Page 60 - Guiding-at-risk-youth-through-learning-to-work-Lessons-from-across-Europe

Guiding at-risk youth through learning to work
Lessons from across Europe

concentration of low income families has become an important and successful
element of the country’s policy on early school leaving. In France and Sweden
similar efforts target students who experience difficulties with reading, writing and
numeracy. To help combat early school leaving, the French Ministry of Education
has introduced Individualised programmes for academic success (Programme
personnalisé de réussite educative, known as PPRE) in primary and secondary
schools. It is aimed at students who display difficulties in learning French,
mathematics and modern languages and who are subsequently in danger of
leaving school without an upper secondary level qualification. Each student is
assigned an individualised action plan to help them learn and develop, while
taking into account their individual circumstances. Likewise, in 2001, the Czech
Republic introduced preparatory classes for children from disadvantaged
sociocultural backgrounds in an effort to improve school completion. The classes
follow a special curriculum and each child is assigned their own individual
educational programme. Group tutorials have been funded in Hungary to support
low achievers. Research has found that most children who have had to resit a
school year could have caught up with their fellow students simply with extra time
to improve their basic literacy and numeric skills.
Another discernable trend concerns teaching assistants. Many of the
countries studied have a long tradition of using teaching assistants to support
pupils, including France, Finland and the UK. Typically, teaching assistants
support students at risk of falling behind with their school tasks, answer questions
and try to stimulate interest and enthusiasm. Teachers in charge of a whole class
may not always be able to identify immediately if a pupil is falling behind or not
understanding the work, whereas teaching assistants working with individual
pupils or groups of pupils are ideally placed to recognise such circumstances and
address them accordingly. Further, students receive more personalised
instruction because either the assistant helps to give them more oneonone
instruction or frees the teacher of some of his/her duties so that he or she can
offer this to struggling students.
Teaching assistant posts have been created recently in Bulgaria and the
Czech Republic to support the integration of Roma pupils from segregated
classes into mainstream education. Assistants contribute to the transition by
helping pupils to adjust to the school environment, actively communicating with
students, their families and the wider community, as well as helping teachers with
educational activities. A similar policy in Hungary focuses on recruiting teaching
assistants from a range of different ethnic backgrounds.
Initial and continuing teacher training has become an important part of the
overall policy approach to encouraging school completion as dissatisfaction and

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