Among the strategies "Europe 2020", one of them is to ensure that 95% of the children aged 4 to 6 years attending pre-school and another is to reduce the dropout rate to bring it within 10%. But in Belgium, 25% of the Walloon children and 40% of Brussels children grow up in a household with an income below the poverty line. In the other partner countries the situation is not any brighter. These countries also face kindergarten attendance problems, "parental support" of dropping out even before the start of primary school. These families "living in insecurity conditions" meet financial difficulties that often go along with many other problems (health, housing, education, employment, participation in social life ...) Children are the first victims of this situation. Early childhood is a key period in life. This is when it all happens and everything is bound. The bases built at that time largely affect the education of the child, their social and professional life, health and well-being both physically and mentally. So, we want to implement actions that will give the best chances of developing these children, whether from foreign origin or not, and that will allow them to access quality kindergarten in spending otherwise rather than spending more: in strengthening teacher training, differentiating approaches, stimulating the best language skills of young children and investing in relationships of trust with parents. The aim of our project: to make the first contact with the school become a lever in the future schooling of the child.
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.