Modern school’s overall purpose is to provide a high quality education in a welcoming and friendly environment and inspire the student to flourish as a person in school and beyond. The project “Inspiring Schools – Aspiring Students” provides various opportunities to develop individuality, curiosity and a breadth of interests. Students will participate in a full range of social, cultural, artistic and sporting activities: active membership in a school parliament will give students better understanding of democracy, a sense of responsibility; supporting a charity will develop their generosity of spirit and compassion; many artistic projects will build students' appreciation of European culture and arts; organizing a school trip will improve their management skills and increase team spirit; European Literature Corner remain a valuable long term resource for the whole school community. All the project activities are based on student-centred approach and were carefully designed to make the most of rich diversity of participating countries. By exchanging the outputs of the project students will get a big insight into everyday lives of the Europeans, their values, culture and traditions. They will cross the borders and personally experience the reality of their European peers while exchanging traditional letters and visiting their homes and schools. We carefully selected five project partners. They appear reliable, hard-working and aspiring to raise their standards of education. We will happy to share our experience with three new partners from small towns in Bulgaria, Spain and Cyprus. The Italian school promotes cultural and linguistic diversity; the Bulgarian partners hope to learn new methods of education to keep students at school; Spanish school is bilingual with a focus on language teaching; Cypriot school needs inspiration for after school activities; the students of Turkish school gained experience in school council. All schools boasts of great sense of cooperation among the staff. Partnership among these schools can be greatly inspiring and aspire both, teachers and students to be more responsible, supportive, creative and concerned about the world’s issues.
This project was founded on the belief that the school should encourage students’ holistic development and that it should go beyond subject boundaries and school curriculum. Our aim was to provide students with a range of inspiring activities which developed children’s responsibility, active citizenship, sense of initiative, awareness of social issues, both local and global. We formed a team of 6 primary schools from Poland, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Turkey, Italy and Spain and more than 300 teachers and 5000 students who participated in a full range of social, cultural, artistic and sporting activities that established a sense of self-belief and the confidence to set aspirational goals. The schools started or reformulated school parliaments and their schedules, charity events obtained a modern and effective forms (Sport Relief event, Penny Fairs), students' creative writing was collected into the book “A Day in My School Life”, students created work of arts inspired by a national artist (“How to be Van Gogh”), searched the past and engaged their grandparents to play “Good Old Games”, the schools found inspiration and extended their offer of cultural and educational activities by introducing other partners' ideas taken from our “The Highlights of the Month” online magazine where we shared school events; students learned management skills and organized a school trip “Inspirational Travels”, they also organized a protest event against food waste on World Food Day, and exhibited their photos of Same and Different project- during the short term pupils exchanges students used the idea of participating photography and took photos of the place through the eyes of local people and looked for similarities and photographed them. Active membership in a school parliament gave students better understanding of democracy, a sense of responsibility and influence on bigger community; supporting a charity foundation developed their generosity of spirit and compassion; the artistic projects built students' appreciation of European culture and arts; organizing a school trip improved their management skills and increased team spirit. All the project activities were carefully selected to make the most of rich diveristy of participating countries. By exchanging the outputs of the project students got a big insight into everyday lives of the Europeans, their values, culture and traditions. 51 students crossed the borders and personally experienced the reality of their European peers while visiting their homes and schools, they also exchanging traditional letters. Cooperating with other European schools was a valuable experience of working in the intercultural and multilingual environment and motivated students for the high quality performance. Both students and parents have expressed their interest in the next Erasmus project and look forward to participating in creating a new project.