The most concrete goal of the project is to develop a holistic and comprehensive guide for preventing early school leaving for students with special educational needs. This topic is addressed in four main modules: 1. Challenges and recommendations for individual students. 2. The role of the teacher and recommendations. 3. The role of the family and recommendations. 4. Ways to make school more attractive. This guide is intended to serve as a guide for other institutions facing similar challenges by bringing together experiences, best practices, and educational materials from partner countries. Our goal: To reduce early school leaving in partner institutions. To strengthen students' sense of belonging to school. To ensure that participants specialize in methods and techniques for preventing early school leaving. To develop teachers' professional and language skills. To raise awareness among families. To support students' participation and retention in society. To create a transnational culture of cooperation by sharing partner countries' methods for combating early school leaving.
This project was launched to address the high rate of early school leaving (ESL) among students with special educational needs. It directly aligns with the European Union's target of reducing the dropout rate to below 10%, as the dropout rate in Turkey is 18% and in Lithuania 14% among partner institutions. The primary motivation is a significant gap in established knowledge and international literature on the relationship between ESL and special education. Teachers, the project's direct target group, recognized the need for an organized and structured methodology to address ESL in their pre-service work. This project aims to address this need by developing a holistic guidance report with modules for students, teachers, families, and schools. The goal is to bridge the knowledge gap in this area by pooling best practices from different countries to develop sustainable and scalable solutions through international collaboration.