We felt that participation in the mobility project would add value to the students' training programme by embedding an overseas work placement into the curriculum, and would impact positively on retention and achievement rates through increased motivation, self-confidence and self-esteem. Furthermore, the experience abroad would give the students a unique selling point on entering the job market, particularly if the job is in the local area, where such global skills are a rarity. One college objective is to help disadvantaged young people gain the necessary skills to enter into employment. This project offered the students another avenue through which to achieve this goal, which also met the college's objectives. Due to the low percentage of students travelling outside of the region, there is a limited awareness and understanding of other cultures and countries and a limited opportunity to make international contacts. Most students and their families do not have the financial means to travel often (or ever) and the opportunity that this project provided was invaluable for the students participating in the placements abroad in order to start to build international contacts and gain a greater awareness of the world around them.
We applied for this project to continue the work of our previous mobility projects by broadening the horizons of parochially minded young people whilst improving their employability. The project aimed to achieve this through students gaining new knowledge, skills and competences, as well as building self-confidence and raising aspirations through the opportunity of living and working in another country. Many of our students had no experience of foreign travel and often little experience of travel even around the UK, with many not having been outside the local area. For this reason, the duration of a 2-week work placement was selected to provide a “bite-sized” period of experience of other cultures. Our two colleges, Doncaster College and North Lindsey College, are situated in ESF Objective 1 areas with decreasing job opportunities, higher than average levels of unemployment, low migration rates, lower than national average scores at GCSE and poor progression to higher level qualifications.