The project Espair

 

E.SP.air - Non-formal education through open-air sports: a unique chance to prevent early school leaving

 

 

In accordance to the goals declared by the European Union within the European Year of Education through Sports-2004, the European Commission has approved the project "E.SP.air: an new informal training and educational course to tackle early school leaving".The project will be from September 2004 to end June 2006.

 

Core of the project is a new school pattern that interacts with sporting - and environmental education, in order to provide young people with difficulties with new and real skills so that they will be likely to get an adequate job. Open - air sports for young people as a mean of personal growth (human and cultural) and social integration. Essentially, the project zooms on young people at the borders of society, with disadvantages (familiar, social and background difficulties), who have left school and appeals them with sport activities within an adequate general education.

 

 

Our target

 

Youth is regarded as the time of transition between childhood and adulthood. It is a time when young people need strong support to manage this transition successfully and to develop capacities for "life management". In the last decades this transition process has become longer and more complex. Young people gain biological and intellectual maturity long before they are regarded as socially and financially independent and adult. Longer lasting education and growing difficulties in entering the labour market leave them economically dependent on parents or the state. The age of marriage and family founding has also increased. It takes longer for young people to establish independent households and families of their own. [Council of Europe (2002). Exploring the European youth mosaic. The social situation of young people in Europe ]

 

As the transition period is getting longer, it is not appropriate anymore to talk only about teenagers or adolescents, who are people aged 13 to 19. The United Nations uses the term "young people" to cover the 15-24 year age group, and UN statistics relate to this group.  However, for the Council of Europe, it may be more helpful to make a distinction between adolescents in the 13-18 age group, which is when they need the greatest support for the transition to young adulthood, a term covering the 18-24 age group.

 

Espair aims at an innovative alternative that is able to reduce the number of young people, aged 13- 18, with disadvantaged social background, at risk for dropping out of school; it is also addressed to school dropouts that precociously left school because of personal, family, socio-economic grounds.