The main target was to offer 150 quality traineeships to our last year students of our four directions, namely agriculture, horticulture, animal care and biotechnical sciences. Agriculture was the field of study that had been doing traineeships abroad for more than 30 years. The other fields of study started more recently. With Vleugels II it was possible to send out students of horticulture and animal care. The number of students of biotechnical sciences was limited. With Vleugels III we wanted to put all four fields of study on the international map. The biggest part was meant to be used for individual students on farms or companies related to animal care in several European countries, horticulture on a forestry traineeship in Estonia, and an other part for practical courses in agricultural schools. The biggest part of the traineeships are relatively short: 2 or 3 weeks. Also we wanted to send out a small part of the graduated students. The aim was especially to let them practice new and existing skills in a new environment, practice English or French and develop attitudes such as independence. Also we wanted to offer an international experience to about 8 teachers accompanying or visiting.
With this project, the third edition Vleugels III, we continued the last similar, project Vleugels II. Doing so we built further on 10 years of experience with traineeships abroad under Leonardo/Erasmus. However we have been working on internationalisation for 30 years. With Vleugels (Dutch for wings), we refer to letting our students of Vabi fly out, and Vleugels also refers to the ‘lively’ nature, literally and figuratively of our fields of study, namely biotechnical sciences, animal care, agriculture and horticulture. We have been participating in KA1 and KA2 projects for about ten years. With KA2 we sent out only a small number of students, therefore with this KA1 project from 2019 we wanted to offer a big part of our final year students an international experience. For this reason we applied to be able to send out about 150 students and about ten teachers in the schoolyears of 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.