Through this project we aimed: - to improve the job related skills of our staff in teaching languages to bilingual students; - to improve our capacity to teach children with speech impairments - to increase the motivation and school performance of our students - to help our teachers learn how to create new educational instruments, adapted to the specific needs of our students
All three partner schools were facing similar problems: their bilingual students were struggling with language acquisition, receiving lower grades, losing motivation and/or leaving school early because of these things. Our teachers felt they lacked the necessary competencies and tools to reverse this trend. In Italy, more than one fifth of the learners from migrant or mixed backgrounds were dropping out each year, and the long-term tendency showed that over 70% of those moved straight to permanent unemployment, creating a cycle of marginalisation. In North Macedonia ethnic and religious tension had denied many children the chance to study either their mother tongue or Macedonian at the right age, so then they found both languages difficult and disengaged themselves from the lessons. In Bulgaria, recently returned emigrant families and Ukrainian refugees were placing children into local classes before they had mastered Bulgarian, which left them with learning delays and speech impairments, pushing them again towards poor results and early school leaving. By bringing together our experience, we believed we could develop solutions, directly assessing the social and educational needs we had identified in our three communities.