Our project is a 3-year programme of research and development undertaken by partnership of 5 institutions integrating educational, youth, sports and other leisure activities in Denmark, Portugal.,Ireland, Lithuania and Norway. It addresses the exclusion of young people from social, educational, cultural and economic opportunities associated with full citizenship a serious issue across Europe. Current research indicates: a) the particular importance of this issue for younger people characterized as "NEETS" - Not in Employment, Education or Training, and those at risk of becoming NEETs through Early School Leaving (ESL) and more general disengagement from mainstream education and wider, socially inclusive networks. b) that within the broad range of life-skills needed to exercise full citizenship, the development of social skills, self-confidence and positive self-esteem is very important for young people c) sporting activities, non-formal types of education, and community activity such as drama, dance, music and multi-media workshops can be very effective in engaging or re-engaging young people in wider social and educational networks, raising self-confidence and self-esteem, developing social skills and team-working and thus combating social and economic exclusion d) Effective initiatives have been “spear-headed” and supported by prestigious sporting and other organizations such as those our partners have worked with, e.g. those associated with two premiership football teams, Benfica in Portugal and “Arsenal in the Community” in the UK. In relation to these issues , we aim to explore and disseminate best practice in educational organisations, youth services, sports and other recreational associations working together to combat the social exclusion of young men and women. The immediate target groups for our findings and products are youth and community workers, school leaders and teachers, trainers, and coaches, working with young people in varying degrees of co-operation with related agencies and with varying and often inadequate resources for training and support. Our ultimate beneficiaries are the many hundreds and thousands of young people whose life-chances will benefit during and after the lifetime of the project.from our target groups’ enhanced knowledge and competence Preliminary needs analysis with our immediate target groups shows a crucial need for more specific training and support directed particularly towards developing and sharing best practice for more effective inter-agency collaboration Currently, even those initiatives which seem most successful have often been developed on a largely ad hoc and “top-down” basis which has not encompassed a wide range of related practitioners and professionals from other agencies who typically have limited opportunities to share their experience and make more effective, collaborative intervention. We aim to help meet these needs by bringing together partners with considerable, but differing types and levels of inter-agency working to combat youth disengagement. We identify and explore best practice in our different national and socio-economic contexts in order to develop and disseminate a range of innovative training and support materials and resources to meet the needs of our target groups. Specifically, we aim to produce detailed reports and filmed analysis of “best practice” case-studies in 5 partner countries. These will be major outputs in their own right but will also form the basis for renewable resource packs and a sustainable, self-financing training course + associated handbook adaptable for distance or residential learning in all European countries and regions. All of our findings, conclusions, analyses, reports, films and resource packs will be disseminated through a freely accessible public website sustainable after the project’s lifetime; through publications and presentations in the academic and professional literature; and through a European conference for practitioners delivered at the end of the project. We believe that the most effective exploration and dissemination of “What works, where, and why” in this field, producing a core of best practice transferable to all European countries, must be based upon transnational analysis of practitioners’ experience of similar problems and strategies in a variety of different European settings. Our partners are from contrasting regions of 5 different countries from North, West, South and Eastern Europe. Each one has a variety of local and regional networks of related agencies in education, youth and community work, sport and leisure. Their staff are drawn from both educational and youth work backgrounds and all have specific and varied experience of working with different types of disadvantaged learners from marginalized communities in different European contexts, many with a migrant background.