According to OECD Pisa results (2009), immigrant students often have to overcome multiple barriers at once in order to succeed at school. Today, the successful integration of migrant children in European schools and societies is both an economic necessity and a pre-condition for democratic stability and for social cohesion (EC, 2008) therefore; it is in host countries’ interest to ensure the achievement of migrant children through creating inclusive education. Lend a Hand intends to contribute to social inclusion of immigrant and refugee students in primary schools. We can only achieve this aim if we undertake a holistic intervention at three levels: (i) school level, (ii) policy level, (iii) learning - teaching level. Our project will put forward the school and learning-teaching level findings in to practice while developing an action plan to be disseminated to the policy makers. The action plan will be based on a needs analysis conducted in all partner countries with a representative sample of students with refugee/immigrant backgroun and their teachers, and will be published on project's website and as a hard copy publication (in 4 languages and 100 copies) which will then be posted to policy makers in partner countries. We will then develop two curricula for intensive training of primary school and counseling and guidance teachers based on the needs analysis. We will train 20 teachers per country (C2) which will be following a training of trainers (ToT) to take place in Turkey (C1) with participation of 6 teachers per country during 5 days and 5 trainers from each of the partner organisations. The training of 20 teachers per country will be in the method of a series of monthly sessions over 6 months where the participant teachers will be introduced to the Toolkit (O3) (we will be developing as out third output based on the previous outputs. The toolkit will include ice-breaking activities, energizers, group work, simulation exercises etc. for teachers to integrate in their classes as well as a guide to implement them in the classroom. The toolkit (to be printed in 4 languages and 400 copies) will consist at least 50 different activity and tools addressing to the needs of primary school, and guidance teachers and their students. It will also make suggestions for extra-curricular activities to be organised in schools. Through the 6 months teaching and mentoring activities, we aim at reaching at least 300 students with immigrant/refugee background in our partner countries. We will encourage them to reflect on the activities and prioritise their feedback in finalising the toolkit at the end of the project. For migrant children and their families, school is a whole new world, and represents the ability of the host society to accept or reject them (European Commission, 2008). We will therefore create an international schools network to promote exchange of good practices and values for social inclusion of immigrant students are similar. In this view, we will set up a nework of migrant-firendly schools with a total of 250 schools in the partner countries and the EU. We will also undertake a comprehensive dissemination plan consisting of press release, social media accounts, website, webpage for migrant-friendly schools network, quarterly newslettes, national conferences and opening and closure conferences.
Our project aims at promoting social inclusion of immigrant children in primary schools. We developed a specific curricula and train teachers who work in the schools with immigrant students on how to incorporate social inclusion principles in their lesson plans. We also developed toolkit for primary school teachers to use in their classes and encourage them to pilot a social inclusion teaching for six months throughout the project. We developed migrant-friendly schools network and guidelines where we are able to share reccomendations, regulations, tools and extra-curricular activities for schools to transform into socially inclusive institutions. We therefore, contributed to inclusive education while strengthening the profile of teachers and supporting schools to tackle issues faced by immigrant students such as early drop out or failure.