Abstract:

The European project IT-CLEX (www.itclex.eu) “European clusters to promote the exchange of knowledge and best practices in fighting early school leaving through IT” (project number 511885-LLP-1-2010-1-ES-KA4-KA4MP), financed with 300.000€ by the European Commission, provides a new model to face the early school leaving issue, coordinating agents from the educational and non-educational background.

It offers 3 tools for free to facilitate the exchange of best practices in the field addressed to achieve education success:

• An ICT platform (www.itclex.eu/itc) which enables the creation of an international network of professionals and sharing best practices, resources, methodologies, etc.
• A collaborative methodology to work in the field of early school leaving. The model is currently used in Norway, Iceland, Romania, Lithuania and Spain. It is a successful holistic model integrating different agents and professionals from a variety of areas: from the schools and from their environment, like technicians from social services, educational department, health services, police, etc.
• The exchange of best practices. The partners of the project have gathered more than 60 best practices in the field, which have been categorized in detection, prevention and intervention best practices, as well as in other areas (age to which they are addressed, type of best practice, etc.).

The tools that the IT-CLEX project offers to professionals in the education and non-educational field, facilitate the coordination, union and optimization of efforts at municipal or local level, when mediating with students, families, the education centre and other municipal services that might be of help in drop-out situations.

The idea behind this project is to provide a solution-focused methodology to work with drop-out students and its detection and prevention in which most resources are coordinated at a local level. The tools (ICT platform, collaborative methodology and best practices) can be used from childhood education until University education.

All these tools offered by the IT-CLEX project also facilitate international cooperation of these professionals: the ICT platform is open and it is possible to use it for free, so that the agents working in the field of early school leaving are able to share experiences, best practices and methodologies, resources, etc. There are also some private forums (also free) in English, Spanish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Lithuanian and Romanian which can be used to ask questions, add comments, and as a meeting point for any professional working in the field who might be interested in sharing experiences, questions, etc. with other professionals.

The partners participating in the IT-CLEX project represent universities, secondary and vocational education centres around Europe, as well as a technological company. They are:

- Florida Universitària (co-ordinator) and TISSAT (Spain)
- University of Iceland and Reykjavík University (Iceland)
- Vennesla Videregaende Skole (Norway)
- Centru National de Arta "Octav Bancila" (Romania)
- Trakai Vytautas Magnus Gymnasium (Lithuania)

Keywords:

ICT, best practice, education, methodology, project, early school leaving, student support, counselling.