Specific project objectives: 1. As part of the strategy for attracting foreign partners, the aim was to attract a new partner for cooperation. 2. To enable the students of the school to gain new experience of real foreign practice in the field of social care. 3. To ensure through the participants that other students and teachers of the school also gained new knowledge during the foreign placement (the project participants passed on the acquired experience to other students and teachers of the school through presentations, videos and photographs, lectures and discussions). 4. To enable the school to learn about foreign practices used in Austria and to introduce the corresponding knowledge into teaching. 5. To enable the school management and the project team to gain new experiences in the framework of this project. 6. To strengthen the language skills of the project participants in the field of communication in English or German, acquiring professional expressions in these languages. 7. To enable the participants' personal development, learning about a new culture and people's behaviour in a different destination that is also so close to the Czech Republic.
Our school has been striving for more than ten years to maintain an international dimension in vocational training and practice, and this goal has been very successful in the past, until in recent years cooperation with international partners has declined and there has been little interest among students in travelling to the same partners. We therefore needed to establish new partnerships in new countries where we saw the potential to gain new approaches in social care and health. Related to this was the need to attract new foreign partners with whom we could work in the long term. Other needs were related to maintaining and developing the international aspect of teaching, thus contributing to the education of students with good language skills, transfer (other students, school, teachers) or direct (participants and accompanying teachers) international experience, knowledge of current methods and techniques of working with clients and skills that will help them to be well placed in the Czech and international labour market. Services in the field of health and social care are among the services necessary and needed for our society, so we knew that foreign practices from other new countries would bring improvement to these services.