Preventing early school leaving is a focus area in all the schools on campus. When a student does not complete their education the consequences are great for the individual and in the long run socio- economic cost for society. We wanted to see how the partner school tackles the same challenge. The findings will then be spread to all schools on our campus. A contributing factor in preventing early school leaving is attendance. Our school focuses on boosting attendance by creating a sense of belonging and motivation. We have in earlier projects seen the positive atmosphere and connection between the staff and the students and parents. We wanted to dig deeper into how they achieve that as well as observe it in the classroom and in the organization of support around the students. Language skills are essential to an active participation in the EU and Erasmus+ program. That demands a good quality of language education. We are therefore interested in constantly evolving and improving teaching methods, equal treatment, and legal certainty by collegial learning and job shadowing.
We applied for this project to investigate how a Spanish school has organized support around students to combat early school leaving. Combating early school leaving is a focus area in our school, and we wanted to observe their work to spark ideas as to how to continue our systematic quality management. The second goal was to learn more about teaching methods in English as a second language. With the means of job-shadowing, conversations with staff and students we could enhance collegial learning between the countries and in the long runs improve learning for the students. Increasing the quality of ESL-education benefits students by broadening the field for education and work abroad. The partner school was chosen since we already have an established contact and good cooperation through previous projects. In addition, the long term goal for the project was to increase international projects and generate more projects within the organization. A goal that has been reached and surpassed since it also generated Erasmus accreditations for the organization and has sparked interest in neighboring organization who have also applied for accreditation.