With this project we mainly wanted to support our staff and strengthen their competencies. This way they, and consequently our schools, will be better armed to deal with the new educational evolutions such as project-based work, differentiated education or the teacher as coach. After all, the government expected us to face our students with sufficient baggage, knowledge and skills to realize these innovations. We also wanted to increase collaboration between our staff members, the various year levels, administration and support or teaching staff and involve them in all aspects of "making school together”. But in all of this, we also wanted to absolutely monitor the well-being of our staff. The ever-increasing loss of staff members, the shortage of inflow of young teachers and the fact that also many lateral entrants did not stay in education made it clear that we also had to pay sufficient attention to the well-being of our staff if we wanted to implement all the expected innovations. This was only possible by cooperating openly and constructively and by involving people in the areas that motivate them.
We wanted to professionalize our staff in a number of areas, specifically: wellbeing, educational innovation, digitalization and participation. All these areas are linked to our institutional needs and they can be found in our professionalization plan, school plan and international plan. The needs arose because of a number of evolutions in Flemish education. There was the modernization that caused a lot of anxiety and changes. Moreover, it was accompanied by the increasing digitalization of our education. On the one hand there was the Digisprong project of the government, on the other hand we had decided as a school to gradually introduce laptops. Many teachers struggled with uncertainty and a lack of competence in these areas. In combination with the increased workload, the changing regular school processes, the new ways of working together, ... this also caused a declining wellbeing of our staff: Moreover, our management wanted to broaden the policy-supporting potential by involving more regular teachers in making school policy through strategic working groups and consultation moments. This can even be seen in our school slogan which, for the past two years has been "Because together you learn more’.