The main goal of the project was to develop the schools and teaching in Liminka to respond to the national curriculum and international strategy of the municipality of Liminka. With wide range of teacher education we wanted to achieve better skills and expertise for our teachers to teach CLIL classes, bilingual classes, early language learners and foreign language classes. We wanted to increase our teachers' knowledge and understanding of planning, teaching and evaluating language lessons and CLIL lessons thus developing ever more varied language teaching and CLIL methodology. We wanted to respond to the needs of the whole personnel by either participating in the mobilities or by shared information from those who attended the courses. Through participating teachers and principals we wanted to meet the needs of our pupils. Our long term goal was to implement a coherent language path from preschool to secondary school and even high school. The language path offers a wide variety of language learning possibilities in bilingual teaching/CLIL classes or in Finnish speaking classes with the choice of many different foreign languages to study. The language path is an important part of the international strategy of Liminka.
A bilingual program started for seventh graders in Liminka in 2018, continuing to eight and ninth grades in 2019 and 2020. In 2019 a bilingual program started for a pre-school group, continuing to elementary school from there one grade at a time. In 2010 foreign language teaching to all pupils in all schools started from the first grade. Earlier it had started from the third grade. Many teachers were given a new task and they faced new challenges when they started teaching a bilingual class in a foreign language for the first time. At the same time many first and second grade teachers in our municipality were also up to a new challenge of teaching a foreign language. There was a clear need for further education in these two fields: CLIL pedagogy and foreign language pedagogy especially concerning early learners, but also a need for strenghtening language skills of teachers. We also wanted to get acquainted with planning and evaluating multidisciplinary learning units especially in bilingual classes. By educating out teachers, we also wanted to develop our international strategy, language teaching path and curriculum for language teaching and bilingual classes.