Assistance Program

School attendance is key for children in early childhood education because it expands their learning opportunities and enables them to reach their full developmental potential.

Problem

When children are absent from school, there is a significant loss of learning opportunities, which limits their ability to reach their full developmental potential as they would if they attended regularly.

A study in Chile shows that missing school has a negative impact on children's learning. In fact, chronic absenteeism (missing more than 10% of school days) in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten has been shown to be associated with worse performance in SIMCE in second and fourth grade, both in mathematics and language (González and Kluttig, 2019).

Our proposal

The Attendancee programme provides tools and strategies to educational teams and managers of public schools and kindergartens, aimed at promoting and increasing the attendance of children in early education.

Learn more about our theory of change (add link)

1.- Implementation of the Assistance Program:
Our implementation model is 2 years with direct support. We invite you to learn more about our implementation model.

2.- Support for own programs:
We support our foundation's Un Buen Comienzo and We Learn programs to promote and improve school attendance.

3.- Promotion of a culture of assistance:
We have a variety of resources to promote attendance:
- Campaign Get them off the ground
- International assistance seminars
- Animated series Super Assistance and messages from our corporeal body.
- Free assistance courses at Oportunidadenlinea.cl

4-. Data Management:
We have data that supports the effectiveness of our Assistance Program. View attendance data

5.- National and international collaborations:
- We collaborate with JUNJI in its national kindergarten attendance and permanence project.
- We lead the INSA Chile Network, the only Latin American country in INSA International.
- We participate in relevant congresses and seminars on school attendance issues. In October we will be participating in the INSA international congress in New Orleans.

Currently:

  • We advise JUNJI in its national kindergarten attendance and permanence project, which allows us to reach more than 90 thousand children, equivalent to 10% of kindergarten enrollment nationwide.
  • We implemented our program in Integra Foundation (Arica and Parinacota, Valparaiso and O'Higgins regions), SIP School Network, Santiago Children's Corporation, DAEM Casablanca, Open Arms Foundation, Cristo Vive Foundation, Betterland School.

Within the framework of the international congress of the International Network for School Attendance (INSA) held in Holland in 2022 -and where we had an outstanding participation- we brought this experience to Chile, becoming the first country in Latin America to have this collaborative alliance whose purpose is to promote school attendance and thus contribute to the protection of educational trajectories.

Since 2023, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad has been convening and bringing together different actors to form the INSA Chile Network. Currently, the Ministry of Education, the Center for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE), Fundación Presente, Fundación Belén Educa, and Fundación Educacional Arauco are also part of the network.

Through local experiences and joint work, the INSA Chile Network seeks to be a national and international reference in the field of school assistance, promoting educational practices and aspiring to influence public policies that ensure inclusive and quality education for all girls and boys.