The concrete aim was to enable 26 students from as many different areas of our school as possible to do an internship abroad for at least three, preferably four weeks during their initial vocational training, which they would then report on in their respective classes and training companies, in order to further promote the internationalisation of vocational education as a whole. Six colleagues from our school were also to take part in a one-week further training course in Finland on various aspects of IT use in the classroom and bring the newly acquired knowledge back to the teaching staff. In this way, we wanted to learn from our European neighbours, who are often far ahead of us in terms of digitalisation. At the same time, the colleagues were to experience first-hand the added value of a stay abroad for the acquisition of professional and personal skills. In this way, we wanted to increase support for future projects.
As a European School in Lower Saxony, it is important to us to prepare our students for a professional future in the European labour market and to enable them to have international and intercultural encounters. In our mission statement, we have anchored "internationality" as one of four guiding concepts and concretise there: "We promote cultural exchange and mutual tolerance". With this project, we want to promote the intercultural competence and cultural exchange of the students at our school. For this reason, internships abroad have been an integral part of our school curriculum for a long time. This project was the eighth of its kind in a row. Over the years, we have always tried to include new areas of our diverse educational offerings and thus implement internationalisation throughout the school. In this project, we also gave teachers the opportunity to gain intercultural experience. The aim was to promote the use of new and innovative pedagogical methods and technologies, thereby strengthening teachers' key competences and digital skills.