School Profile

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Bat Yam’s Personal Education Program is aimed at creating an education system that views each pupil as having distinctive skills and needs. Around 10,000 schoolchildren are already part of the program – and in two years’ time, every single schoolchild in the city will be enrolled in it.

As part of the program, every Bat Yam child will get personal-familial response, aimed at fulfilling to the maximum each one’s inherent potential. Accordingly, the program raises the child’s self-image and social image, improves achievements (both scholastic and social), curbs violence, and fosters a pleasant, enabling social climate. All of these help to improve the city’s image and develop pride in it and the country among local residents.

The child’s family and close environment are highly significant factors, and so the program is characterized by a structured integration of the city’s formal and informal education systems, and its social affairs system. Collaborations like this are aimed at coordinating and pooling resources between all the services that the municipal systems provide to schoolchildren and their families.

The personal-familial connection between children and the system is made possible by the personal mentor – a member of the school staff who receives a larger educational role, and becomes responsible for a small group of students (from fifteen to twenty). The personal mentor is the everyday personal liaison with the child and his/her family, coordinating between all their activities and the formal and information education systems, as well as the social affairs system. Every school day in the program’s framework starts with a morning meeting – where the mentor meets with the small group; it enables a relaxing, structured start to the school day. Afterwards, classes begin and between classes the personal mentor hold personal mentoring talks with his/her students. Towards the end of the school day, a wrapup meeting is held – closing the day and enabling a conversation about the children’s activities during the afternoon. During all these meetings, the personal mentor helps each child to develop a personal learning contract in the sphere of formal learning, in social areas, and in his/her “sphere of excellence” – which is at least one area of knowledge in which each child in the group must display top-level achievements.

To back up the personal contract, a contract-support learning center is opened in each school. It operates three days a week, after school-hours, and helps students interested in promoting the goals they defined in their specific personal contract. To help develop the student’s sphere of excellence, the local authority provides funding for municipal after-school courses and programs in that sphere. Every child needing funding help receives a credit voucher from the personal mentor to take part in the activity / course in the specific sphere. The mentor tracks his/her progress together with staff of the city’s informal education.