The AllAboard project is to be seen in the light of all the alarming rates of early school leavers across Europe and on the need to creating a space for discussion and cooperation at EU level, particularly within the Erasmus+ programme on matters referring to ESL.

Research, dissemination and development are the core issues that guide this project. They refer to creating challenging educational environments and innovative methodological or pedagogical strategies that are consistent with both local circumstances and the globalization of our communities. To do so, four organizations from three European countries (Austria, Sweden and Spain) decided to set up a partnership that will work as a team to develop research and products that will certainly help to fight early school leaving. Additionally, we count with several schools and guidance institutions that will collaborate in the project as shadow partners to help us with research or piloting procedures. Likewise, any institution willing to take part or collaborate with the project will be welcome.

To tackle ESL we need therefore to understand the causes behind early school leaving, remove obstacles within the educational systems that prevent the youth from completing upper secondary education, encourage schools to develop supportive learning and environments, promote multi-professional teams and increase their continuous training. We also need to adapt educational guidance and vocational counseling to pupils’ and societal needs, support cooperation between schools and local communities and involve relevant stakeholders.

The added value of this project is that we do not only do research on ESL, but we guide all the process in the schools, from prevention, early detection, case studies and results analysis to the implementation of new methodologies derived from the outcomes resulting from the work in this project.

The preventive perspective that we want to implement is one of the outstanding points of our approach. We believe that fighting ESL needs adopting early detection ESL strategies, implementing preventive dropout programmes, fostering the improvement of the emotional climate in the classroom, and/or integrating the development of skills in the curriculum, which are key pillars of our approach to cope with ESL.

Our ultimate objective is to reduce the number of early school leavers. The basis of our project is to provide detecting tools, guidance and training to the persons in direct contact with students (teachers, guidance providers, educators, management teams, etc.) and who can detect at an early stage possible cases of school dropouts.

The AllAboard team.