Abstract:

Secondary education students can benefit from several supporting programmes to achieve good results in their learning process. Over the last few years, schools across Europe have benefited from a variety of programmes to ensure European students achieve the main objectives of compulsory education. These programmes follow the guidelines of the European Commission, since one of its main priorities is reducing early school leaving to less than 10% across de EU countries by 2020 (European Commission, Education and Training Policies). Students’ interest and eagerness need to be constantly fostered to prevent school dropout, which is a real issue in Europe, especially with teenagers aged 14-16. The aim of this paper is to highlight how a specific programme, PROEDUCAR (Pro Educate in English), tries to accompany secondary students, not early learners, and monitors their learning process and acquisition to acquire the minimum curriculum requirements for compulsory education.

The PROEDUCAR programme aims at reducing the level of school leavers and dropouts in secondary education. Content teachers and tutors offer the possibility to some students to join this programme throughout the whole academic year and at any time. The groups are divided by school year to provide a good learning atmosphere and the maximum number of participants allowed per group is eight. Under these principles, parents or legal tutors who want their children to enter this programme have to fill in a form, and a high school committee decides the students’ adequacy to enter PROEDUCAR programme. Once in the programme, the students commit themselves to attend every lesson and to maintain an appropriate attitude towards learning, misbehaviour and non-compliance to the programme requirements can take them out of the programme.

This paper presents a study carried out with a small group of Secondary Education students in their 1st cycle in Spain. These students, aged between 13 and 15, are supposed to attend 2 hours of supporting lessons after school every week, in order to reinforce the content from different language subjects through a variety of additional supporting activities. These complementary sessions will try to foster students’ motivation and performance, especially in language subjects such as English as a Foreign Language and Spanish.

Regarding methodological procedures, teachers who participate in PROEDUCAR lessons are expected to have a good command of different teaching techniques to address the different learning styles of these students. Providing them with a more individualised attention, content teachers make use of a different methodology, which completely discards the use of textbooks. Activities such as 'grammar auction' tasks or 'picture dice' story telling become essential for enhancing speaking and writing. In this way, students can find themselves in a comfortable, relaxed learning environment and take more ‘safe’ risks.

References:
[1] European Commission. Education and Training programme. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/school/early-school-leaving_en (last access: 10/03/2019)

Keywords:

School early leaving, Secondary Education, supporting programmes, effective educative strategies.