It was our goal to develop and widen the competences and skills of CQAEHS teachers and staff. It's still vital to everyday work to master foreign languages, mainly english and french: when we attend online international conferences or discuss and analyze suport documents, we always struggle to keep up with the sequence of ideas; on the other hand, we receive many migrants and we must be fluent in order to maintain the conversation. It was/is important to contact with european structures with the same mission in order to find and to promote the best practices which will also boost team confidence to deal with the specific adult education challenges - interculturality, tolerance, classroom diversity. Collaterally, we hoped to increase team motivation and satsifaction by creating the sense of belonging to a much higher and global structure, an european structure, leading to a much more meaningful role. Being an awarded centre, is CQ AEHS intention to keep innovating and implementing successful strategies, aiming recognition by both european partners and local community. Besides these imaterial gains, we were also interested in updating our daily work instruments.
Centro Qualifica do Agrupamento de Escolas Henrique Sommer (CQ AEHS) is a recent name for a three decades well known centre focused on adult education, unique within Leiria municipality. It is our mission not only to provide certification to those adults that, for several different reasons, did not achieve to get a school degree early in mandatory years but we are also commited with promoting lifelong learning. When we take the national policy in consideration, adult education is a very specific framework and, therefore, staff is required to have specific skills and competences, unique within the school cluster staff. Most of the times, adult education team deals with higly demanding challenges that have no parallel in the surrounding reality and yet, an answer is needed. Also, the portuguease Programa Qualifica, the national adult education program which we implement, is in line with the european strategy and meets the EU guidelines. Therefore, applying for an Erasmus+ project was a very natural and needed step to enable CQAEHS team to work in an european dimension and elevate daily work accordingly to our cluster's European Development Plan and motto "Saber ser e ser com saber... um caminho em comunidade".