The main goals settled by our consortium were the following: - Avoid absenteeism and dropout by fostering students' motivation and self-confidence - Improve and update our teaching skills in order to achieve better academic results - Improve creativity, innovation and critical thinking in all the education and training levels - Foster equality, social cohesion and active citizenship by addressing diversity in the classroom - Promote employability and social insertion of underqualified students - Provide our students with the necessary tools to achieve their personal and professional goals along with their desired academic degrees - Improve the academic results of our students - Help our region, schools and students to overcome their historical isolation while providing employment opportunities thanks to the European dimension - Fight against social exclusion and isolation, which represent a potential risk and even a reality to our students - Deal with the diversity within the classrooms and give student-based responses according to their specific necessities: age, gender, previous knowledge and labour context
Based on our collaborative work within a public-school network, the three centres belonging to this consortium realised that we all share common features: - Heterogeneous students with a wide age range. - Students with a serious lack of training and knowledge or who struggle to understand and acquire the contents that this kind of studies implies. - Lack of motivation, which leads the students to absenteeism and dropout. Upon this context, and after analysing in depth the data contained in the Absenteeism Plan carried out by each centre, we all agreed that the rural environment in which we develop our activities and the type of students who attend our schools lead to a common problem: the increase of absenteeism and dropout during the last years. The results of the specific plans implemented by the three centres to fight against absenteeism and dropout were not satisfactory at all. For this reason, we decided to work together through this European project so as to find feasible and real responses to this problem that have been taking place successfully in other countries.