According to the Ministry of Public Education (MPE), 95% of the population of Costa Rica is literate, a distinctive it shares with most countries in the world. Now the country is focusing on more qualitative policies that ensure the quality and efficiency of the system. The secondary education stage also poses greater challenges if we consider that the dropout rate in 2012 was 13.5%, according to MPE secondary and tertiary education figures. The average dropout rate for the 80 schools linked to PROEDUCA was 25.48% in 2011. In this context, real-life needs require actions to be designed that combine efforts and initiatives already in place and aim to significantly reduce school failure, understood as repeating grades or dropping out of the school system (OECD, 2013; SITEAL, 2010).

Official dropout definitions apply to students who drop out of school, either because they stop studying altogether or because they do not complete a given academic year. Drop-outs begin long before the final break with the educational system (Adame and Salvá, 2010; De la Cruz and Recio, 2011). This raises the challenge of pin-pointing symptoms and dropout risk factors in order to act preventively.

As some authors point out, dropouts do not occur suddenly. They are rather a process of gradual disconnection (González, 2006; Gairín et al., 2014) triggered by the socio-cultural and economic reality faced by students, but also by the quality of the educational processes and their capability of addressing students’ needs. Thus, actions focused on educational transition processes, academic tutoring, diversity support and actions focused on vulnerable groups which are more susceptible to abandonment gain greater importance, even more than study and commuting aid (proposed in Gairín, Castro, Rodríguez-Gómez and Barrera-Corominas, 2015).

The "Initiatives for educational and socio-community development” project (IDEAS, from its acronym in Spanish), funded by the European Union under the PROEDUCA programme (Ref. DCI-ALA/2014/351-291), was created to address the situation described. Developed in Costa Rica, the programme’s main objective was to improve secondary education stay rate at night schools. To achieve this, actions were launched to enhance the curriculum, organisation, teaching staff and community support for the country’s night schools.

A diagnosis was undertaken (detailed below) and its results were applied to create an intervention programme that included implementing a training programme for various regions that leveraged published material and online aids, defining a specific intervention project for each school, providing roll-out support and evaluating the its implementation impact. The project website describes specific actions carried out, the materials created and the institutional innovation projects carried out and presented at a final conference: http://projectes.uab.cat/ideas/

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