30% of six-graders in Bulgaria are at risk of dropping out of school – school doesn’t make sense to them, according to national representative survey of Centre for Inclusive Education
How to bring back the sense to school – This is the main subject of the new free online handbook of Centre for Inclusive Education which could be downloaded here at organization’s website:
https://www.cie.bg/bg/narachnik-da-varnem-smisala-uchilishte. It aims at supporting teachers and principals from all over the country to manage with the increasing loss of motivation of their students to go to school.
The handbook gathers the experience of Centre for Inclusive Education from the intermediate phase of
School Makes Sense programme which is executed with the support of Velux Foundations in two Bulgarian schools – Georgi Benkovski Secondary School, Teteven and Hristo Smirnenski Secondary School, Brezovo. Only for one year programme’s innovative approach succeeded
to increase the motivation for studying by over 70% of the participating children and even to decrease by 20% the unexcused absences from class compared to the previous school year by focusing on the link between school and life.
Exactly the broken link between school and life is one of the major problems of the Bulgarian educational system – children don’t understand how the school material will be useful in life and by this they are losing interest in school. According to Centre’s national representative survey
30% of six-graders in Bulgaria are at risk of dropping out of school and
45% of them consider the major subjects as maths, history, natural sciences to be completely uninteresting.
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When we saw this data, we told ourselves that urgent measures should be taken because the school is becoming more and more inadequate to modern children’s requirements and expectations”, Dimiter Lazarov, Programme Director at Centre for Inclusive Education, explained and added:
“With our activities in Brezovo and Teteven we clearly saw that it is possible and even it is not complicated to make children to go to school with joy. And in order to inspire teachers and principals from all over the country to do the same, we decided to gather the lessons learned in the new handbook.”
The handbook “To Bring Back Sense to School” gathers the intermediate experience of School Makes Sense programme and could be downloaded completely free of charge at the Centre for Inclusive Education website:
https://www.cie.bg/bg/narachnik-da-varnem-smisala-uchilishte. A complete methodology, representing the full results of programme’s activities in pilot schools will be presented in the end of 2018.
