Successful Educational Actions in Southern Europe: From Marginalization to Educational Inclusion

The recreation of the successful social and educational actions is achieving the transformation of social contexts with strong indicators of exclusion. These actions have been identified through the INCLUD-ED project, the only Integrated project about schooling from the Framework Programmes of research until its ending in December 2011. There have been 15 universities from 14 countries participating in the project and case studies have been conducted in Spain, Italy, Malta or Cyprus, among other countries, where the successful educational actions (SEAs), universal and transferable, have been identified. The case that we are presenting here is the one in the La Milagrosa neighbourhood, at the outskirts of the city of Albacete (Spain). The educational centre in the neighbourhood presented low academic performance, high levels of absenteeism, serious problems of coexistence among students and high levels of conflict between teachers and the families. Through the implementation of the SEA’s advocated by the international scientific community, a transformation started which was extended far beyond. The academic results experimented a rapid improvement and the diverse social agents (university, administration, professionals-officers and neighbours) carried out a Dialogic Inclusion Contract to re-creates the SEA’s and to carry out the transformation of the neighbourhood. This process has become a model at a European level to exit the ghetto. The key resides in the design of policies based on scientific evidence; and on the inclusion of the voices in all the decision-making processes.