Description
The European Learning Space on early school leaving offers a great deal of high-quality content and expertise accumulated on early school leaving (ESL) at international, national, local and institutional levels.
Beneficiaries
Practitioners including: teachers, school leaders, administration staff, local and national policy makers, social workers, school care teams and other professionals.
Countries
Date of creation of toolkit and periodicity of updates
2016-2018, continuous updates.
Purpose of the toolkit
Provide practical help, inspiration and a deep learning opportunity for practitioners to support their initiation of enhancing equity in education and reducing early leaving from education and training. The ESLplus Portal is an international (4-language) interactive learning space where the users have a lot of possibilities to improve their ESL-related knowledge and skills:
- Play with the statistics module and the policy learning game;
- Learn from others' good practices and stories;
- Use and adapt the newly learned ESL-related knowledge; and
Share their own ideas, experiences, cases.
Description of each of the tools
The European Learning Space on ESL offers a wealth of content and expertise that has been accumulated in early school leaving at the international, national, local, and institutional levels. Visitors can find up-to-date information and resources on ESL. The linked and interactive functions support a deeper understanding of the broader context of the problem.
What resources are offered?
- Good practice repository – A structured database of good practices to identify and manage students at risk. The structure of the description and the strong focus on the contextual factors of good practices aims to support the adaptation of solutions and ideas that were piloted previously by others. It is not only possible to download but also to share good practices.
- My stories – Short videos and written cases about colourful and true stories of students and teachers to bring the problem closer and prepare emotionally for exploring real solutions. In this unique part of the portal individuals share their own stories, feelings and experiences about being a drop-out or working with students at risk.
- Interactive statistics – A structured and comparable ESL-related country data collection of Europe with an interactive visualization for researchers and policy makers. About 100 different variables are uploaded into 5 variable-groups (1. ESL/ELET and NEET variables, 2. Participation in education, 3. Youth indicators, 4. PISA variables, 5. Country background indicators) of 34 European countries. This section of the portal enables evidence-based analyses of the problem.
- ESL-Library – A collection of the ESL literature: European and national policy papers, research papers, booklets on ESL topic. The Library has filters by type of the documents, by author, title, publication year, language and country.
Glossary and the Tag-system – The tag-system is a collection of keywords and definitions related to the professional background information on ESL. All the tags – and some other keywords on ESL – have a short explanation in the Glossary. All the contents in the ESLplus Portal are tagged. The tags link the professional materials and the recommended related elements, which are shown to the readers automatically.
Type of indicators used in the identification of learners at risk of early leaving
Not applicable.
(The ESLplus Portal builds on the result of the EU policy (CEDEFOP, Eurydice, ET2020 Working Groups) documents on early school leaving and helps you to identify possible indicators related to early school leaving and early warning systems.)
Type of guidance given to users
The online portal is user friendly, tags, filters and the related contents help navigate around the content. A short video is also available introducing the main portal features.
Source of information of the different tools
The ESLplus project is implemented in the framework of the EC proposal "Key Action 3: Support for policy reform - Prospective initiatives, European Forward-Looking Cooperation Projects in the fields of education and training, and youth" (EACEA/33/2014) under the Erasmus+ Programme, which aims to support innovation in practices and policies across educational and youth sectors.
The ESLplus Portal was developed by the Tempus Public Foundation within the ESLplus project and all the partners contributed by providing contents to the Good Practice Repository, My Stories and ESL-Library. The original source of the Interactive Statistics variables and database are the Eurostat, the OECD PISA and Education at a Glance databases.
Link/s to the toolkit and further information
Downloads
ESLplus website