The project partnership links five state secondary schools from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom with over 6000 pupils between them for three years. The schools have very different characters due to their locations and varied pupil intakes. However, they share common concerns about the future including sustainability, the responsible and irresponsible use of resources and energy, and human interactions where there are conflicting values regarding supply and demand, consumption and fairness. Skidelsky’s question “How much is enough?” is the central question. Over three years students and teachers will work together on the overall theme Less is More: the Smart City. Their thinking and actions will be channeled through three pairs of sub-topics followed for a year each by different core teams of 6 students per school per annum. The objectives include raising awareness of the practical and moral issues, considering solutions and sharing them with a wider audience across Europe. The ‘Europe 2020” agenda provides a framework through which skills such as foreign languages and digital competence in the use of modern media will be enriched. Considerable use will be made of apps in the project.Throughout the project, students will work in internationally mixed teams. Before meeting for an annual mid-year plenary conference to be held in Hattingen (2017), Schijndel (2018) and Lincoln (2019), they will have collaborated through email, twitter and eTwinning to develop knowledge and thinking on the three pairs of sub-themes. These are Environment and Mobility, Living and Economy, and Government and People. After the annual meeting they will be responsible for dissemination through websites, displays and ultimately an online project handbook of good practice. The participants at each mid-year conference will agree on a manifesto relating to their particular area of study, which will be circulated widely. At the final conference, there will also be a summative manifesto on Less is More to be circulated at European level.ANTICIPATED LEVEL OF BENEFICIARIESHeadteachers and school co-ordinators will be the facilitators with student representatives attending the teacher meetings through Skype. There will be annual face-to-face meetings for each group in one of the partner schools, but most contact will be by Skype or email. The long term effect will be the product of sustained teamwork in the form of series of statements about the sort of world the students would like to inhabit, which will be expressed in various digital and creative ways, and then disseminated through the web, eTwinning, school curricula and in live performances and presentations. This will be disseminated through the ambassadors each year to the anticipated 1500 participants i the multiplier events.There will also be a long-term training commitment through the development of a new KA1 staff mobility opportunity available to all Erasmus+ countries. The longer term impacts will be that the participants will be committed to making a difference to their own lives and those of other Europeans through this exciting collaboration.
The five schools have come together for all of the planned activities, both in terms of management and planning of the project and the implementation by the students. The overall topic of “less is More” was broken down each year into smaller sections – Environment and Mobility, Living and Economy, People and Government. In each of the three years, students from each of the five schools worked together in small workshop groups of between 5 and 10 students from all the schools examining a particular aspect of the yearly theme. Their findings and results were then documented in various ways – written articles, videos, displays, presentations and so on to the whole of that years’ cohort of students, staff and invited guests. These included civic dignitaries, staff from the schools, parents and friends. In this way an immediate dissemination occurred to several hundred people at each closing event. Each school then presented their findings back at their own school to other students in the schools, via newspaper articles and on their own websites. In addition, the ROTA website (rotaonline.org) and eTwinning contains details of each year’s activities. Overall the students have though very carefully about the sort of world they would like to live in. This is evidenced through the questionnaires compiled by the students after each event. Their longer term thinking has been effected, especially towards the importance of international co-operation and friendship in the modern world, especially as Brexit, which has been a theme throughout the project, get ever nearer.