Different surveys have illustrated how people's lifestyle has evolved in the past century. Indeed people tend to be less active than fifty or sixty years ago (the number of people who never exercise has increased from 39% to 42% in the past few years - according to the Eurobarometer on Sport and Physical Activity) and their diet has also evolved. In fact, teenagers, nowadays tend to be more fond of junk food, candies and chocolate than vegetables, fish, etc. These unhealthy food choices result in an increase in overweight and/or obese people (According to the OECD, there are more and more obese people - from 8% to 24.5% within the EU - with 24.5% in the UK -). Therefore the creation of this project is motivated by this global and alarming issue. The main objective of the project is to create awareness of the importance to have a healthy lifestyle. Both partner countries aim at working together (as they have been doing so for the past three years) through regular exchanges and virtual meetings via the twinspace that will be especially created for the project and through physical meetings during the planned mobilities. Through this project, we also aim at developing our students's motivation because a loss of motivation and involvement in school activtities can lead to early school leaving and as aforementioned early school leaving leads, in its turn, to unemployment, poverty and social exclusion. So this is one important issue to tackle. The pupils's self-esteem, curiosity, confidence, decisiveness, tolerance and open-mindedness will also be impacted by their participation in the project. Another of our aims is to develop our pupils as European citizens and engage learning about other cultures and lifestyles. It is important to encourage their curiosity, their openness to other cultures and nationalities and their propension to mobility. This will be done through regular web conversations, activities planned throughout the project and physical meetings. We are also building this partnership with a view to developing our students' basic and transferable skills, use of a foreign language and use of ICT. This will be developed through completing tasks and communicating with each other via IT tools. There are numerous objectives for our students but there are also many objectives for the staff and the teachers involved in the project. Indeed we aim at making our teaching methods more innovative and more attractive than regular usual teaching methods. The reputation and standing of our schools will also be impacted by such a project. The topic of our project is a global concern and is totally in line with "Europe 2020 Strategy: for a Healthier EU" but also with the objectives and goals advocated by the Council of Europe for the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage. Our project covers various fields such as Sport, Health, Prevention (through first-aid training course) and Cultural Heritage (tangible, intangible and natural). In order to reach the objectives aforementioned, a wide range of activities is planned during the two years. These activities will include the creation and the election of a logo to illustrate and promote our project, video presentation of the pupils and of each respective school and country, presentations of buildings, places and natural spaces classified at the UNESCO, the preparation of typical recipes from each respective country involved in the project, the creation of posters and shooting of videos to promote and advertise a healthy lifestyle, the presentation of different sports and physical activities in order for the pupils to get acquainted with sports and physical activities from their counterparts's country, the shooting of a video debunking stereotypes - stereotypes about boys and girls and stereotypes about different European nationalities. All of the results of these activities will be uploaded on the twinspace and on the project-related websites. To prepare, organize and implement all these activities, a strong development of collaborative activities is planned at an European level and at a local level between pupils and teachers. Moreover the planned activities in the project will be totally in line with the pupils's curriculum so all the students will be involved in the activities - although not all of them will take part in the mobilities - as a consequence, the project and its objectives will become an integral part of the pupils's school life for two years. Furthermore, the pupils will receive lessons and attend classes to enable them to do the different activities successfully. Finally, the mobilities will enable the real development of team spirit. The mobilities will also enable the pupils to re-use and transfer the previously acquired skills in the actvities to be done together - France & Wales.
Two secondary schools took part in this project: Simone Veil Middle School in Wassigny, France and Ysgol Gyfun Ystalyfera, in Swansea, Wales, UK. The topic of our project was and still is a global concern and was totally in line with the "Europe 2020 Strategy: for a Healthier EU" but also with the objectives and goals advocated by the Council of Europe for the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage. Our project aimed at covering different fields such as Sport, Health, Prevention (through first-aid training course) and Cultural Heritage (tangible, intangible and natural). As underlined in the application form, different surveys have illustrated how young peoples' lifestyle has negatively evolved over the past century as teenagers tend to be less active than in the previous century, tend to have a more sedentary lifestyle (little to none physical activity, long hours spent playing video games and surfing the web), and poor dietary habits (not eating enough healthy foods and / or consuming too many types of food and drinks which are low in fibres or high in fat, salt and/or sugar). All of these factors are leading to an increase in overweight and/or obese people. In this respect, our project aimed at raising awareness among teenagers about the importance of leading a healthy and balanced lifestyle by improving the quality of one's eating diet and by promoting the importance of practising a regular physical activity. Moreover, in regards to the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage, one of our goals was to open our pupils to and have them learn about European Cultural Heritage. This helped them develop their European citizenship and, hopefully, increased their curiosity and openness to other cultures and lifestyles. Although the pandemic and the lockdown considerably challenged the implementation of our project during the second year, most of the activities - with the exception of 2 or 3 - were completed by the pupils. These activities are reported in details in the "Description" part of this report. The different activities helped increase the pupils' motivation, dedication and self-confidence. They were aware of the opportunity they had to be part of such a project. The activities tackling the issues of Health and Sport helped the students grasp the importance of leading and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It also helped them improve their physical condition. The activities tackling, in different ways, the topic in relation to Cultural Heritage helped them discover Europe's cultural heritage (in particular France and Great Britain) (tangible, intangible and natural) and become aware of the importance to preserve this heritage. As a consequence, this project had an immeasurable impact on the participants. The pupils are aware of the chance they had to participate in such a project. It developed their open-mindedness, their self-confidence, their motivation and their dedication. Hoepfully, it trigered their willingness to become more mobile and to travel more in the future.