Building relationships between school, family and community to enhance students' school persistence and avoid Early School Leaving (ESL)

Dropout is a multidimensional phenomenon, resulting from a combination of personal, family and school factors that interact with each other. The combination of risk factors (or protective factors) is an event or a condition that increase (or reduce) the likelihood of an individual experience of emotional or behavioural problems, that may contribute to school dropout. The decision to stop school education is the result of a long evolutionary process that is characterized by an accumulation of frustrations, often induced by academic failures and difficult relationships with peers, teachers, and parents.
Through involvement in educational aspects, families especially play an important role in student success and affect conditions that might lead to dropping out: positive impact on school performance, enhancing motivation and school involvement, improving well-being and school behaviours, building a constructive and efficient relationship between school and family could be an efficient way to avoid school dropout.
In this session, our exchanges and reflections aim at comparing and analyzing issues, experiences, ideas, and questions from different interventions of European representatives. Through these different contributions, we try to highlight concrete policies for UE countries regarding the connections that we can do between school dropout and relationships between school, family and community.