CONTEXT LEAD!, specific LEArning Disorders no more! is a project aimed at increasing SOCIAL INCLUSION starting with school education and decreasing Early School Leaving (ESL) empowering students with the right competences. Indeed the project wants to identify and defeat the barriers that students with Specific Learning Disabilities meet at school when they start writing and reading. EUROPE 2020 Strategy wants to reduce ESL to less 10 % around EUROPE, and, according to EUROSTAT (Disability statistics - access to education and training), 1 out of 4 people in EUROPE who faces BASIC ACTIVITY DIFFICULTIES, leaves the school prematurely. According to EPALE (JULY 2017) there were around 35.67 million students with such disabilities, 13.88 million coming from PRIMARY SCHOOL and 21.700.000 from secondary school. OBJECTIVE LEAD! wants to empower and support students (9-14 years old) in developing the right competences about the ADAPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES and their use thanks to the support of an INNOVATIVE PLATFORM, MY SKILLS. The learning material will be validated according to the EUROPEAN GUIDELINES OF THE VALIDATION OF NON-FORMAL AND INFORMAL LEARNING (CEDEFOP) and, at the end of the learning path, students will have the chance to get the EUROPEAN ADATPITVE TOOL LICENCE. TARGET GROUP The DIRECT TARGET GROUP of the project is represented by students with SPECIFIC LEARNING DIFFICULTIES (SLD) with age range 9-14 years old. The INDIRECT TARGET GROUP is instead composed by teachers, headmasters, tutors and trainers and all the school and no school staff dealing with students with Specific Learning Disorders. In pointing out the this target group, families have to be considered as indirect beneficiaries of the project due to the fact that they will exploit project results with their children. ACTIVITIES In order to reach its objective, LEAD! wants to promote forefront knowledge regarding the adaptive technologies (and their use) and create the EUROPEAN ADAPTIVE TOOL LICENCE targeting students with LSD (age 9-14). Students with SEN (SPECIFIC EDUCATIONAL NEEDS), which include students with Learning Specific Disorders, indeed have a higher probability to leave school prematurely compared to those students without disabilities ((Early School Leaving and Learners with Disabilities and/or Special Educational Needs, European Agency for special needs and inclusive education, 2017). To reach its objective, LEAD! will develop and adapt to distant learning a training course targeting the adaptive technologies which it will adapted to MY SKYLLS PLATFORM. At the end of the learning path, students can award the EUROPEAN ADAPTING TOOL LICENCE which it will support them to ACQUIRE the NECESSARY learning competences and, on the other side, it will be the quality LABEL that it will certify to the teachers that the students are ABLE TO USE THE ADAPTIVE TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES.
Objective of the project LEAD! was to support students to develop the right and necessary skills with respect to what are the compensatory tools and their correct use. In the end of the training course, after evaluation by experts, a certification of the acquired skills would have been provided for each student. Our target is composed by pupils with 9 and 14 years. Consequently, the indirect target defined is given by: teachers, parents, educators and stakeholders. The project idea, thus proposed, was divided into two specific objectives: to obtain a platform aimed at increasing information, knowledge and skills; define a training program capable of enhancing the learning performance of the pupils in order to issue a specific certificate. This certification is not a clinical tool where the difficulties of the person are specified but on the contrary it defines the skills and competences of the student himself. This would thus be a "revolutionary" way of understanding SLD since the non-skills due to a condition linked to a nosographic classification are not highlighted, but skills in the use of tools capable of remedying problems are highlighted closely related to school learning: reading, writing and calculating.
The Origin of the project is dictated by two factors: the growing number of students diagnosed with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD); address the needs of this segment of the school population which is among the most vulnerable and exposed to early school leaving. Epidemiological data show that in Italy alone there are approximately 276,000 minors with this condition, equal to 3.2% of enrolled students. In the rest of Europe, the data even reaches 17% (for example in the UK) because there is a particular irregularity of the written and oral language. In the planning phase, it was found that in Europe 1 in 4 young people has difficulty in acquiring and carrying out basic tasks and leaves school before any other age group. There are 36 million students with this condition of which almost 14 million are enrolled in primary school and about 22 million in secondary school (EPAL, 2017). A situation that has led the EU to strategies aimed at reducing school dropout to below 10% of the entire school population (Europe2020). Scientific literature shows that if there were adequate compensatory tools for every student with SLD, we would have greater inclusion and less school dropout.