SENtor - Exchanging Experiences and Practices in Mentoring SEN Children

Partners mentioned the same situation: insufficient capacity to care for children with SEN in mainstream education, lack of teacher training, shortage of specialists, high class sizes, backwardness, bullying, special teaching materials and lack of one-way methods and techniques. Recognizing that similar problems exist in other countries, the project idea has been modified by the final partners and goes beyond the mere exchange of experiences: one partner experiences a general systemic failure, another tries to support it from the outside, and a third can act as a quasi-quality assurance authority to report on sound practices. The aim of the project is to develop a mentoring system for SEN children that can be embedded in the formal education. Only through the cooperation and appropriate training of mediators, coaches, parents and teachers can capacity gaps and and recent under-qualification. As the current project is a small-scale partnership, the framework is rather limited to build up the system and but are sufficient to start work by identifying the problem, exchanging good practices and developing a and developing a system plan.

SEN pupils tend to under perform in public education. They have particular difficulties in cooperating with their peers, motivation to learn self-directed learning, emotional engagement and the use of technical tools. The project will develop a grassroots mentoring system a bottom-up approach: involving stakeholders: parents, teachers, institutions. The partner countries have trained the first coaches who will support teachers in mentoring parents in the institutions they are working with. By alleviating the lack of capacity in the in public education. We have successfully communicated our core message: our main objective was to ensure that institutions address situations and problems related to SEN pupils and parents in a conscious, professional and systematic way. The mentor network is able to successfully mediate between the stakeholders: school systems, families and counselors.

The project focused on the exchange of experiences, the development of a grassroots mentoring system that can be embedded in formal education, and the training of the first mentors. In addition to the initial project management tasks, the work took place in 4 thematic sessions: 1) We defined the problem areas 2) We studied the original state of parental activism in all three countries. 3) Examining mentoring techniques and SEN approaches 4) Designing the system. We developed the necessary steps for efficiency: We refined the created methodology with the colleagues and institutions involved in personal and virtual meetings, workshops, conferences, and events.

The long-term goal of the project was to build a mentor network embedded in the formal education system. Concrete results: We implemented the exchange of experience between the participating countries and between the institutions involved in the respective countries. We assessed the needs and problems and then, focusing on the problems, involved the institutions we visited. We have created various auxiliary materials in order to develop pedagogical competences. We laid the foundations of the mentoring service system to create a larger-scale planned and tested mentoring network. The results of the project were published on our websites, in social media, in our own Facebook group created in the program, in the final publication and in the final conference.