School failure [“grade repetition or retention, also known as flunking” (Psacharopoulos 2007, p. 5)] and dropout [“withdrawal from an education or training program before its completion” (CEDEFOP, 2008, p. 62)] have been widely regarded as major concerns by governments across Europe and beyond, as well as by the European institutions themselves: for example, the European Centre for the Development of Vocational training (CEDEFOP), established in 1975, helps develop and implement vocational training policies, with a particular emphasis on helping early school-leavers return to education and training. Several authors have also discussed school failure and dropout as factors of social exclusion (e.g. Jahnukainen, 2001; Flecha, 2015). Inclusive and equitable education, and the promotion of lifelong learning, under the aggregating designation of “Quality Education”, are listed as part of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (United Nations, 2015). Portugal is one of the European member-states where school failure and dropout rates have improved the most in the past decades (DGEEC, 2019), but the situation remains worrying.

Project EDUPLACES (PTDC/MHC-CED/3775/2014) expanded between 2016-2019 and explored the factors that interrupt the school failure-dropout spiral. It was a multi-case study of ten practices, located in four Portuguese municipalities. The practices were developed within (one of) two government intervention programs (one school-based and one community-based).

EDUPLACES highlighted the perspective of actors involved in socio-educational practices (children/young people; parents; teachers/professionals and institutional leaders) and aimed to answer two research questions: i) which processes and factors contribute to building inclusive socio-educational practices; and ii) which processes and factors interrupt the school failure-dropout cycle, and favor educational remobilization.

The project’s framework was based on the discussion of barriers/obstacles to participation in school and learning, and of processes aimed at overcoming such barriers/obstacles (how these so-called inclusive socio-educational practices contributed to defeat school failure-dropout). EDUPLACES explored how the practices under study tackled institutional barriers (internal to institutions), situational barriers (including sociocultural expectations and pressures, or family and work responsibilities) and dispositional barriers (such as fear of failure or sense of alienation, attitude toward intellectual activity or educational goals, level of educational aspirations and expectations of the subjects) (Ekstrom, 1972).

Following Rumberger (2001, 2004) and De Witte et al (2013), EDUPLACES also identified ‘systemic’ strategies [seeking to reorganise the contexts where children acted and interacted with school and learning, “with the help of resources and other forms of assistance” (De Witte et al, 2013: 24)] and ‘programmatic’ strategies [aimed at influencing students’ behaviours, attitudes and values (ibidem)].

As systematised by De Witte et al (2013), from the point of view of who their primary beneficiaries or targets are, the practices could also be classified as more explicitly aimed at students (focused on improving academic outcomes, with the involvement of teachers and other staff, in a school or community context), aimed at families (such as strategies promoting parental/family engagement in school-related activities, empowering families to supervise homework assignments, hosting parent support groups…) or aimed at schools (setting to influence schools’ organisation or ‘climate’, as well as teacher/teaching skills). This typology was also mobilised in EDUPLACES’ analysis of inclusive socio-educational practices.

As summarized by Balbín (2016), the practices analyzed by EDUPLACES could also be closer to the model of the selective school (segregation of students who do not follow the “normal” learning pace), the compensatory school (emerging circa 1950-1960, focusing on compensating for students’ and families’ socio-cultural handicaps), the integrative school (gaining traction circa 1970, under the banner of “the same school for different students”) or the inclusive school (connected with the emergence of special needs education, aimed at groups most at risk of exclusion, and promoting school-family-community interaction).

EDUPLACES’ objective of listening to different voices in an interpretative and reflective way, found in focus groups, as a data collection tool, an essential place for the development of this specific research (Moloney, 2011). This paper will focus on the voices of children/young people. Recognising the potential of focus groups as enabling the sharing of thoughts and feelings, simultaneously promoting the creation of knowledge and new individual and collective reflections (Kitzinger & Barbour, 1999; Wilkinson, 1999), eight focus groups were developed with children and young people, within the scope of five inclusive socio-educational practices - Mediation and Study Support practices - from two types of intervention contexts: one community-based and one school-based. All elements collected, transcribed and anonymised were analyzed using NVivo 12, always ensuring that data was returned to the research participants for validation. Therefore, based on a content analysis system (Bardin, 1991), which respected the theoretical-analytical framework of the project prior to this empirical phase, as well as the team’s reflections based on the first readings of all collected material, it was possible to build an analytical category tree. This process was accompanied by the necessary triangulation of data by four elements of the research team, never ignoring the different emerging categories. Given this methodological framework, the need to perceive focus groups, specifically with children and young people, as safe places to share reflections and opinions, representing a moment of shared experience and respect for each participant's individuality (Hyde et al., 2005; Raby, 2010), was crucial for this phase of research. Hence, the work of all the facilitators of the focus groups developed involved adapting the discourse to the target audience (Krueger, 1994; Kitzinger & Barbour, 1999), always communicating first with the legal guardians of these children and young people, ensuring that their participation was allowed, while both anonymity and data confidentiality were guaranteed (Morgan et al. 2002; SPCE, 2020). The dialogical link between the theoretical elements and the constructed category analysis framework of this project allowed the creation of a few lines of analysis, in order to guide the reflective work that is put into focus in this paper.

The breadth of the analysis provided by the data collected through these focus groups with children reveals not only their richness but also their potential as a platform to further our knowledge about educational success. The results of the study showed that the three mediation practices under study seem to have a hybrid goal of personal development portrayed in the educational success of the children they work with. This means that the school-family-community relationship is one between cultures, which aggregates school and extracurricular, as well as individual and collective aspects, establishing relationships that allow reinforcing, maintaining, or mitigating cultural differences and social inequalities (Silva, 2010). On the other hand, the issues of expectations and stability of the intervention teams were highlighted in the speeches of the children who participated in these mediation practices. This fact may corroborate that, within the scope of social and educational work, mediation depends more strongly on the interest, availability, and motivation of individuals for action. From the analysis of the two Study Support practices, it seems to emerge as key elements for school success, the stable and lasting nature of these practices, which extend over school years and developmental periods, as well as the promotion of dynamic activities close to the community, being seen as enhancers of school, behavior and personal motivation. The data indicate that children indirectly point to institutional barriers as the main obstacles to their academic success in these two Study Support practices, correlating the narrowness of the type of knowledge that is valued and disseminated by the school through the regular curriculum (Young, 1982), as well as the lack of consolidation of prerequisites for learning the craft and role of the student (Perrenoud, 1995).

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