Parents Engage

Building bridges between schools and migrant and refugee parents in Europe

Parents Engage is an Erasmus+ program aiming to encounter Early School Leaving (ESL) of migrant or immigrant children by encouraging parents to involve more in their children’s education. The program is taking place in Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey.

Migrant and refugee parents face significant linguistic, cultural and socio-economic barriers when it comes to being more actively involved in their children’s education. The situation has worsened with the outburst of the pandemic crisis and the shift to distance learning in schools which multiplied educational inequalities, affecting more severely those who were already disadvantaged, including newly arrived migrants and immigrants.

How do organizations and schools in European countries-home to refugees and migrants, face the difficulty of parental information and students’ integration? Are there any innovative approaches from which we could benefit? How can we improve the learning system by using digital tools and methods?

Parents Engage brings together education professionals, parents and students with migrant or immigrant background residing in Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey to overcome pressing challenges on the educational system.

During the course of the two years an open, digital, educational platform will be developed mainly but not exclusively for the teachers, including:

• teacher training materials
• innovative and beneficial practices
• frequent answered questions (FAQ)
• useful information and relevant educational resources and services.

For the parents, Parent Engage team will create a mobile application with inspirational real-life cases of other parents, innovative initiatives and good practices.


In figures
The program aims to reach

• Up to 500 students of primary and secondary education
• More than 500 teachers and school heads

Contact

Ioanna Ntali Ioanna.ntali@goethe.de

Project Partners

Coordinator: Stichting International Parents Alliance (IPA), Netherlands 

Goethe-Institut Athen, Greece
Buyuk Ortadogu Saglik Ve Egitim Vakfi (BOSEV), Turkey  
CESIE, Italy 
Center For Social Innovation Ltd (CSI), Cyprus 
Technische Universität Dresden, Germany 
Stimmuli For Social Change (STIMMULI), Greece

Parents Engage is co-funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union (Key Action 2).

The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.