This paper results from a financed research project, “EDUPLACES - Educating places: practices, voices and pathways of inclusive education” (FCT), focusing on socio-educational inclusion related practices, actors and policies that have been successful in Portugal, having in mind the wider European context. Social inclusion of children and young people is a central concern of the European educational policy. The reduction of early school leaving (ESL) to less than 10% by 2020 is seen as a way to prevent unemployment, poverty and social exclusion (EC, 2010). The multidimensional processes that lead to school underachievement, dropout and ESL are complex and involve institutional as well as social contexts, family and individual factors; school disengagement is often used as an «umbrella concept» that, in a way, shelters most of the complexity of those processes (Ferguson et al. 2005; Dale 2010; Costa et al. 2013).

Portugal has been identified as one of the European member-states with higher rates of school underachievement and ESL; nonetheless, in the last decade, the country has notoriously reduced those figures. In fact, since the 80’s/90’s, several policies, programs and practices have been developed to tackle the problem (Araújo et al., 2013). So far, research on those programs (e.g., TEIP1 - Educational Territorial of Priority Intervention Program, 1996-2000) has highlighted the diverse contextual appropriation and reconstruction of the policy, teachers’ perspectives regarding students and the multiple logics of action underlying its conception and implementation (Canário, Alves, & Rolo, 2010). As to TEIP2 (from 2006 onwards), an external assessment has shown dropout and retention rates in the schools involved decreased (between 2006 and 2011), despite later data shedding some uncertainty over this second effect (Figueiredo et al. 2013).

Also, an external assessment of the  “Programa Escolhas" ("Choices Program”, committed to promoting social inclusion of children and youngsters, mostly from multicultural communities, displaying high rates of school retention and ESL) has registered a reduction of retention rates and a school success of about 80% (Saint-Maurice et al., 2013).

A European project involving five countries has described ten cases of educational practices which have contributed to building successful schooling youth pathways, despite faced with particularly adverse social contexts. Some factors for those successful pathways that seem transversal to those cases have been identified, e.g., cooperative involvement, empowerment, mediation, democratic quality (UB/CREA & UM/UEA, 2006; Edwards & Downes, 2013). Partnerships and networks in education have also been targeted in their relations with school improvement (Chapman & Hadfield 2010; Silva et al., 2014, Chapman et al., 2014). Yet, the merits of some measures designed to reduce school underachievement and ESL and the quality of learning they provide students have been questioned (Dias, 2013; Antunes & Barros, 2014; Sá & Antunes, 2012). And there is still little knowledge besides significant controversy on some dimensions of those successful inclusive education practices: the local dimension, the socio-educational innovative dimension and the dimension of learning communities and of communities of practice (Wenger, 2001; Loureiro, 2010).

Bearing in mind this problematic, the core research questions that guide this research are: (i) which processes and factors, subjects, action rationales and (institutional, local, community) partnerships contribute to building local inclusive education practices, in the views of actors involved? (ii) which (social, institutional, biographical) processes and factors stop the negative spiral of school underachievement, school dropout and ESL and favour the youngsters’ remobilization to learn and build successful academic pathways? 

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