What can be more important than helping the next generation find their feet successfully in society? Very often young people's interest in their future is dominated by fears. Alleviating those fears and opening up opportunities will be the target of our project. At the same time we aim to concrete awareness of opportunities in a European context, to motivate and encourage students to see the bigger picture within the European structures so as to enable them to use these structures to their own advantage. It's important for us to enhance our students' opportunities both with respect to the job market in Europe and in their personal lives. Personal well-being and feeling content in your life depends a lot on work-life-balance. How can this be achieved in an ever-increasingly demanding environment? We intend to explore strategies and techniques, such as response groups regarding language development and interactive workshops to practise public appearance skills, to achieve these aims with our students thus opening new avenues of experience for all those taking part. These insights will be passed on to peer groups, parents and all others who are either interested in the development of these young people or in furthering and differentiating their own skills. The countries working together in order to learn from each other are: Sweden, Germany, Great Britain, Poland and Macedonia. They will contribute all their expertise in fields such as career guidance, work experience, entrepreneurship, communicative skills, usage of media and ICT, language improvement, work-life-balance and intercultural skills. There will be workshops on the topics mentioned, at the same time enhancing students' motivation and creativity thus encouraging personal development. Student participation in the workshops with the acnowledged ”Europass” can be used as a valuable tool for future career decisions. While hands-on experience will be gained in six project meetings with approximately eight students per country. A total of 300 participating students will benefit from this project, including a balance of both genders, ethnic groups, and students with learning disabilities. The results of these meetings will be distributed in the respective schools. These results will be made accessible on a local, regional and international scale by publishing products on the eTwinning-platform, a specially designed joint blog, and in our respective local and regional networks. Ideally our mutual experience will be included in the individual school curriculum of the partner schools where it is applicable. Therefore the project will evolve into a rather complex enterprise that will have lasting effects on a great number of people involved.
We decided to enter into a co-operation between five countries since we all were interested in the same subject; how to implement the key competences into the education to prepare the students for the labour market in a good way. The objectives were literacy in the mother tongue and a foreign language (key competence 1 and 2), entrepreneurial learning (key competence 7), insight into convocational training, interaction with peers of the same age group (key competence 6 and 8), which in the end had the above mentioned theme and final goal. Projectpartners have all been schools, in Sweden, Germany, Poland, Northmacedonia (former FYR Macedonia) and the UK. Our main activities has been bookreading and Skype-meetings for joint discussions, mobilities with study visits, seminars, practical tasks, problem solving exercises, intercultural exchange, CV-writing and practical exercises preparing for national/international labour market. There has been well prepared exercises at the national schools for the students, as well as during the mobilities abroad. We have had the opportunity to let our students try a range of different pedagogical solutions to real life existing situations, which we feel has been conducted with a very high quality from all our project partners as well as the involved organizations. The students that has participated in the mobilities (a total of 88 students during three mobilities from all countries), are many of them more secure with using a foreign language and a closeness between the students from the different countries has been noted. The students in general have said that the probability that they will study abroad is higher now, after this project. Our students have developed a greater self-confidence and a broadened insight into the variety of ways to study and work - an example of the European dimension. The impact on the national staff has also been noticed, in the way that new ways to implement the national curriculum have developed. The longer-term benefits that we have seen is that many of the participating students that for one way or the other were a bit shy, now have started to dream bigger and trying to find more alternatives for their future lives than earlier.