By participating in courses and following the ways in which various schools in Europe work on these issues, the teachers involved in development work would get different perspectives, approaches and ideas for developing our schools. As part of this, we would learn about the effectiveness of home and school collaboration elsewhere in Europe. The goal was also to improve the skills of the staff to arrange early language teaching. By following the language teaching of small pupils in primary and lower secondary schools in different European countries, we hoped to get new methods, practical ways and ideas for early language learning. By networking with teachers in European schools, we would get valuable contacts for the future. Participants in the project would take their skills to school development teams, developing their own school-specific skills in these matters. The aim of the consortium was to find ways to develop students' positive self-image and to create an early language learning model. We planned to attend courses on positive pedagogy, anti-bullying, emotional intelligence, social interaction skills, robotics and technology. The courses and the job shadowing experiences would give us new practices and operating models for everyday life of school staff; how to help students develop their self-esteem and how to help them learn friendship skills and how to help them create a positive self-image. In addition, the aim was to acquire new ideas, practices and models for early language learning by monitoring foreign language teaching and by having conversations with early foreign language teaching teachers in different countries. The aim was to develop the way of teaching an early foreign language in Ylivieska. Sixteen teachers from Ylivieska primary schools were involved in the project. One language teacher, two coordinators of Early Language Teaching, the headmaster of the biggest primary school in Ylivieska, eleven primary school teachers and one special education teacher.
The title Everybody along! summarizes the core idea of our project. Our goal was to get all our students actively involved with school work, to make all our students realize their importance as class members, to increase every student's interest in learning a new language. Furthermore, our goal was to provide staff with tools for working together with the aim of increasing our students' sense of security and school satisfaction. Our goal was to prevent social exclusion.