3.1. Well-being of learners

This project is designed to support the development of Social-Emotional Learning skills (SEL) for 11-14 year olds, and to promote Peer Support to tackle and reduce bullying. SEL Programmes improve the student's social, emotional and academic skills, which include more pro-social behaviour and positive attitudes toward the self and others, and lower levels of emotional distress. Peer support systems reduce the negative impact of bullying on victims and make it more acceptable for them to report it. It follows a whole-school approach which includes young people, staff, parents and the wider community. Thus, this programme is a departure from the two-dimensional view of bullying as victim and bully, and instead looks at the social and group dynamics in a school or leisure environment to address a range of factors which contribute to bullying. ENABLE has trained a team of Ambassadors in each participating country, who are available to provide information and guidance to any school or organisation wishing to implement the programme.

The ICAM (Including Children Affected by Migration) programme is an Erasmus+ programme designed to ensure that children who have been affected by migration can access education. The programme helps schools to create a safe and secure environment for children affected by migration to enable them to take full advantage of their education.

LERI is a qualitative action research project under FRA’s multi-annual Roma Programme. It was developed in response to the European Commission’s Communication on an EU Framework for National Roma integration strategies up to 2020. LERI brings together local authorities and residents, in particular Roma, to investigate how they can best be involved in Roma integration actions, and identify which aspects of these actions work, which do not, and why. The aim of the project is to facilitate the engagement of all local stakeholders, including Roma, in joint efforts to enable Roma inclusion. The experience gained and the lessons learned during the process will help improve the design, implementation and monitoring of Roma integration policies and actions at the local level.

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.

The objective of the MiCREATE project is to encourage the inclusion of diverse groups of migrant children by adopting a child-centred approach to the integration of migrant children at educational and policy level. Stemming from the need to revisit the existing integration policies, the research project aims to comprehensively examine the contemporary integration processes of migrant children to enhance their agency, participation, and well-being.

This paper seeks to examine evidence regarding the potential for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams to play a key role in the prevention of early school leaving. As part of developing a strategy for such multi/interdisciplinary teams, an important focus is on necessary and supportive conditions for their effectiveness, rather than a deterministic assumption of their inevitable effectiveness. The report highlights the need to provide strong strategic guidance to the teams on important issues to be engaged in by the teams such as mental health support, alternatives to suspension, marginalized families outreach, teacher conflict resolution and diversity training skills, bullying prevention skills, positive school climate promotion, engagement with parenting skills and a focus on children?s language development etc.

The Peep Learning Together Programme (LTP) is run by Peeple Charity. It aims to raise children’s outcomes by helping them to make the most of their opportunities and to become confident communicators and active learners. By supporting parents/carers, the programme aims to improve children’s personal, social and emotional development, communication and language, early literacy, early numeracy and health and physical development.
The evidence-based Learning Together Programme values and extends what parents/carers already do. It helps strengthen adult-child relationships, building children’s self-esteem and emotional self-regulation. The programme offers key ideas and activities relating to child development that practitioners can share with parents/carers and their children. LTP helps parents and carers to: value and extend learning opportunities in everyday life; improve the quality of the home learning environment; develop secure attachment relationships with their children; and gain nationally-recognised units based on supporting their child's learning and development. Practitioners and parents can choose which and how many topics they want to focus on, depending on local needs and interests. Nationally-recognised adult learning units are embedded within the programme. These units are based on what parents/carers already do to support their child’s development, and how they have put into practice the knowledge gained while taking part in the programme. This builds parental capacity and “learner identity;, which research shows makes progress in volunteering, learning or work more likely.

This intervention is an educational approach centred on nurturing philosophical enquiry, originally developed by Professor Matthew Lipman in the USA in 1970. The aim of the programme is to create a classroom ‘community of enquiry’ and to help children become more willing and able to question, reason, construct arguments and collaborate with others.

Materials recommended by the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE) include stories, poems, scripts, short films, images, artefacts, and picture books. Feedback from teachers and pupils suggested that P4C had a beneficial impact on wider outcomes such as pupils’ confidence to speak, patience when listening to others, and self-esteem.

RefugeesWellSchool (RWS) is a European-funded Horizon 2020 project carried out by seven partners in six European countries. Its overall objective is to further implement the evidence-based role of preventive, school-based interventions in promoting refugee and migrant adolescents’ mental wellbeing, and how they can be implemented in diverse educational settings.