About our project:

In recent years, the number of underprivileged students has increased in the Ghent education sector.

Since some years, a considerable number of new EU-citizens (Inter European Migration) have come and settled themselves in Ghent. The parents and the children have to cope with difficulties which transcend the school environment and are different/more complex that with former migrants. In many cases, the families are dealing with a language problem, but also with a precarious resident situation, degrading life circumstances, poor housing, a lack of healthy food, limited hygiene, welfare and employment. Consequently, quite some inter-European migrants are entirely focused on fulfilling their basic needs and school is pushed back.

Quite a few of inter-Europeans are preoccupied with fulfilling their basic needs, thus sometimes neglecting the school, often ensuing in multiple absences, lacking punctuality and deficient parent participation.

In Ghent, schools with a considerable percentage of vulnerable students can appeal to a school mediator. He or she has the task to promote the dialogue and the cooperation between the parents and the school in the interest of the children.

The new BIEM-project (School Mediator Intra-European Migration) intends to strengthen the existing school mediation project in an informative and methodical way so as to approach the new group of Eastern European migrants. By deploying specialized school mediators, it will become possible to considerably enlarge the expertise in the schools with a large influx of Eastern European children (mainly of Roma origin). By means of informing, sensitizing and reuniting parents and teachers as well as setting up activities destined to support education, BIEM will prove to be a sizeable surplus value in their upbringing and education assignments.

If you have experience on this subject, feel free to respond.

Thank you.