2016 Schulzentrum Ybbs (училищен център, състоящ се от три професионални гимназии) въведе концепцията IndY, съгласно която 20 % от времето за преподаване е предназначено за индивидуализирано учене. IndY цели да подобри експертните знания на учениците, тяхната мотивация, лична отговорност, самоуправление, умения за сътрудничество, емоционална интелигентност и методи за учене.

The Joaquim Ruyra Elementary School is located in a disadvantaged suburban district of Barcelona. In the 2016-2017 school year, 92% students were immigrants representing 28 different nationalities (including Pakistan, Morocco, Georgia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru, the Philippines, China, Bangladesh, Senegal, and the USA) or from minority background (Romani). The school has a 40% mobility rate.  

National and international press have referred to the school as the miracle school as it had achieved academic outcomes above the average in the Catalan standardised tests, outperforming elite schools in the Catalonia region.

All classes in the school feature group work 40% to 60% of the time. The groups mix students of different abilities, genders and nationalities.  The small groups are designed to ensure that no one is left out, and students are encouraged to participate actively.  Each group is facilitated by an adult (e.g. a classroom assistants, a parent).  Psychologists and special education teachers may also work in the classrooms, and they support volunteer parents, teachers and the students.  The extra support and student interaction are considered as essential for supporting and reinforcing children’s learning. 

Manchester Communication Academy (MCA) works to improve outcomes for children, families and the community. This secondary academy opened in 2010 to serve one of the most disadvantaged inner-city neighbourhoods in England. From the outset, the academy’s sponsor, a large employer in the city, wanted the school to help to contribute to a vibrant and sustainable neighbourhood, and committed to addressing the many inter-related economic, social and physical challenges which characterise the neighbourhood. This mission has directly shaped the academy programme, which places equal importance on ‘teaching and learning’ and ‘social investment’. The school’s social investment department is a highly distinctive feature of its overall strategy for addressing the impacts of disadvantage on young people’s education and wider life chances.

"Our School - My Future" was an ESL project initiated within the framework of the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships for School Education. It aims to support cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices between schools from different countries across Europe.
Part of the problem of ESL is attributed to lack of support and guidance, disengagement from schooling, and secondary-level curricula which too often do not offer enough options for varied courses, alternative teaching pedagogies, experiential and other hands-on learning opportunities or sufficient flexibility and support.
The framework for this project was designed to focus mainly on in-school factors influencing ESL, such as teaching methods and curricular issues, positive/negative school climate, and the parents’ role as a contributing factor to ESL.
A distance education programme, “Promotion of healthy lifestyles and development of the students’ social skills through physical education and environmental activities” was offered to teachers from five partner countries. Some 65 teachers from Greece, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Turkey had the opportunity to participate in this training programme, along with six academics who are also members of the Hellenic Academy of Physical Education.

In 2011/2012, the Dutch School Inspectorate concluded that student results in the Tjotter school were too low. The school used to have a negative pedagogical climate, and suffered from a loss of trust between school and parents. Eventually, the school staff lost confidence in the former school leader and requested the school board to appoint a new leader. With an arrival of the current school leader four years ago, innovative processes started. A common view of education and teacher mutual learning was established, in addition to the culture of continuous improvement.

Key interventions:

• improvement of teachers’ pedagogical and didactical skills: team schooling with subsequent follow up and monitoring within the learning community of teachers, individual coaching and change of personnel
• creating student portfolios to make students the owners of their learning process while students were also encouraged to participate in its formation
• other approaches being used at school: positive behaviour support; encouraging student participation and (direct) feedback on student’s results; ‘Teach like a Champion’; and HGW (Action Oriented Approach) for student differentiation.

In the past, the Dutch School Inspectorate notified the Warande school about their students‘ low results. The school staff, however, were very much hesitant towards the test-driven-accountability-approach established by the Inspectorate. Therefore, the school team decided to re-define and interpret test-driven accountability in their own way. Instead of emphasising the learning results per se, they wanted to focus on the process of learning itself – starting from children’s needs and guiding them in their own development.

To be able to focus on children’s continuous development, the school also felt the need to integrate the child day care, kindergarten, elementary education and after school care. These issues ignited the need for organisational and pedagogical changes. Overall, the school has been innovative during recent years, and latest innovative approaches represent a continuity of this process and reflect the school’s innovative culture.

The school has been developing innovative practices of informal learning for six years (since 2011). The main aims of these innovative approaches were to improve the educational level of pupils and school performance, to promote their social competences and sensitivity to the surrounding community and to enhance cooperation between teachers. As the first step of the informal learning approach, the school aimed to create informal learning environments by renovating the school yard and make it suitable for the learning purposes. As a second step, the school designed various learning approaches connected to the yard and broader school community (e.g., focusing on environmental education, natural sciences, reading). In this process the school cooperated with external stakeholders (scientists, artists, craftworkers, museums, etc.).