In 2013 the EU Youth Guarantee established that it is of great importance that all member countries are committed in ensuring young people an offer of employment, continued education, an apprenticeship or a traineeship within four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education. This was due to the high unemployment for youths in Europe. Statistics from January 2018 shows a continuing high rate for Europe in general and for some of our participating countries in particular - a 31,5% rate for Italy, 24,5% for Croatia, 16,9% for Sweden and 11,8% for Bulgaria. Working with ways of helping youths getting employment is obviously a crucial undertaking for all EU countries. "Enhancing the possibilities of the future with a Mentoring Programme" is a project intended to increase the possibilities for the participating students to get employment after school with the help of different capabilities practised throughout the project. By developing relevant and high quality skills and key competences such as networking, communicative and language skills, ICT skills and entrepreneurial skills among many others, the project aims in fostering employability and socio-educational and personal development as it is declared in the horizontal priority chosen by the project group. Because of the hardening climate for youths around Europe, our first objective of this project is to have our students gain self-confidence, thus enhancing their possibilites for a better future. Our students will get self-confidence through a better knowledge on business and mentoring as well as through a focused and active work around the building of a so called growth mindset. The mentoring programme also enhances the abilities of the students to create networks - both locally and internationally - which obviously will be useful for their further education and future jobs. In addition to the important objective of giving the students skills which aim in giving them self-confidence, we also want to work with different types of equality in this project. We want to show the students that the economic and social situations some of them live in is not necessarily a brake to inclusion. We want them to be aware that they have the keys to a future which can be different from the one they may know. As for those who do not suffer from any difficult situation, they will learn from this experience and become aware of the plight of some of their peers. The students engaged will all be obliged to show respect to the people they will get to meet, work together in the same direction, whatever their differences. The project will also focus on gender equality and we will make sure that parity is respected during the meetings. While building up mentoring programmes on the participating school, our project will also produce and publish a digital manual on how to do this. This work allows fellow learners which might have special needs or learning disabilities to benefit from these contents. Consequently, the schools involved in this project come from four very different countries which all face different problems but at the same time strikingly alike. We decided to make a training course of 4 mobilities with assignments to be done in between in order to build up mentoring programmes in our schools. In every mobility we will send 7-9 students in the ages of 14-19 years who (together with 2 teachers from every country) will learn about mentoring, discuss, reflect and together create a digital manual with the aim of disseminating the knowledge on how to work entrepreneurial with the link between the school and the business sector. We want to develop partnerships between our learning institutions and the local businesses, but we also want to give the students the opportunities to build international networks and relations. On the basis of a modern pedagogy where the teachers help the students gaining competence and skills with the help of different scaffolding strategys, knowledge on the teenage brain and ICT this project will give the students a relevant education which can form the start of a life long learning and we also want to create a tool for other schools and students to use. We want to give others an equal chance of a better future. The results of this project and the impact envisaged is partly individual and partly noticeable in our organizations. The students who will participate will improve their basic skills and knowledge. Visiting other countries and communicating with other students from different cultures will provide the European dimension and it will improve the language skills of the students who participate. This will also strengthen the status of our schools and all students attending the school will benefit from that. All partners will benefit from the European dimension of the project. They will have the opportunity to make contact and learn from other partners.
“Enhancing the possibilities of the future with a Mentoring Programme" has been a project intended to increase the possibilities for the participating students to be better prepared for business life after finishing school and the project. By developing relevant and high quality skills and key competences such as networking, communicative and language skills, ICT skills and entrepreneurial skills among many others, the project has aimed to foster employability, socio-educational and personal development. The students then get more employable meeting the EY Youth Guarantee. Our first objective was to have our students gain self-confidence, thus enhancing their possibilities for a better future. Our students have increased their self-confidence through a better knowledge of business and mentoring as well as through a focused and active work around the building of a so-called growth mindset. In addition to the important objective of giving the students skills which aim in giving them self-confidence, we have also worked with different types of equality in this project. By taking part in the project the students have seen that the economic and social situations some of them live in is not necessarily a hindrance for development. Through the project the students have learned about the different challenges a person can encounter depending on gender, age, financial situation, nationality or e.g education by working together in workshops, creating a digital manual and starting a mentoring programme at each school. In the project we have carried out 5 activities with 1 staff training event (Sweden, December 2018) during which the planning, communication platforms, pedagogy and project management were decided upon and then 4 LTT activities. The LTTs were all focused on building a mentoring programme: starting in Sweden (February 2019) “Working in a Mentoring Programme - history, experience and definitions”, then Italy (March 2019) “Setting the rules of a local mentoring programme; adept, mentor and the different roles”, Croatia (November 2019) “Recruiting mentors - matching with adepts; how do we do that?” and finally Bulgaria (virtual mobility: November 2020) “The mentoring programme at work”. Between each LTT activity the schools worked with assignments in order to create mentoring programmes in our schools. To every mobility we send 7-9 students in the ages of 14-19 years who (together with 2 teachers from every country) have learned about mentoring, have taken part in discussions and workshops and created a digital manual. The digital manual has aimed to describe the different workshops, students' reflections and knowledge gained thus disseminating the knowledge on how to work entrepreneurially with the link between the school and the business sector and starting a mentoring programme. Due to the pandemic the final LTT activity that was to be held in Bulgaria was changed to a 5 day digital mobility during which the students and teachers carried out presentations, listened to digital lectures, took part in digital workshops and together wrote texts to the digital manual. This particularly enhanced their entrepreneurial, social and ICT competence. The results of this project and the impact that can be seen is on individual and partly on organizational level. The students who have participated have improved their English, entrepreneurial, ICT and communicative skills. Through visiting other countries, collaborating in English, meeting and learning from people from schools and business sectors the understanding and knowledge on business, mentoring, networking, culture and entrepreneurship have given the students enhanced possibilities for a better future thus making them more employable. The digital manual is a result that we are very proud of and which we hope will inspire other schools to start a mentoring programme. The results can also be partly noticeable in our organizations through all of us now running a mentoring programme, thus strengthening the status of our schools. The different workshops and activities have also to some extent been integrated in the education and the mobilities have been disseminated at each school thus influencing other students but also other teachers and staff. The long term benefits for the students are that their improved skills, enhanced self awareness, growth mindset and knowledge of mentoring will have made them more prepared for life after school. Through the European dimension and gaining a more positive and strong belief in themselves they are now more inclined to seek other educations or jobs (both nationally & internationally) than before taking part in the project. The network created through this European project will also be a long term benefit from the project for not only the individuals but also for the schools, through which we can keep the mentoring programmes and its objectives active but most also keep in contact and keep learning from each other.