Easy School for Young Students

In 2016, an average of 10.7% of young people (aged 18-24) across all 28 EU member states were early leavers from education, with a similar problem across ESY project partner countries. The high rate of early leavers from education remains a pertinent topic, despite great efforts by the EC and Member States to reach the Europe 2020 target of reducing this percentage to below the 10% benchmark.

The Easy School for Young Students was established to combat this problem.The Easy School programme is run by a partnership of organisations, from 4 EU member states: UK, Portugal, Greece and Italy, that specialise in non-formal education to tackle high early leaver rates.

The project is aimed at students aged 14-19, predominantly from disadvantaged backgrounds, who could benefit from extra tutoring to keep up with their studies, and coaching to provide motivational and educational support.

The Easy School consists of transnational partners meetings, study visits to partner countries and training activities. It will be based on activities tried and tested, by project partners, with particular emphasis on practical task such as sport and games activities, creative and cultural laboratories, to encourage active engagement of project participants.

Specific objectives of the ESY project:

• sharing methodologies and best practices of partner organisations
• increasing the capacity of partners to operate at a Europe-wide level
• improving the scholastic performance of students at risk of leaving education early

The programme covers the following ares:

• WP1 Project management and co-ordination
• WP2 Networking and sharing experiences
• WP3 Transitional training activity
• WP4 Communication and dissemination

Benefits of the project

• For partner organisations: they will benefit from sharing practices and developing new methods to innovate approaches to combatting learning failures. It will also improve the quality of their work and their capacity to cooperate at EU level. The transnational mobility of the staff has been identified as an ideal way for sharing experience and promoting cooperation and new collaborative partnerships both within, and beyond the end of the project.

• For participants: it will help improve their learning performance and to complete their education; it will also help build the academic confidence of students, enhance their skills and employability, as well as making them active European citizens.