Page 114 - Štremfel, Urška, and Maša Vidmar (eds.). 2018. Early School Leaving: Cooperation Perspectives. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
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Multidisciplinary teams in schools (e.g. learning and behaviour sup-
port teams) are important for improving the support structure provided for
children and teachers (Downes, 2011). Schools as universal services are well
placed to identify early signs of vulnerability in a student and work with oth-
er professions to explore the extent of that vulnerability and to develop a
joint response. Schools have long referred students with specific individual
needs to discrete external services which give specialist support. These ser-
vices, for example, include school psychology, mental health services, speech
therapy and counselling (Edwards & Downes, 2013). Schools can help to
build local capacity and parents’ social capital through paying attention to
how they help foster local networks and engage with parents (Edwards &
Downes, 2013). Such services usually target general issues of child welfare
(e.g. Every Child Matters – ECM, UK, Cheminais, 2009; Behaviour and edu-
cation support teams – BEST, the Netherlands, Downes, 2011).

Educational alliances
Recently, the term educational alliances rather than multi-profession-
al teams, cooperation or partnership has emerged in the educational set-
ting, including with regard to the ESL issue (Thibert, 2013). Educational
alliances have been identified as one of the return-to-school factors (for
details of the concept’s development, see Allenbach, 2014). Gilles, Potvin
and Tièche Christinat (2012) propose three levels of educational allianc-
es: macro (institutions, regions), méso (different professionals/experts) and
micro (relations within the class and with the family). Meso-level alliances
correspond to more internal (within-school) educational alliances, but can
also include professionals external to school, while macro-level are exter-
nal educational alliances as they include a variety of external partners (in-
ter-agency partnerships).

In relation to internal educational alliances, it seems the biggest chal-
lenges of a multi-professional service are maintaining student/family pri-
vacy and confidentiality. There are also other problems of using the school
as the place for delivering the service (e.g. resistance from school person-
nel to students missing classes, the clash of the emotional climate of an in-
dividual session and the classroom environment); this shows the need for
emotional support services at locations apart from to the school and the
need to address the confidentiality issue (Downes, 2011). However, schools
should remain involved because schools are the only universal service
(Edwards & Downes, 2013). Moreover, institutional resistance (perceived

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