Territorial socioeconomic contexts, education, and academic failure in the Coimbra Region Intermunicipal Community (Portugal)

Abstract

Despite the indisputable advances in education over the last decades, school failure and early school-leaving indicators in Portugal remain somewhat high, particularly when compared with those of other European Union countries. Once identified, the need to understand this problem have given rise to a number of research studies ranging from factors mostly related to development: students’ motivations and aspirations, families’ socioeconomic and cultural conditions, school organisational aspects and teaching staff quality, which focus less on variables more related to territory. Assuming, conceptually, school failure as a multidetermined phenomenon, yet directly relating it to the geographical space in which schools are located and students live, this study seeks to identify and explain some territory-related variables, viewed in this study from an innovative and dynamic perspective, in an attempt to characterize its identity by a coordinated and cross-cutting series of indicators. This study was developed within the Coimbra Region Intermunicipal Community, in Portugal, and involved a robust statistical analysis relating primary students’ performance (10-year olds) in national exams with territorial characteristics. Thus, it points to the mutual influence of these dimensions and suggests the need for a grass-roots debate, reinforcing actions to prevent and combat school failure and early school leaving.

Survey on Student School Spaces: An Inclusive Design Tool for a Better School

“…We sought to work with partner schools in different sectors of the municipality, in which the socio-economic and cultural environments were very different from each other [31][32][33][34]. Even though this tool may be used by schools with different levels, for the pilot study two basic schools were chosen-from grade 5 to grade 9 (10-15 years old), which corresponds to a full study cycle in Portugal.…”

“…This aggregation used the Euclidian distances between the The choice of the partner schools was, however, mainly down to the social, cultural, and economic environment in which the schools are located, as the intention was for the same tool to be used by students from different economic backgrounds and family situations. (For this purpose, and making use of a methodology used in previous work [32,36], a multivariate analysis was carried out using "Principal Component Analysis" (PCA) methodology, as well as "Hierarchical Cluster Analysis" (HCA). By using the results of PCA, HCA methodology permits the aggregation of territorial units that have similar characteristics.…”