Production Schools and Enterprises: Partnerships combating Poverty among Young Disadvantaged Learners

Zusammenfassung

Within this chapter the results from the Danish domestic project ‘Local Partnerships. Production Schools—Companies—Civil Society‘ will be presented as an example of a social-pedagogical perspective on combating poverty. This chapter will focus on the quantitative insights gathered during the scientific evaluation of the project. The partnership project is carried out in collaboration between four Production Schools in Denmark (Esbjerg, Aarhus, Randers, and Copenhagen) and a social work NGO ‘Social and Educational Development and Training Centre’ known as SPUK. The project has been funded by the Velux Foundation and involves a large number of social workers, educators, managers, coordinators and pupils from the respective Production Schools and employers and employees from public and private companies and volunteers from associations. The results that will be presented mainly build on an analysis of questionnaire data retrieved from the pupils as well as school records. These data are furthermore combined with other questionnaire data collected among other young people for comparative insights on drug use, cultural activities, well-being and democratic participation (European Commission, Brussels DG Communication COMM A1, 2013). A number of validated instruments have been applied as well, these include the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), Pupils’ Life Satisfaction Scale and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE). In this article we focus on relations to SDQ.