The initial goal of our project was to give our students and teachers an opportunity to get their professional practice and professional improvement in countries members of the European Union. In this manner that they were supposed to: - get acquainted to working standards followed in highly developed countries, - experience working procedures in Croatia and France - gain new and more sophisticated gastronomy and restaurant service techniques and trends - learn ways of operating, as well as standards that they can transfer to fellow students and colleagues in our school and other schools in our country educating students in the same domain. We wanted to place the participants in a situation of an everyday use of a foreign language that they learn in school or that they use in their professional development, in this case primordially French (for staff) and also English and Croatian (for students), which is of an enormous value for their future careers. Another important goal of the projects was the inter-cultural dimension. The ICL comes at its maximum in the process of exchanging national and traditional knowledge and know-how in every field of catering and tourism covered by our schools' curricula, by which the countries involved in each activity were supposed to get an experience of an immeasurable amount and value. Hosts were supposed to be leading country in every domain of catering and tourism and are modern institution, highly equipped and with teaching methods that we would like to be available to our teachers and students. In this sense, this mobility would have been a perfect occasion to put together the tourist offer of the hosts as sources of new information to our students and teachers and the capacity and skills of our colleagues and their students which transferred to our students and teachers would be of a great importance to their future professional development. This would have also represented an additional value mentioned in their CVs, which would have made them more valued on labor market in our country and abroad.
Our school, as the biggest vocational school in the domain of catering and tourism in our country and the leader of innovation and perfection among other schools of the same type in our country, is a member of the most important organizations and associations of schools for catering and tourism, such as AEHT and EUHOFA. These memberships permit us to constantly implement new things in our functioning as a public vocational school. Due to this fact, we consider our obligation to bring new skills and know-how from other European countries and this is a benefit for our school in general, as well as for our staff and students. Indirectly, staff and students from all the vocational secondary schools of the same type across the country are being affected. We are aware of the fact that gastronomic and touristic schools from other European countries are ahead of us in the matter of innovation in the domain of hotel and travel agency work, in all the segments of the work of a restaurant or a caterer, starting from food preparation and ending with the moment of food decoration, presentation and serving. Their bakeries and pastry shops use techniques that we are still not introduced to, as well. Therefore, when we applied for this project we were eager to learn from the best, in this case from France which is a far known gastronomic power where our teachers could really learn from experts and from Croatia, which was a leader in tourism in our former country, Yugoslavia, and while still being a country member of the European Union is nevertheless a destination close to our country and a place where the adaptation would not represent a problem for our students, considering the similitude of mentality between our two countries.