The mobile life of travelling families has a huge impact on the education of the children: they have to change schools quite frequently. To make sure that the children take part in a continous learning process, their parents have to establish contacts with the different schools in which they want to enrol their child. Experiences in the past have shown that the majority of traveller parents experience a lot of difficuties in their contacts with these schools. They lack communicative skills and assertivenness and do not succeed in expressing their needs and wants. Next to this, they are rarely represented by a parents' association and often confronted with prejudices against their lifestyle.
The family-school relationship is very important for the education of the children. A lack of communication with the school often leads to a lack of involvement in the educational process.
The objective of this one-year project is to provide parents with communication skills and support to help them to play an active role in the education of their children. This will be done by training sessions on the basis of existing modules developed by the European Parents' Association (EPA) from 97-99. In the course of this project, the modules will be adapted to the specific situation of travelling populations. The trainings will be given by sedentary parents who themselves were trained within the framework of the EPA Training Programme. Depending on the region where the trainings will be organised, the target groups will be composed of traveller parents or a mixture of travelling and sedentary parents.
The training sessions will be evaluated and a report with recommendations for the further training of travelling parents will be produced.
The project will lead to an improvement of the whole educational process of travelling children, better relations between traveller families and schools and to a mutual understanding between sedentary and travelling populations.
European Parents’ Association (EPA, EU)