Onboarding and Student Retention

“Early school leaving” and student retention is a challenge amongst educational institutions across Europe. Students who have dropped out of school struggle with lower employment rates and lower participation in adult education for the rest of their lives. This means, that there is lasting and possible devastating effect on the individual pathways in life of early school leaving.

Traditionally the approach to student retention has been reactive; when the student has been missing classes for some period of time, the school initiates a plan for “bringing the student back”. What this project consortium proposes is to change this approach from reactive to proactive: Developing a structured way of using data proactively could make it possible to help a given student – maybe even before they realize that they need help.

In this project, a guidebook and the Onboarding & Student Retention-app (O&SR-app) will be developed and tested by approximately 400 students, 24 guidance counselors, 40 teachers, and 4 managers at four different European schools.

The project could potentially have a widespread regional, national and European impact at educational institution level, but it could also contribute vastly to individual student schooling experience and thereby foster social inclusion.

The project aims to:
1. Change the student retention approach from reactive to proactive by using data proactively to combat the considerable challenge of early school leaving.

2. Create a guidebook with methods on student retention.

3. Develop the Onboarding & Student Retention app (O&SR-app) which onboards the students to the given educational environment and creates a possible predicative retention approach to guidance counseling by having the students themselves indicate how they experience going to school.

4. Reduce the student drop-out rate by 10-20% in the early school leaving risk group.