In accordance with our Development Plan and Internationalisation Strategy and to adapt to the constraints of Brexit which no longer allows us to send Erasmus students to Edinburgh, We wanted to offer a range of company internships towards wider destinations: Republic of Ireland, Spain, Portugal. Indeed, this corresponds to a request from our students who are very demanding of these English-speaking, Spanish-speaking destinations to improve and develop their practice of Foreign Language 1 and Foreign Language 2 studied in school. In our establishment in Clermont-Ferrand, each year, we have, moreover, a pool of students of Portuguese origin who practice this language in their family environment and would like to use and value their skills in this field. In our teams, we have motivated staff to supervise the experience : we already have a Spanish teacher who is also fluent in Portuguese and also highly motivated (and fully-trained with a good level in Spanish and Portuguese) trade teachers . We wanted to gradually open up mobility to staff so that supervisors and teachers themselves could test the value of mobility for their professional practice and their open-mindedness.
Since 2010, Lycée Professionnel Les Cordeliers (equiv to Vocational School) in Clermont-Ferrand has been very much involved in European projects, particularly with the regular sending of Lycée Pro students to work placements abroad. These training, integrated into the Bac Pro (equivalent to BTEC national) curriculum , are open to voluntary students in and also outside the European Section. The school has sent with great success students of Bac Pro Commerce, ASSP (Health and Child Care) and ARCU (Reception work) in of 4-week internships in Edinburgh and Dublin on a very regular basis. We obtained the VET Erasmus+ Charter in 2018 (and also in 2020 the Accreditation 2021-27 ) The main objective of our project has always been to develop the autonomy, adaptability and self-confidence of these young people, to encourage an open mind and a critical eye on the practice of their trade by living their activity abroad. It was also a question of developing essential language learning in these sections and creating the conditions for a contagious curiosity and mobility for the other students+staff of the school. These mobilities give audacity and are also most of the time a springboard towards other subsequent post-baccalaureate mobilities.