Santiago Apóstol Primary School is a private education institution held by Valencia’s Archbishopcric and located in Valencia, specifically in the Cabanyal neighbourhood.

Due to obvious reasons it is impossible to know exactly how many Spanish Roma people are currently living in the neighbourhood, but some studies clearly set Cabañal as one of the metropolitan areas with the highest percentage.

We currently have 208 students, 91% of which is Roma and come from families at serious risk of social exclusion, either due to economic, labour or racial reasons.

We’re well aware of the inherent complexity of the task related to educating kids coming from such a disadvantaged environment, and for that reason we decided to offer an integrated solution by  turning our school into a Learning Community in 2010.

We’ve based our daily work on the dialogical approach and we’ve put in practice several effective educational actions like the Interactive Groups, Dialogical Literacy Circles, Families’ and Volunteers’ Training, Educational Participation of the Community, the Dialogical Model for Conflict Prevention and the Dialogical Teachers’ Training.

Some years ago we started an Innovative Education Program focused on fostering our students’ motivation through ICT, whose output have been so far the School Radio, the “gamification” of our methodologies, the “Creativity Development through digital media” Course and The “Programming and Robotic” Course.

Hence we’ve developed  some experience related to the pillars of our methodologies, i.d.

• Fostering motivation to prevent early dropout and absenteeism;
• Education innovation through formal and non-formal techniques;
• Prevention, management and solution of school conflicts;
• Implementation of interculturality and diversity issues in our curriculum;
• Modernisation of the school workflow.