ALS project – Adaptive Learning System – aims at providing children presenting learning disabilities with adaptive learning approach, allowing a better inclusion and easier access to education and basic skills. Indeed, nowadays in Europe, around 16 to 24% of pupils are facing difficulties to adapt themselves to the traditional learning sytems. 2-3% are affected by sensorial, motor and neurological deficiencies. 4-6% are concerned by behavioural and emotional disabilities such as dyslexia, dysphasia, dyspraxia… and around 15% are affected by cultural and sociological disadvantages. Regarding the second and third categories of disabilities, most of these children are however included in traditional courses, facing issues to screen their disabilities or even not considered as disabled. Schools are the place to tackle these issues at the earlier stage. Indeed, early learnings are the requirements to acquire basic skills to reinforce the capabilities of pupils to have an easy access to the higher classes. For these children, the rythm and contents provided by traditional learning is most of the time difficult to follow without adaptations. The ALS project aims at addressing these statements by providing a tool to develop in Europe a common personnalised and inclusive learning contents. The solution provided by the consortium will be to create a digital learning tool that allows the adaptation of content for children during early learning. This tool will be created thanks to the development of a cognitive approach of learning and will aim at allowing children the access to a personalised learning system. Strict definitions of troubles will be deconstructed to provide learning profiles based on the cognitive behaviour and motivation of the pupils (pupils can be represented by various profiles). The final result will be the possibility to adapt traditional contents with the appropriate modifications for each level of difficulties. To develop properly this tool and to test its relevance, the consortium is based on 4 organisations, complety complementary. Haikara, coordinator of the project, will bring its expertise in e-learning and contents creation, as well as on development of IT solutions to provide the project with both the pedagogical requirements and the final learning tool. It will be supported by the Cognition Institute of Plymouth, to implement research activities and assessment regarding the children psychology and disabilities. To reinforce the research part, two associations will act on the project to bring their practical point of view. ICEPE, with its strong international networks and high relationships with institutional organisations in Europe will be highly involved in the dissemination and demonstration requirements. Moreover, from its expertise regarding teachers behaviour when it comes to special educational needs, it will help during the research phase to implement policies that fit with the schools demands. Finally, Ecole2Demain will be the stronger partner for demonstration as it will bring its large scale networks of demonstrators, especially schools. Through these developments, research and demonstration, ALS will test and prove the utility of a new learning tool, consolidating needs of diverse European Countries. Indeed, the project will provide profiles on the European scale, that will lead to a general cultural awareness increase towards the development of common policies tackling the needs of disabled pupils. The project will have high potential of transferability as the adaptive aspect of the tool can be implemented through a diverse range of end-users after the project end.

School starting ages vary across Europe. The experience of transition to school can be very supportive for children and their families, setting them up for future academic and social success. However, it can be a difficult experience for some children, particularly those with Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities (SEND), those who have already experienced multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences, or those from hard to reach communities such as migrant, refugee and Roma and Sinta groups. Transitions have been identified as an important focus area as a result of the partners’ work on previous Erasmus+ projects, such as ITIDE, PROMISE, and PROLEA. This project aims to synthesise and develop best practice around transitions to school for dissemination across partner countries to support positive outcomes for all groups of children. Whilst acknowledging individual regional contexts and investigating best practice in our partners' regions, we will find solutions through collaborative transnational knowledge exchange. We will be addressing the horizontal priority of supporting educators, and the school education priorities of tackling disadvantage and increasing access to high quality early child education and care. Cross-cultural research on transitions to full time compulsory schooling argues that these experiences relate to social competence and academic achievement (Tizard et al., 1988; Ramey & Campbell, 1991). Preschool children with SEND often experience a more challenging transition to school than others (Janus et al., 2008), with success depending on the child’s adaptation to the new environment and on the parents, teachers and school facilitating the child’s learning. Parents play a key role in providing information about their children whilst teacher attitudes and expectations and communication with parents and other members of the transition team are highly important in determining the quality of the transition (Salend, 2008). Hard to reach and vulnerable communities include children who have experienced trauma, looked after children, refugee and migrant children, marginalised groups such as Roma and Sinta, and children who experience intergenerational poverty. For them, transitions are particularly hard as they are less likely to attend early years care settings (Gilley et al., 2015). The family may also lack experience of schooling, or have negative expectations that the home culture and language may not be valued. Schools may make 'assumptions about levels of cultural familiarity and contextual knowledge' (Vickers, 2007). For these children and families, transdisciplinary networks to support transition are valuable (Krakouer et al., 2017) as well as a focus on partnerships and professional learning for early years professionals and school teachers. This project focuses on supporting educators: we will work collaboratively with early years educators and primary school teachers to link education practices with research and innovation through the planned knowledge exchange on transitions practices in the partner countries. These professionals will work with us in developing and evaluating individual learning units: learning and professional development resources for the teaching profession. These will enable professionals to engage more effectively and support learners from disadvantaged and diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The project aims to tackle school disadvantage by strengthening collaboration amongst early years professionals at different stages of the educational system through the workshops and learning units. These training opportunities and best practice guidelines at the regional and transnational level will improve transition into formal compulsory schooling and support relationships between schools, early years settings and families.The project partners have extensive experience of working with schools and educators to provide training and psychological services for Early Years, SEND and vulnerable populations including refugee and marginalised groups. Each organisation has established access to networks to access participants in these groups regionally. Proposed activities are: knowledge exchange on transitions policies and practices in the partner countries with a literature review, resulting in policy guidelines; training materials disseminated free of charge; workshops to evaluate the materials, leading to an evaluation report; and transnational best practice guidelines. The resources will be embedded within existing structures within the partner organisations to ensure continued impact and life for the materials beyond the end of the project. The expected impact is to improve transition experiences for those groups who find them most difficult, by equipping Early Years practitioners, teachers, and families with knowledge, tools and ideas to promote positive transition experiences.

Answering the challenge of inclusive education is however a complex process. The teachers are confronted to a multitude of children profiles, as every pupil is unique. This diversity should be encouraged however in terms of learning skills, interests and motivation, the discrepancies from a pupil to another is a challenge in order to promote equal opportunities given by education. To be inclusive, the school should be multiple and collaborative, and the teachers should be committed to the success of a universal pedagogy. This supposes major changes in the structuring of schools and classrooms, regarding pedagogy and learning environment, aiming at ensuring that all children feel supported to be able to develop their full capacity. Towards this challenge, Universal Design for Learning, by understanding the way of people are learning, is giving flexibility and personalised learning to all. From experience, this concept has shown potential for inclusive education, especially because nowadays, at the level of regular classrooms, the teachers face pupils with learning issues at different level. We count around 1 child on 5 that presents learning disabilities including only the children that have been diagnosed. Besides, early school classes have the constraint of having children under stage of development that can highly differ from one child to another. Promoting flexible learning opportunities for inclusion in regular classroom, not considering the stigma of disabilities, is a great opportunity to enhance the capacity of primary schools to fulfil their mission of committing the children into the education process. In that context, the AILE project is designed to provide teachers with better educational opportunities for the integration of all pupils aged between 6 and 10 years old in order to meet each individual learning requirements to improve the educational development and give equal opportunities for all children. This global objective will be reached using a breakthrough educational web-based solution to enable teachers creating their own regular learning contents and pedagogical activity, in an adapted and interactive way, thanks to a list of adaptations started through the ALSO Erasmus + project. Through this project, AILE aims at answering to three objectives: i) give a concrete opportunity to the teachers to create, from a unique template, several adapted materials depending on the children’s needs, ii) promote easy inclusive education to motivate teachers and iii) promote a collaborative pedagogy with and without schools for inclusion.To achieve this goal, AILE will implement a breakthrough methodology and solution based on: (1)An in-depth assessment of the end-user’s requirements and needs compared to the opportunities given by UDL to implement concrete digital solutions towards inclusive education, (2)The creation of a large database of adaptations to the children needs, to offer new opportunity of alternative learning pathways, (3)The release of a breakthrough web-based solution, enabling all teachers to create, from their own material, adapted learning interactive contents, compared to their pupils’ profiles, (4)A complete assessment of the solution, and a replication plan towards institutions, schools, teachers, families and supportive organisations such as language therapists. The AILE project will be coordinated by Haikara, a digital agency based in France that will bring to the project its expertise acquired through the ALSO project funded by the Erasmus + programme and referred as a “Best practices” projet recently by the European Commission. In addition, Haikara will be supported by 4 renown partners: (1)CEFES, Center for Studies and Training for Specialized and Inclusive Education, with the mission is to help and support the person with disabilities and their family, (2)Ecole2Demain, gathering a high level of knowledge and competencies to develop a new qualitative policy focused on pedagogy and adaptive learning(3)ICEP Europe, Institute of Child Education and Psychology Europe, independent training and research institute specialised in psychology and special educational needs (4)Orthocentre, speech therapists, specialised in adapted and inclusive learning pathways. Thanks to these activities, the AILE project will have significant impacts on major challenges in the EU framework related to school education, especially i) increasing the capability of teachers to provide adapted learning contents, ii) developing collaboration mind-set between all stakeholders inside and outside the classroom, including therapists and families, iii) reducing school drops through better motivation and learning experience of children.

Context/background: Our project, EAGLES, aimed to tackle the youth unemployment problem by developing important employability skills to young job seekers in combination with positive emotions, psychological resilience, optimism and self–esteem. This was achieved through the development of a very innovative and practical training package which will be utilised by Youth Workers, who will be trained by the EAGLES team and will then act as multipliers of this knowledge. Emphasis will be placed on transferring positive emotions and thoughts to young job seekers. Positive Psychology is the scientific study of optimal human functioning that seeks to discover and promote factors that allow individuals, communities and societies to thrive and flourish (Seligman et al., 2006) Extensive research shows that positive emotions can broaden thoughts and actions and enrich physical, mental, psychological and social resources (Fredrickson, 2013). However, it has been scientifically proved that young people and especially young job seekers lack the ability to activate their positive characteristics and they end up with limited employability skills and inadequate positive emotions to achieve their goal. This is due to the disappointment they often feel when they get rejected by many employers during recruitment process, feeling inadequate and unworthy. EAGLES aims to enhance young job seekers’ employability and entrepreneurial skills, utilising horizontally the principles of positive psychology intervention. Project Objectives:• To develop, test and publish an innovative educational tool for Young Job Seekers (age group: 18-30 yrs old), combining positive psychology approach with current employability/entrepreneurial educational tools. • The educational tool will be provided to 40 Youth Workers (people supporting young people) who will be responsible for transferring this knowledge to young job seekers in their country. Most importantly, the educational tool will further enhance the quality and professionalism of youth workers’ effort to help young people to acquire transversal and life competences and to foster young people’s personal development, enhancing also their employability skills and entrepreneurial spirit. • The educational tool will include practical exercises and activities that job seekers will be able to apply at any stage of their life along with the support of a coach/mentor. One or two experts from our consortium in each country will be trained to take on this role.Number and profile of participants: 5 expert organisations from 4 EU countries (with high levels of unemployment rates): CY, GR, IT, IE. 40 Youth Workers (10 in each country) will take part in our pilot testing programmes. It is expected that through our dissemination and training activities and our media campaign (including traditional and new media) more than 26,000 people will be informed about our project at EU level. Main activities/methodology: 1) State of the art and needs' analysis: Our aim is to identify the most important employability skills needed nowadays in the workplace. 2) Construction of educational training package + manual - Prepare the first version of the EAGLES programme.3) This will be pilot tested in 4 EU countries (CY, GR, IT, IE), having 10 youth workers participating in each country 4) All participants will give feedback about the quality of the training programme, through the use of a questionnaire. Also the trainers and the External Advisory Board members will give their suggestions for further improvement.5) The EAGLES Programme will be provided in face-to-face and through an online platform6) A media campaign will be implemented, with many dissemination activities across Europe, directly reaching our main target groups.Results and impact envisaged: • Offer a new training course to be used across EU by youth organisations, career counselors, universities etc. • By training Youth Workers (Coaches) in four EU countries this will contribute in transferring transnational knowledge and skills to a number of young job seekers and provide support and guidance to them. It will assist Youth Organisations to enhance their practices and methods based on the Positive Psychology perspective.• The proposed educational tool (combining Positive Psychology and Employability skills) will enhance the quality and professionalism of youth workers’ effort to help young job seekers to acquire much needed skills and competences.• The predicted impact of this project on young population will be enormous due to the persistent young unemployment rate. This versatile educational tool will assist young job seekers to develop necessary skills needed in the workplace nowadays.• Serve as a best practice example and a training model for Strategic Partnerships and other EU initiatives within the employability skills area.

While stress is an inevitable part of life, it is very present and becoming more prevalent among university students [1]. In addition to anxiety and stress, depression can also impact higher education students’ life to such an extent that in-depth research is necessary in order to help future students. Studies show that in some cases almost 10% of university students have been diagnosed with, or treated for, depression over the past 12 months [2]. In a recent study [3] the students completed a survey consisting of demographic questions, a section instructing participants to rate the level of concern associated with challenges pertinent to daily life (e.g. academics, family, sleep), and the 21-question version of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale. The results indicated that the top three concerns were academic performance, pressure to succeed, and post-graduation plans. Academic pressures of meeting grade requirements, test taking, volume of material to be learned and time management has been shown to be a significant source of stress for HE students. While academics can be perceived as a positive challenge, potentially increasing learning capacity and competency, if viewed negatively, this stress can be detrimental to the student's mental health and wellbeing. Researchers urged for the need for universities to implement a systematic and continuous method to monitor the mental health of their students [3]. This type of monitoring, along with increased availability of programs, would allow universities to evaluate the mental health needs of their students as well as assess and improve the efficacy of their existing counseling programs.The project’s objective is to design and develop a 3D virtual world using the potential of a gamification-based approach in which university students will anonymously engage in activities that will help them be better prepared for University curricular activities and ultimately help them reduce anxiety while simultaneously monitor their mental health. Inside the environment, students will engage in gamified activities that usually induces anxiety such as preparation for an exam. Visualization of activities that causes anxiety through the virtual world will help the participants to get better prepared for the actual activities. Additionally, successfully completing the activity in the virtual world will reduce the anxiety in real life when the real activity will take place. Psychological counseling will be designed inside the environment using proper setting. The 3d virtual world environment presents numerous benefits for psychological counseling, since it removes the restrictions of physical representation. The student and the counselor -each in the convenience of their own space (campus or home)- can log in in the environment and be represented by virtual avatars that can be transformed as the individual user wishes and feels comfortable with (appearance, outfit etc.). Furthermore, the environment will comprise a visually appealing and relaxing virtual environment consisting of rivers, mountains, waterfall, flowers, trees, beaches etc. Additionally, the environment provides anonymity for students that are afraid to engage in a traditional face to face phycological counseling. Finally, the Counseling Center of each University can monitor the overall mental health of their students by examining students answers in virtual world surveys. Students will have the option to choose if they prefer to take the surveys or not.This 3D virtual world will be developed using an iterative development process (alpha, beta and final version) after a thorough needs analysis involving students and professionals. Students from all partner countries will participate in various sessions inside the environment. The project will have a significant impact to students, educators, university counseling centers and mental health professionals. The final version of the environment will be multilingual, open and expandable to other languages and game scenarios, allowing broader long-time benefits. References[1] Mackenzie, S., et al. (2011). Depression and suicide ideation among students accessing campus health care. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 81(1), 101. [2] Wolfram R. (2010). Depression Care: Using the Chronic Care Model in a University Health Center. Doctoral dissertation, Valparaiso University.[3] Beiter, R., et al. (2015). The prevalence and correlates of depression, anxiety, and stress in a sample of college students. Journal of Affective Disorders, 173, 90–96.