The main goal of the project is facilitating the integration of children belonging to vulnerable groups into the school/community/society. As a general issue, the social inclusion of children belonging to vulnerable groups is recognized and agreed at the level of partner countries. To substantiate the finding, a needs analysis has been carried out in each school. It has revealed that the number of immigrant students has constantly been rising over the last few years in all partner schools.
The percentage of students with a migrant/refugee background in the partner schools ranges from 4% in the case of Italy, up to 10% in Greece, 16.4% in the case of Cyprus and up to 50% in Austria. On the other hand, the Romanian school is dealing with the reintegration of pupils returning from different educational systems. Migrant pupils often face multiple disadvantages, and therefore risk to leave school earlier than their native peers. The risk of dropping out holds true in every partner school's local community. The need for the project is supported by the fact that the political situation is not going to change soon and disadvantaged children need to be granted equal opportunities for their full integration and active participation in the future society. Because the issue is not specific to Romania and because the sharing of experiences provides important chances of learning, the project promoters have proposed a partnership between schools in different European countries, aiming to encourage and support the integration of each child in school, community and society.
The issue of inclusion is a topic of interest to all partner countries in the project. For example, Romania is implementing the "National Strategy on Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction for the Period 2015-2020", "A Barrier-Free Society" strategy and other approaches addressing vulnerable groups and aiming to support integration in the community.
Thus, our project is part of the national priorities focused on social inclusion. The Erasmus partnership is an opportunity to ensure these pupils' emotional well being and sustain their motivation to participate in the social and civic life of their communities. Therefore, we envision the inclusion of vulnerable groups in our schools' communities via games. During this project we will design, explore, summarize and play a variety of educational games in order to motivate and engage the students.
The objective of the activities is to promote social and intercultural awareness, empathy and understanding. The project focuses on sharing and transfering of good practices between partners in order to support teachers in developing the key competences for teaching via an intercultural perspective. These skills and competences are often missing in traditional teacher training programs. In our project, teacher-trainers and teachers will participate in training workshops to acquire skills to teach pupils coming from vulnerable groups more effectively.