Supporting Opportunity in Schools: Promoting Educational Equity Erasmus Project

General information for the Supporting Opportunity in Schools: Promoting Educational Equity Erasmus Project

Supporting Opportunity in Schools: Promoting Educational Equity Erasmus Project
July 7, 2020 12:00 am
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Project Title

Supporting Opportunity in Schools: Promoting Educational Equity

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 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

European countries have fulfilled the right to education, reaffirmed in many declarations, making education available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable. But it is not enough. Education plays a key role in determining how we spend our adult life and it has been proved that an individual’s level of education directly correlates to future quality of life. Consequently, there is a need for schools and education systems to focus on equity, as a measure of achievement, fairness and opportunity to ensure that personal characteristics are compensated and everyone can attain the same type of healthy lifestyle.

School stakeholders have a key role to enhance equity in education and school autonomy is a drive for school quality. By enabling schools to combine equity and quality, all children are given opportunities for a good quality education. These reasons let us set the aim of this project: To empower schools to enhance and assess equity, and the following specific objectives:
-To develop school practices that enhance equity in education
-To create a framework to assess equity in schools
-To empower school heads to lead school changes that increase equity in their schools
-To promote awareness and collaboration in school communities to enhance school equity

In a European project, it is important to generate and share new knowledge collaboratively; this is why we have created a partnership with different stakeholders: schools, universities and educational authorities, from five different countries with different schools systems and different school autonomy traditions.

The partnership is formed by nine institutions from Belgium, Italy, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom. The coordinator of the project is the General Inspectorate of Education in Catalonia, a regional educational authority, which supervises and evaluates equity in schools. In terms of educational authorities with similar competencies, we have as partners, the Evaluation Council of the Education System in Catalonia, the Ufficio Scolastico Regionale per la Lombardia, the Inspectorate of Education in Sibiu and Scholengroep Brussel, a school group with administrative power. With also count with Istituto Casati and Institut El Calamot, two secondary schools that along with some schools from Scholengroep Brussel have successfully tackled equity with good practices. Finally, the Welsh Centre for Equity in Education and the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu have expert knowledge on equity in education and are essential to set theoretical frameworks and publish good quality materials.

The target participants of the project are students, school leaders, university researches and educational stakeholders. They all have participated in different activities. We have applied action research and reflective practice methodologies and we have used teamwork as an organizational strategy. which have brought the following results:

The project has had the following results:
-103 staff mobilities in four transnational meetings
-34 staff participants in one international training activity
-More than 500 school heads and educational stakeholders in multiplier events
-5 papers on school equity published in academic journals and international conferences on education
-35 recordings and descriptions of school equity best practices
-More than 200 school engaged in assessing school equity
-More than 50 school heads trained in school equity
-6 newsletters in 6 languages sent to more than 5000 educational stakeholders

Apart from these results, we have produced 4 intellectual outputs:
-Framework and methodological guide on equity
-Digital tools to evaluate school equity (interactive rubric and indicators software package)
-Training course for school heads on equity in education
-Academic portal on equity in education with academic papers (written by project staff), best practices recordings and bibliography.

Some intangible results are:
-School heads have been empowered to deal with equity in their schools due to professional development course and the availability of tools to evaluate equity
-All stakeholders have become more aware of the importance of equity in education due to the availability of the project’s intellectual outputs and the planned dissemination activities: school leaders meetings and multiplier events
-All the staff in the project institutions have increased their knowledge and expertise on school equity thanks to their participation in the project

We also expect a very important long-term outcome, which is an increase of the number of schools that evaluate equity and implement good school equity practices within the project’s area of influence, thanks to the availability of all the products developed in the project in different open platforms, which will also ensure the longer term benefits of it.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 166258 Eur

Project Coordinator

Subdirecció General de la Inspecció d’Educació & Country: ES

Project Partners

  • GO! Scholengroep Brussel
  • CONSELL SUPERIOR D’AVALUACIÓ DEL SISTEMA EDUCATIU
  • Istituto comprensivo Casati
  • UFFICIO SCOLASTICO REGIONALE PER LA LOMBARDIA
  • Inspectoratul Scolar Judetean Sibiu
  • INSTITUT EL CALAMOT
  • UNIVERSITATEA LUCIAN BLAGA DIN SIBIU