Early warning – early reaction – increase performance in school qulity Erasmus Project

Project Title

Early warning – early reaction – increase performance in school qulity

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Inclusion – equity; Quality Assurance

Project Summary

Early warning – Early reaction
We have created a systematic work to assure that quality in school is a prerequisite for everyone working there. No matter at what level in order to be able to deliver high quality teaching and optimum learning output with focus on equal and inclusive education or training to all groups of learners. An effective quality assurance is also decisive to result in an education that will stimulate the development and learning for all students and a life long desire to learn.

The aim with the quality assurance is to visualize quality and equality, what is done, why and what it leads to, to gain success for both the individual and the organization including its professionals. One major challenge in school quality development is the long process cycle, often the shortest cycle is a year. This means that a systematic review and improvement process only happens once a year and that students seldom have a profound experience of a continuous improvement process. During the three years of our ongoing project Early warning – Early reaction we have measured the students sense of belonging six times which has given us a long process cycle and assured quality work.

Our project is about early warning, early reaction. By developing an IT-tool we have seen an increase in performance in school quality and also an increase of the number of students that succeed at school.

The main objective of the project has been to work out a method and and an IT-tool that will help schools to assure their quality in a systematic and value-driven way to achieve the highest level of sense of belonging among the learners. By creating an environment where the learners belong and feel comfortable, indicators as grades, absence, the number of dropouts etc has shown positive trends and has helped the learners to succeed.

The target groups of this project are numerous but to start it is the learner who will succeed in his or her studies. But it is also the teacher who will succeed in meeting the student´s needs and deliver the proper learning. For the school this will be of great benefit to assure that the task to deliver the right learning to meet the needs of all the learners is achieved. The participants of this project are schools and organizations committed to systematic quality development, many committed to a national or European quality award process.

The project participants has been:
Nyköping Strand Utbildningscentrum, Sweden
Vågen Videregående skole, Norway
San José Jesuitak, Spain
Värdeskaparna, Sweden

The project participants has carried out the surveys, met locally and analyzed results, data and decided on measures to be taken. Each partner then brought this input to the Transnational meeting where the total result has been analyzed. The four physical meetings have rotated among the project participants.

The results of the project has proved the correlation between “a sense of belonging” and the learning output, a questionnaire where the statements strongly point out the connection, an IT-tool for the questionnarie, that is ready to be used in various schools, a toolkit of “good practices in the classroom”. All this is to be find at the web page www.earlywarning-early reaction.com.

The impact of the project has been on different levels. For the individual learner the probability of succeeding in learning outcome will increase. There will also be an enhancement of the teachers´ possibility of meeting the learners´ needs to achieve good learning outcome. On a local, regional and national basis our aim is to contribute to less drop-outs, more students with complete grades and exams which will form the basis for a sustainable life including: job, health, economy and social well being.

The needs to be addressed in this project were to:
-prove the importance of the cultural feeling for the learning output
-create tools to assess the present status in the teaching group
-visualize the student´s sense of belonging
-obtain knowledge of what makes a difference for the student´s sense of belonging
-develop the staff members´ knowledge and skills in this area
-develop the student´s consciousness of the importance of the sense of belonging.
All these needs have been fulfilled.

Our project is mainly teacher oriented, although the students of the participating learning institutions have been directly involved and have benefited from the results.

Our Objectives were to:
-develop a tool to measure, compare and analyze
-develop methods how to work in the classroom in order to develop the teachers teaching skills concerning teaching students within the theme of the project
-increase the students´ consciousness about the sense of belonging so that they can be an active part and make change in order to break a negative trend in their learning output and personal development
-enhance the competence of the teachers and staff
-disseminate the knowledge of sense of belonging
All these objectives were achieved

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 75925 Eur

Project Coordinator

Nyköping Strand Utbildningscentrum & Country: SE

Project Partners

• Värdeskaparna – Institute of Value Creation Management IVCM Aktiebolag
• SAN JOSE-JESUITAK
• Vågen videregående skole