Our school has elementary and secondary levels, 210 teachers, 67 members of the staff, and 1320 students. The school is situated at Funchal, the principal city in Madeira Island, Portugal. Nowadays, the school has a diverse educational offer, including Regular Education from 5 to 12 years old, Vocational Education, and Courses of Education and Training, in order to prepare young people in our society for the job market and the increasingly competitive future, not neglecting the appreciation and respect for diversity. The School offers a structured teaching unit for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder and includes students with other special educational needs in their classes.
We have a very dynamic team and 47 students from different countries, we call them PLNM students, Portuguese Non-Maternal Language and they have special attention from a group of Portuguese teachers.
Even though the school has developed measures to fight school failure and early school leaving, which have shown some positive effects, our school intends to increasingly act on prevention, thus avoiding the significant number of retentions.
Being a school in an ultra-peripheral region, the same (being the entire educational community) is faced with several difficulties related to its geographical features.
Our school has, as well as the entire region of Madeira, a lot of experience working with students with special educational needs. We still have a long way to go in the direction of true inclusion, but we have already gained extensive experience in this area.
At our school, we try to develop actions and activities focused on Environmental Education and Citizenship. Our main objective will be to encourage actions and carry out work in schools for the benefit of the environment. It will enable children and young people to develop the capacity to act and intervene, in order to improve the surrounding environment, providing true Education for Citizenship. Besides our experience in Erasmus+, both as a partner and in the development and implementation of our own projects, our school can add value to what is intended as the final aim of this new project.
The people involved in this project are the school’s president, as he can organize and lead such initiatives. The other is the Special Education teacher, who is also a very important element, who can add experience and other skills. He worked in the Regional Directorate of Education of the Autonomous Region of Madeira for 8 years and, therefore, has an external vision, in terms of educational policy, regional and national. She has participated in training in other countries under the then Comenius Program, and, since 2016, she has been coordinating in our school all Erasmus + part projects.
More info: http://mirror.ebsaas.com