The E-SCHOLAR project (European Schools Cooperating: Healthy Organisations Learning, Achieving Reviewing) is a three-year project being delivered in the context of Sunderland and Saint-Nazaire’s longstanding partnership. In each region it brings together 2 secondary and 4 primary schools to work with the local authority and an additional expert partner. Half of the pilot schools in each region have been involved in previous transnational education activity, while half are inexperienced.The 16 project partners are collaborating to achieve the following objectives:• 8 sustainable bilateral partnerships which include regular communication between staff and learners using a variety of media (including virtual methods, letters, phone calls and visits) and which strengthen the longstanding partnership between the two regions.• Transnational project management experience and capacity within all 16 organisations• Sharing of best practice on delivering education on Health, Sport, Nutrition and Wellbeing, as well as Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) and Information Communications Technology (ICT)• Sharing of resources among schools, local authorities and expert partners, particularly on topics surrounding health education, global citizenship, ICT and MFL.• Healthier participating organisations which are delivering more concrete activities related to the project topic and improved academic attainment of young people.• Provision of meaningful contexts for work on MFL (exchange work with counterparts in target language) and ICT (eTwinning, video-conferencing, blog, social media) which should motivate learning in these disciplines.• Widened perspectives of staff and learners through transnational work.• Understanding of own and others’ identities, shared history and present, and place in Europe and the wider world.• Empowering of learners to lead activities and take responsibility for project delivery.• Increased confidence of staff and learners in a range of areas, particularly MFL, leadership, communication, teamwork, and international working.• Production of resources for use by schools more widely including digital content and a project DVD. This toolkit should support practitioners in all Sunderland/Saint-Nazaire schools to deliver transnational school projects (particularly with focus on MFL, Global Citizenship, Social inclusion and School achievement through healthy living styles).• Delivery of dissemination events to share project results and transnational project management experience and to support other organisations to consider future applications for transnational projects.• Promotion and publicity for European transnational project work.All partners bring significant experience to the project in different areas, and will be responsible for delivering content, as outlined in project partnership agreements. Additional partners will play a key role in developing content and activities and will use their expertise in the project theme to support schools to achieve the E-SCHOLAR objectives.Project partners will use a variety of methods to deliver this work, including:• virtual communication• joint project work• parallel activities, with preparation and results shared• events, including sports festivals organised by project partners• participation in initiatives including Journées sportives, Sport Relief, World Food Day• training (both within individual partner regions and jointly and offered by project partners and additional stakeholders)• meetings and workshops with relevant stakeholders• invitation to speakers to inform learning• dissemination events• production of multimedia toolkit including digital resources and DVD• regular press releases and social media content during E-SCHOLAR’s term• systematic monitoring and evaluation of project activities throughout its lifetimeThey will also use travel to one another’s regions to deliver other activities. These will involve a variety of mobility types, including:• joint staff training with additional partners and other stakeholders in each region• long-term teaching assignments of additional partners with their counterparts• school exchanges to allow secondary-level learners to develop project work in two key areas more fully• transnational meetings to work on coordination, management, dissemination and monitoring activities.
The E-SCHOLAR project (European Schools Cooperating: Healthy Organisations Learning, Achieving Reviewing) was a three-year project delivered in the context of Sunderland and Saint-Nazaire’s longstanding partnership. It sought to share good practice on health education and the impact this can have on educational attainment. In each region it brought together 2 secondary and 4 primary schools to work with the local authority (LA) and an additional expert partner. Half of the pilot schools in each region had been involved in previous transnational education activity, while half were inexperienced. The additional partners (Foundation of Light and Escalado) played a key role in developing content and used their expertise in the project theme to support schools to achieve the E-SCHOLAR objectives. The 16 project partners collaborated towards the following objectives and achieved the following results: • 8 sustainable bilateral partnerships with regular communication between staff and learners using a variety of media, which have strengthened the longstanding partnership between the two regions and which are now taking forward new lines of activity; • Transnational project management experience and capacity within all 16 organisations which some are now using to bid for new funded joint projects; • Sharing of best practice on delivering education on Health, Sport, Nutrition and Wellbeing, as well as Modern Foreign Languages (MFL); • Provision of meaningful contexts for work on MFL (exchanging with counterparts in target language) and ICT (video-conferencing, social media, using digital health tracker data and recorded sound files) which motivated learning in these disciplines; • Widened perspectives of staff and learners and increased understanding of own and others’ identities, shared history, and place in Europe and the wider world, particularly observed of the 45 young people who took part in the exchanges, but also noted in attitudes amongst those who worked directly with partners virtually and in hosting activities. • Empowering of pupils, particularly secondary young leaders who delivered health and sports activities for primary pupils; • Increased confidence of staff and learners in areas including MFL (through training and project work), leadership, communication, teamwork, and international working (particularly through participation in project mobilities and events); • Healthier participating organisations, with all 12 schools now delivering more concrete activities related to the project topic than at E-SCHOLAR start and obesity levels more decreased in all Sunderland primary schools than the city average; • Improved academic attainment reported, however, insufficient significant statistics to substantiate the causal link with E-SCHOLAR activities. • Sharing of resources among schools, LAs and expert partners, particularly on topics surrounding health education, global citizenship, and MFL and leading to production of a toolkit for wider distribution; • Production of digital toolkit and bilingual project DVD distributed to practitioners in all Sunderland/Saint-Nazaire schools and youth organisations to support future transnational and health projects (with additional focus on crosscutting skills in MFL and Global Citizenship); • Delivery of dissemination events in both regions to share project results and management experience, to promote European transnational work, and to support other organisations to consider future applications for international projects. Project partners used a variety of methods to deliver this work, including: • virtual communication • joint project work • parallel activities, with preparation and results shared • events, including sports festivals and tournaments led by young leaders • participation in initiatives including Journées sportives, semaines du goût, Sport Relief, World Food Day • training (within individual partner regions and jointly, and offered by project partners and additional stakeholders) • meetings and workshops with 12 key additional stakeholder organisations • dissemination events • production of toolkit including digital resources and DVD • regular press releases and social media content • monitoring and evaluation of project activities. They used travel to one another’s regions to support project delivery, including: • 5 joint staff training activities with other stakeholders in each region • 2 school exchanges enabling secondary-level learners to develop project work fully and collaborate directly • 5 transnational meetings on coordination, management, dissemination and monitoring activities Much project work (notably on health and MFL) has been integrated and mainstreamed by schools and local authorities who are unanimously pleased with E-SCHOLAR results and the impact it has had, and results and tools developed are being widely disseminated. This will continue, as do the bilateral partnerships which are now developing new lines of collaboration.