The proportion of young people in East Central Sweden (ÖMS) who have not completed their high school education in four years is approximately 24 percent. There are more women than men who complete secondary school. The proportion of men who do not complete secondary education are three to five percentage points higher than the corresponding proportion of women. On the preparatory study programs, the proportion of students who did not complete upper secondary school after four years is 15%, while the corresponding share of the vocational programs is 23%. The group of young people who find it difficult to gain a foothold in the labour market also includes newly arrived young people with varied educational backgrounds and young people with disabilities. Deficiencies in basic and secondary education is one reason why persons with disabilities in general have a lower level of education than the rest of the population. As the rest of the population, women in both of these groups have generally higher level of education than men. Young people, 15 to 24 years, dropping out of school without pass grades, are at risk of illness and find it difficult to enter and find a permanent job on the labour market, than those who have achieved passing grades. There are however low skilled jobs available on the labour market but young people with without pass grades can not compete with young people with complete grades. Dropping out of upper secondary school in the ÖMS region presents challenges in terms of interventions to support young adults for a re-entry into education or work. In order to apply an integrated approach to this challenge, the five regions in East Central Sweden-Östergötland, Södermanland, Uppland, Västmanland, Örebro partnered in a joint application and effort to prevent and reduce the number of dropouts and academic failures and help young people to return to studies or internships/work and get a permanent affiliation to the labour market. In the period 2015-2018, we would like to implement the following action with the support of the ESF fund: • helping young people 15-24 years who are at risk of dropping out or have already fallen off the education/labour market by early identification in order to receive individual support to return to education or to enter the labour market. • Empowering young men and women entering the labour market, in particular by increasing the proportion who complete their high school education. • Reduce the number of gender stereotyped choice of courses and jobs by widening their perspectives and choose schools/jobs from a broader perspective. • Projects promoting non-discrimination perspective in its activities. • The projects will promote accessibility perspective in their activities. Way to achieve these effects include • Development, testing, establishment and evaluation of new tools and methods targeting young people at the risk of dropping out of school • Development, testing, establishment and evaluation of new tools and methods targeting young people who have already dropped out of school • Lasting changes in the participating organizations. • Permanent structures to be built for continued efforts to reduce drop-out rates from secondary school. The project will be implemented in the form of a 30 sub-projects at schools and in a number of municipalities and 40 municipalities comprising approximately 4000 young people, in the age of15 to 24 years. Each project set its own goals within the framework of the project described above. Collaborative partners include Arbetsförmedlingen, Försäkringskassan, social insurance, municipal administrations, county councils and enterprises in the various counties.