Context of Project: The project involves staff and students from partner schools in The UK and Germany. Both schools are Special schools for children with learning and physical disabilities. Both institutions have found that their students are at a high risk of unemployment and being socially marginalised once they leave at the age of 19. Objectives of project: O1 To provide opportunities for students to develop the skills, knowledge and understanding that will shape them into responsible, independent members of society. O2 To provide opportunities for our students to develop entrepreneurial skills. O3 To provide young people with the opportunity to travel to other countries to promote tolerance and understanding of their own and other countries' cultures. O4 To provide teachers and other professionals with opportunities to work collaboratively, share best practice and improve their knowledge and understanding of employment issues and cultural diversity. O5 To provide parents and the local community with opportunities to become involved in the project. O6 To provide young people with the opportunity to develop their language and communication skills in a practical context. Participants: Each mobility, between six and eight students and four or five staff from the partner school will travel to the host country to carry out activities. Back in their own country, they will work alongside their link mainstream school to carry out some of the activities and consolidate the things they have learnt. Activities: Participant schools will work together on a number of activities. P1: Logo Competiton P2: Teacher Partnerships and Class Twinning C1: initial Transnational Meeting and Planning P3: Social activities to develop links with mainstream school P4: Students to create a Currency Tutorial to prepare visiting countries for mobility C2: Travel Training in Germany C3: Shopping Experiences C4: Cookery Skills and Conclusion of Project. Methodology The responsibility for organising the activities will lie with the identified lead school for any particular activity. In most cases, this will consist of the lead school setting out criteria for the other participant schools to achieve within the specified time frame. The activities have been decided on collaboratively as a result of research into the particular needs of our schools and local communities and take into account the skills and expertise that each school brings to the project. Each school has been made responsible for a particular activity based on their existing competencies and through collaborative work, they will support the rest of the group by sharing their fields of expertise. Results and potential longer term benefits: This project aims to address some of the barriers faced by adults with learning disabilities. We aim to do this by developing students' independence skills as they work together on different activities and also as they start to build relationships with students from mainstream schools. We also want to equip our students with the desire to participate in social and democratic life. We will achieve this in a number of ways. Through activities like a logo competition, we will give students opportunities to practise voting. To prepare for the mobilities, we will give students opportunities to help plan the visit. Through the activities during the mobilities, we will develop students' skills in travel, shopping independently and cooking. We will build in work experiences such as developing enterprises and working in the school cafe. We hope that staff will benefit from working alongside colleagues from other countries and that this will benefit the schools as they continue to make changes to their curricula. We also hope that in the future, our schools will be helping students to be more employable as they build on their experiences from this project.
Context of Project: The project involved staff and students from partner schools in the UK and Germany. Both schools were special schools for children with learning and physical disabilities. Both institutions had previously found that their students were at a high risk of unemployment and being socially marginalised once they left at the age of 19. Objectives of project: O1 To provide opportunities for students to develop the skills, knowledge and understanding that will shape them into responsible, independent members of society. O2 To provide opportunities for our students to develop entrepreneurial skills. O3 To provide young people with the opportunity to travel to other countries to promote tolerance and understanding of their own and other countries' cultures. O4 To provide teachers and other professionals with opportunities to work collaboratively, share best practice and improve their knowledge and understanding of employment issues and cultural diversity. O5 To provide parents and the local community with opportunities to become involved in the project. O6 To provide young people with the opportunity to develop their language and communication skills in a practical context. Participants: For the first two mobilities, between six students and four staff from the UK school travelled to Germany to carry out activities. Back in their own country, they worked alongside colleagues to carry out some of the activities and consolidate the things they learnt. The third mobility had to be adapted to be carried out virtually due to the pandemic and this meant that the activities were also heavily adapted to make them relevant to our students, despite them being carried out virtually. Activities: Participant schools worked together on the following activities: P1: Logo Competiton P2: Teacher Partnerships and Class Twinning C1: initial Transnational Meeting and Planning P3: Social activities carried out virtually. P4: Students created a Currency Tutorial to prepare visiting countries for mobility C2: Travel Training in Germany C3: Shopping Experiences C4: Virtual activities based around current affairs and politics. Conclusion of Project. Results and potential longer term benefits: This project aimed to address some of the barriers faced by adults with learning disabilities. We focused throughout on developing students' independence skills, giving them opportunities to work together on different activities and encouraging them to build relationships with students from other schools. Through our activities, we have worked to equip our students with the desire to participate in social and democratic life. When preparing for the mobilities, we gave students opportunities to help plan the visit. Through the activities carried out during the mobilities, we developed students' skills in travel, shopping independently and cooking. Through the virtual activities, we gave students opportunities to discuss current events and politics with support. Across both schools, we have built up work experiences such as developing enterprises and working in the school cafe. We think that staff have benefitted greatly from working alongside colleagues from other countries and that this has benefitted the schools as they continue to make changes to their curricula. We believe that our schools are helping students to be more employable as we continue to build on their experiences from this project.