In recent years, the profile of homeless adults has changed greatly: the number of women has risen dramatically, as well as the number of people under 30 years of age. Currently, more than 40% in the US (Williams Institute Public Policy Fellow) and 25% in Europe (United Nations Libres & Égaux) of the more than 1.3 million homeless people (FEANTSA-2020) are between 18 and 30 years old (point at which they can be legally disowned by their family) fall into homelessness due to extreme discrimination for belonging to racialized groups, the LGTBIQ+ community, or on the basis of gender.

These people suddenly find themselves on the street (expelled from their environment without any kind of protection), without resources and without any defense against the terrible threats they face… often falling into prostitution, alcoholism, and even losing their life; even if they are people without other barriers to inclusion excepting those that derive directly from the social discrimination they suffer or from their loss of a home.

As a fundamental strategy for their social reintegration, education reveals itself as an essential tool to achieve full inclusion. Access to formal education stands out in particular, not only as a fundamental right, but also as a basic mechanism for improving their employability and resocialization, which is fundamental for their full inclusion.

However, despite the better opportunities of this group for reintegration, no effective steps have been taken to achieve their educational success, largely due to its novelty, its social invisibility, and social skepticism before this new model of homeless person who doesn’t fit into the established roles and brings this problem closer to their daily reality.

That is why an innovative strategy has been designed, establishing itineraries in three personalized and progressive phases for the educational reintegration of homeless people and/or people in street situation. This strategy establishes a joint work between the user and the street teams (reinforced by teachers), in accordance with the needs and characteristics of the user, in order to regenerate the educational and transversal skills needed for them to access secondary education degrees through their access to the Initial Training of Adults (ITA). These itineraries begin at the street level, continue with specific training sessions for homeless people in social entities, and end with their access to regulated training, with adapted methodologies that include pedagogical, psychosocial, and administrative aspects, adapting and providing feedback to the social and medical work they already carry out, thus providing their users with a holistic path for inclusion.

This work has been carried out within the framework of the Erasmus+ project “Reconnecting education with homeless people: walking towards inclusion through adult education adapted to the reality of homelessness”, co-funded by the EU in 2024.

Keywords: Education, homeless, reconnecting, methodology, strategy.