To fight school failure and school dropout, EPIS implements innovative empowering methodologies to improve students academic success.
In Portugal, every year, around 15-17 thousand students leave the education system without having completed compulsory education. The cumulative result of this dropout rate translates into the existence of more than 200,000 people under 24 years without a full educational preparation to cope with the job market. In 2006, Prof. Aníbal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s President, appealed to the business community to help the country find a solution to school failure and early dropout. Ten entrepreneurs and top managers responded and subsequently created a council that gave life to “Associação EPIS - Empresários Pela Inclusão Social”. EPIS is committed to helping students in risk of school failure or dropout to improve their personal and school competences, as a means of joining university or entering the job market with a professional qualification and certification.
EPIS began the project in 2006 with the support of more than 100 national enterprises with financial backing and strong institutional support. Equally important was the co-operation of the Ministry of Education and local government bodies. Every day around 90 professionals work full time in EPIS’s project team, including 71 ”trained mediators”. A scoring model has been developed to evaluate the risks of school failure or dropout, based on 4 dimensions: student performance and profile; family functionality; school-student relationships; and social and economic human capital of the family. This model has been applied to 20,000 students, in 88 schools, in 10 regions of Portugal. Moreover, all empowering methodologies developed by EPIS have since been published in two manuals.