Demographic changes of modern society lead to new challenges in old people´s care. People are getting older, meaning their number is rising, due to migration their group will become very heterogeneous and the future generation of old people will have acquired competences in digitalization. This means, that carers working in this field will face new challenges. Their work cannot be focused on hygienic and medical aspects, but caring for older people needs an "innovative touch". The overall target should be to provide home care as long as possible. According to this participating partner schools decided to have students of old and disabled care work together in this project. The main target is develop visions and ideas how to cope with the above mentioned challenges. As each partner can come up with special expertise in one of the areas the project is structured in four work packages. WP 1: Caring for old people with a migration Background WP 2: Different forms of living together at old age WP 3: Making use of Digitalization WP 4: Future challenges Each of the topics will be prepared in home schools according to tasks agreed on before at eTwinning meetings. The four planned meetings will partly be theoretical by inviting experts from working life, and partly practical as there will be two days of job shadowing at each meeting. ETwinning platform will as well be used to evaluate meetings and publish results. Participating partner schools will use experience and results to strengthen their co-operation in future, especially in the area of student mobility by organizing 4-week internships for students from partner schools. The results of this project will improve the quality of preparing students for an international internship.
The project could not be implemented as planned. Initially, the Dutch partner received a rejection from their national agency. The first thematic focus (WP1) was planned under the leadership of the Dutch partner. The remaining partners worked on the topic in their schools. Results were exchanged, but neither the planned expert discussions nor the practice visits could be carried out. The coordinators of the participating schools met in Germany in January 2020. Results were compared and the further strategic approach, in detail the project meeting in Germany (WP2), was planned. Due to the Covid-19 situation, the second project meeting also had to be canceled. In the hope of an improvement in the situation, we agreed to make another attempt in autumn 2020. However, no project meetings could be held either in autumn 2020 or in spring 2021. Further work on the topics only in the partner schools without direct encounter and workplace experience no longer appeared to be expedient to us. Furthermore, an extension would not have helped, because in principle we would have had to start with new groups of students at the beginning, so we decided not to continue the project.