IUS Leads WP3 Completion in the CORE-ED Academy Project: Evidence Base and Ecosystem Mapping Delivered for Juvenile Justice Training Reform
The International University of Sarajevo (IUS), as the Lead Beneficiary of Work Package 3 (WP3), has successfully completed the project’s foundational evidence-building phase within the CORE-ED Academy initiative.
WP3 focused on co-producing the CORE-ED Correctional Pedagogy Ecosystem - a structured, practice-informed foundation for the next stage of curriculum development aimed at strengthening services for children in conflict with the law across the Western Balkans. As documented in the WP3 Synthesis Report, IUS coordinated a mixed-methods needs analysis that combined desk research with field data gathered through interviews, questionnaires, and DACUM workshops, enabling the triangulation of findings and providing a consolidated view of sector needs and training gaps.
A central WP3 achievement was the delivery of Deliverable 3.1: Synthesis Report on “CORE-ED” Findings, authored by Dr. Orkun Aydın and Dr. Pınar Ünal-Aydın. The report consolidates multi-source evidence on challenges, trends, and professionalization needs in juvenile justice and correctional pedagogy. It specifically covers the Western Balkan partner contexts - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo - while also enriching regional understanding through comparative DACUM insights from Greece and Romania. The methodology section demonstrates the breadth of data collection, including DACUM sessions and structured stakeholder engagement through questionnaires and interviews, providing a robust basis for evidence-informed training design. Alongside system-level mapping, the Synthesis Report also offers comparative content on juvenile justice frameworks and operational approaches, such as diversion, rehabilitation-oriented models, and institutional structures, ensuring that the forthcoming training model is aligned with real-world implementation environments.
WP3 also advanced the project’s occupational and competency framework through DACUM-based analysis. The DACUM document synthesizes workshop contributions from multiple countries and highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the sector, reflecting the participation of representatives from justice institutions, probation and correctional services, academia, civil society, and community-based actors. The DACUM synthesis identifies recurring cross-country role expectations, showing that professionals often function simultaneously as educators, mentors, counselors, and case managers. It also emphasizes core responsibilities such as communication and counseling, assessment and reporting, rehabilitation planning, interdisciplinary coordination, and crisis response and de-escalation. Importantly, it documents systemic training gaps and operational constraints, including weak inter-agency collaboration and limited structured professional development in some contexts, thereby strengthening the rationale for a standardized, practice-oriented training pathway under CORE-ED. In addition, Deliverable 3.4: Competence Chart outlines domains, competencies, and indicators across juvenile justice sectors in the Western Balkan countries.
To ensure that the project’s ecosystem model supports not only skills development but also institutional sustainability and alignment with EU values, WP3 also integrated an ESG-informed modelling layer. The ESG analysis frames juvenile justice and correctional pedagogy challenges through Environmental, Social, and Governance dimensions, linking training and institutional capacity needs to facility conditions, child-friendly justice and inclusion requirements, and governance and coordination realities. The ESG document provides country-level legal and policy grounding while identifying risks and opportunities relevant to juvenile custodial and community-based settings, such as infrastructure quality, staff well-being, consistency of standards, and monitoring capacity. In this way, it supports the project’s goal of designing competency development that is both operationally realistic and aligned with EU standards.
Collectively, these WP3 outputs establish a consolidated, evidence-based foundation for the next phase of the CORE-ED Academy project, in which the consortium will move from ecosystem mapping and needs analysis to curriculum architecture and training package development. The WP3 evidence base - built through structured research, stakeholder engagement, DACUM competency mapping, and ESG modelling - positions IUS and its partners to develop curricula that reflect frontline realities, strengthen professional standards, and improve outcomes for children in conflict with the law across the region.
