U-turn

The district of Kleve has developed an innovative 'U-turn' program at five locations in the district for students with intensive educational support needs with a focus on emotional and social development in accordance with Section 15 AO-SF NRW. These students have a very high level of psychosocial problems and are exposed to a particular developmental risk, which extremely jeopardizes their participation in school and society and thus the greatest possible inclusion. Within U-turn, teachers for special educational needs cooperate with specialists from youth welfare services to support the students in their social-emotional and academic development and to initiate successful learning processes.

In the first phase of the project, the scientific monitoring includes determining the current status of the intensive educational measures in order to derive recommendations for further development on this basis. The cross-sectional and longitudinal evaluation is based on the renowned CIPP model by Stufflebeam and Shinkfield (1988). On the basis of potential analyses, questionnaires, interviews and document analyses, an environmental analysis is carried out to determine the needs, resources and problems in the U-Turn locations (input evaluation) as well as the identification and assessment of the system's performance and resources (context evaluation). In addition, the current implementation of intensive educational support is analyzed (process evaluation) and the results of the intervention(s) to date are assessed against the background of the defined objectives (output evaluation). An analysis of the acceptance of the measures is also carried out by surveying the satisfaction and acceptance of the people involved in the process with regard to the educational measure. In the second phase of the project, a qualification and support concept for the intensive educational measure is developed, implemented and evaluated on the basis of the evaluation results and the recommendations for action derived from them.