Well-being and Equality in Early Years of School Path – Towards a Flexible School Day in Pirkanmaa Region
2019 – 2020, Finnish National Agency for Education
The underlying goal of the project is to advance the overall well-being of the schoolchildren and increase equality among their families. This will ideally happen by improving the structures and contents of the school day to be more engaging, whole and equal in nature. There is also a strong emphasis on creating connection between schoolwork and extra-curricular activities and professional development needed to achieve that. This project is a co-operative effort of 18 different educational providers, which are all responsible with planning and implementing their own sub-projects, which will form the basis of the evaluation. The timespan of this project is one school year, with most sub-projects starting in mid-2019 and finishing in early 2020. LDS research group is responsible of the evaluation related to the development work.
The goal of the evaluation research is to find different functional practices and models that support the well-being of the students and their families during the early stages of their school path. The further goal of the evaluative approach is to find working models that are also applicable in a wider educational context.
The evaluation is development oriented and participative. Interview, observation and questionnaire data will be collected during the project. The participants will also be provided training and discussions on the concepts of well-being, equality and learning as well as feedback based on the analysed data from the project to help them to carry out their sub-projects and facilitate collective learning in the project.
The project is financed by the Finnish National Agency for Education and it will take place in Pirkanmaa region in Finland.