1) To promote positive perspectives towards democracy and help strengthen a sense of common European citizenship among our students and staff. Initially, H20 wanted to focus on democracy and citizenship as these topics were already being addressed at our school. Since then, these topics have been incorporated into the new national syllabus curriculum (Fagfornyelsen) and their importance further strengthened. 2) To ensure our students completed their formal degrees and give them an advantage in the labour market. Our completion rate was already strong as this project began, but we wanted to further strengthen this positive trend. We acknowledge the fact that our primarily multicultural students are unfortunately often disadvantaged later in the labour market. Our hope was therefore that an international exchange would make them more attractive employees. 3) To develop our students' English skills, but also knowledge of Spanish and German. Language skills are key when working in healthcare. Yet we saw that many of our students struggled to communicate properly in English. International exchanges was a tool to help motivate students to learn English, but also to evoke a certain interest for German and Spanish.
H20 (former Hersleb Upper Secondary School) had 3 main objectives with this project. It was designed to fulfil the following needs: 1) To promote positive perspectives towards democracy and help strengthen a sense of common European citizenship among our students and staff. 2) To ensure our students completed their formal degrees and give them an advantage in the labour market. 3) To develop our students' English skills, but also knowledge of Spanish and German. We believed that an international project was a particularly well-suited tool to fulfil these goals. Ever since our school opened in 2014, international projects and cooperation with external partners has been an integral part of our school culture. We see that cooperation with external partners in both the public and private sector is especially motivating on our students. Simultaneously, these projects are of great benefit to us as an organization as close cooperation with partners allow us to continue to develop our teaching methodology as we continuously reflect and receive feedback on our work, making us a better school that becomes more attractive to the students of Oslo, a city where there is fierce competition to attract the strongest students.