L’école maternelle, levier pour l’éducation future de l’enfant. Erasmus Project

Project Title

L’école maternelle, levier pour l’éducation future de l’enfant.

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 Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Gender equality / equal opportunities; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

This project is based on the “Europe 2020” strategies, aiming on the one hand to reduce the drop-out rate to less than 10% and on the other hand to ensure that 95% of children aged 4 to 6 attend pre-school education. These are two issues that we have in common with all the partners of the project.
Our schools are located in neighbourhoods where a number of pupils are growing up in families where the income is below or close to the poverty line. Some parents had a difficult past with school and are themselves former school “dropouts”. Most of them do not have the tools or the keys that would allow their children to succeed in school and more specifically to feel comfortable at school. These “life-insecure” families have to face financial hardships that often go hand in hand with many other problems (health, housing, unemployment …).
To this home environment we can add the problems of the neighbourhoods as well as the environment close to the schools which sometimes constitute an obstacle to the fulfillment of the pupils. They generate, in fact, sometimes a source of behavioural deviance of the teenagers and pre-adults who prowl there. They meet around the school. Our pupils then witness verbal or physical abuse from their elders. Besides, in certain neighbourhoods, all ranks of society come together with glaring social inequalities generating misunderstandings and tensions.
Our project was not meant to solve all the problems. It was intended to raise awareness of these realities among all those involved in the life and education of our young students with a view to adopting new behaviors and attitudes for parents and family circle as well as new strategies for all educational and social actors, to ensure that the first contact with the school from an early age becomes a real lever in the future education of the child.

To achieve our objectives, the choice of partners and the methodology were decisive. Sharing similar realities, it was imperative to find partners who could bring new insights and innovative pedagogical approaches to the issues addressed.
Our program was organized around the organization of 7 joint training events. Turkey offered a training on how to integrate parents into school life and learning activities, Belgium: learning through games with the help of CECP, Portugal: developing language at school and at home, Guadeloupe: the integration of culture into school and learning activities, Bulgaria: language learning and the use of ICT in pre-school, Romania : the strategies to be implemented to fight school dropout and Italy: the continuity between pre-school and primary education. These trainings had a 3-part structure: academic training (delivered by an external expert) and practical workshops, good practices exchange (with learning activities provided by the partners in the host schools) and the planning of an agenda of practice activities in each school.
Our partners have forced us upstream through training and reinvestment to build skills and have the confidence to innovate and try. This resulted in the production of a collection of activities for teaching experts and a booklet of advice for parents.
By implementing actions and a long-term dynamic, our goal is to continue to train all adults who surround the children.
Such a European project has taken our teachers out of a certain form of resignation. It has also permitted all the partners and actors of the school to find their places in order to offer a benevolent school offering everyone the opportunity to access social promotion.
Through this project we have made the school evolve as everyone’s business: parents, children, partners, teachers. We have changed the place of the parents because we have seen other ways of doing school elsewhere and promoting students. This has led us to review our school management to make it more efficient and effective.
The teaching teams have felt the need to implement piloting tools that have led them to rewrite their school project by taking into account the culture of the project work. Indeed, this was not the preferred method for every teacher working in his class without taking into account enrolling in a project. Children were the first victims of this situation. Since the beginning of the school year, we have been working on making the tools we offer more coherent for the pupils’ learning, now we have become aware of our lacks.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 177433 Eur

Project Coordinator

Ecole Communale de Seneffe & Country: BE

Project Partners

• Agrupamento de Escolas Gil Paes
• Fatih Ilkokulu
• Comprensivo Santo Stefano isa12
• TSELODNEVNA DETSKA GRADINA 30 KOSMONAVT
• Ecole Maternelle Publique Laure Laurent SOLIVEAU
• Scoala Gimnaziala Vladimir Streinu