I.I.S.S.ENRICO FERMI LECCE

I.I.S.S. " Enrico Fermi" -Lecce Italy

I.I.S.S “Enrico Fermi” is situated in Lecce, a beautiful town in the south of Italy. Our school represents a local cultural landmark in the field of technology with its branches: Mechanics- Mechatronics- Energy, Electrical Engineering, Information Technology and Telecommunication, Transports and Logistics, Lyceum of Applied Sciences. It operates in a complex and varied socioeconomic and cultural context with a relevant rate of unemployment, especially youth unemployment. The majority of students are commuters, coming from the rural areas of Salento, while the rest are town residents.

The students learning here springs from various family backgrounds. Beside the normal, well-organized, emotionally and financially solid families, there are many students who confront with numerous hardships. Some of them come from disorganized families or mono-parental families, some are migrants, coming from no-European countries and a small number of students live on the verge of poverty. Moreover, there are students with special needs whom so far we have successfully integrated in ordinary classes.

In a so varied school population our school pays great attention to motivate all the students in order to give them equal opportunities and to encourage their human and cultural growth. Our school widens the educational offer by connecting the learning process with strategies and activities that are intended to remove youth uneasiness, to re-motivate the study, to reinforce the students’ knowledge, competences and abilities.

In the last years our school is working on projects preventing early school leavings ,fighting dropping out of school and developing transversal skills and educational strategies to tackle the lack of school attendance.

Our previous experiences in Comenius projects made us aware of the benefits that the European cooperation activities can bring to school, teachers, parents, local community and especially to students.

Our aims are: to develop the spirit of European membership, to promote international cooperation between educational institution, to help the students from socially disadvantaged area to travel and to know cultures of European countries, to practice and improve their linguistic and communicative competence in English, to practice and improve their information technologies competences, to open up new long term prospects.

We think that school must be inclusive and motivating, school must insert the student in a positive context, with more opportunities, giving different answers to different needs.The general goal of our Erasmus plus KA2 Strategic Partnership project is to increase the quality of schools in order to tackle the plight of failing students and to promote the students’ comfort, as a way to prevent early school leaving and to reduce the drop out risk.

Moreover Erasmus projects aim at

-Reinforcing the students’ positive attitude to education

-Fostering the provision and the assessment of key-competences, including basic skills and transversal skills particularly entrepreneurship, languages and digital skills;

- Creating a synergy among our foreign partners who will cooperate to find common strategies to tackle the drop out problem and to exchange good practices

- Creating a synergy among our local associated partners to increase the quality of education in our school and to make our school more open to exchanging ideas, with the aim of creating the premises for our students’ lifelong learning

-Nurturing the students’ specific skills by encouraging the self-esteem

-Intervening on support of the lack of the key- competences, including basic skills and transversal skills

-Boosting the value of non formal and informal learning

-Using a motivating laboratory teaching which can create positive synergies between students and teachers by encouraging the responsibility of each one for a cooperative learning

-Encouraging cooperation with families in order to make them more aware and able to orient their children’s  future school choices

-Encouraging support activities for the teachers so that they can work with teaching methods more appropriate to the students and with adequate competences, in order to identify the unease and the behavioural problems before its time.

-Enhancing educational and professional consultancy