Converging with European policies and goals that value the role of education and training in social inclusion, Portugal has been developing efforts to reduce early-school leaving, including the enlargement of compulsory schooling to 12 years and the reinforcement of vocational educational tracks (Araújo et al., 2014). However, student grade repetition and related equity concerns remain challenging, thus being key policy areas (OECD, 2020). Second-chance schools have been a recent policy measure to support young adults' transition back to education and training, with practices that invest in high recognition of students' life situations (Macedo et al., 2018). Bearing in mind reducing early-school leaving, we conducted a study in which a model was applied that privileges the Indirect Approach as a methodology that uses communication, thus giving voice to young people in vulnerable situations. Disadvantaged situations that can hinder learning can be identified in the young people's life stories. The Indirect Approach is an explorative method through which the recognition of impactful and unknown realities is intended. Ideally, the intervention session should take the shape of storytelling, letting the young informant guide the conversation (Frostholm & Walker, 2021; Moshuus & Eide, 2016). This paper presents and discusses the ways the Indirect Approach being upscaled in the COSI.ed project was adapted and applied to a sample of five young people in a second-chance school of the metropolitan region of Porto, in a partnership between educational researchers, Education Sciences Master students and educational professionals from the schools. We will describe the intervention inspired by the Indirect Approach and discuss the preliminary results of the monitoring study through semi-structured interviews with two master's students and one teacher who used the methodology, as well as questionnaires distributed to 21 young people chosen by convenience. The discussion will center on some of the model's strengths and weaknesses as seen through the actors' perspectives and experiences, as well as its relationships with students' engagement with schooling in general, and the second-chance school in particular. Concerning the conversations topics, the results showed that young people have expectations about their educational and professional future, and most of them know what job they want and how to achieve it. The relationship between policies (Veiga, 2014) and practices that provide opportunities for students at risk of exclusion to tell their life stories and emphasize disadvantaged situations that can hinder their learning will also be highlighted in order to support policy recommendations.

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