The project 'Fit4 healthylife' aims to strengthen school engagement in the field of health promotion for young students with special educational needs and disadvantaged families. There are four special schools from Belgium, UK, Poland and Germany. The starting point is the exchange on existing school concepts in health promotion and participation in corresponding national campaigns. With the elements move, brain fitness and nutrition three other project meetings are designed. At these project meetings give space to present exercises, techniques and recipes and try them out. The project meetings are also used to make the participating students fit to bring their findings to their own school. To implement the project, each school forms a project group that prepares the project meetings thematically, disseminates knowledge about an information board and conducts activities (food, sports, parents' evening). The central goal is to strengthen the young people involved and to have a lasting positive effect on their health behavior.
The project 'Fit4healthylife' aimed to strengthen school engagement in the field of health promotion for young students with specialeducational needs and disadvantaged families. There were four specialschools from Belgium, UK, Poland and Germany. The starting point was the exchange on existing school concepts in health promotion and participation in corresponding national campaigns. With the elements physical, brain fitness and nutrition three other project meetings were designed. Three meetings were planned to give space for presenting exercises, techniques and recipes and trying them out. The project meetings were also used to enable the participating students to present their findings within their own schools. To implement the project, first each school formed a project group that prepares the project meetings thematically, disseminates knowledge about an information board and conducts activities (food, sports, parents' evening). The central goal was to strengthen the young people involved and to have a lasting positive effect on their health and wellbeing. The project, which was originally scheduled to run for two years, has been extended by one year. During this period, it had to overcome various challenges. 1. Brexit: A first consequence of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union became clear to project participants when access to the eTiwinning platform for the Welsh school was cut. The project conducted their video conferences via teams. A Whatsapp group has been set up for a quick exchange among the project-coordinators. 2. Covid 19: The schools involved were all concerned with the effects of the pandemic, that initially all focused on coping with the new tasks involved within the school. Due to various travel bans in the participating countries, the project encounters took place in the last phase of the project period. 3. Ukraine War: The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and the consequences for neighboring countries of Ukraine that could not be assessed had made parents very insecure, so that they did not agree to their children's participation in a project meeting in Poland. The Welsh school had been banned from participating by the government. 4. The extension of the project period meant that the number of participants in the schools changed. This was mainly on the part of the students, but also on the part of the project managers in the participating schools. The originally envisaged measurement of individual health progress could not be carried out. With the lockdowns in schools and the associated change in teaching from face-to-face to distance learning, both students and teachers were required to use competences that were already used in the project. This included organizing video meetings, presenting learning tasks, and documenting classroom activities. At online meetings, the schools presented their concepts of distance learning to each other. In a way, the project participants were thus prepared for the requirements of the pandemic by participating in the project.