The target was to find methods and ways to enhance our students’ performance and well-being. We wanted to find ways especially to support our sports students in the challenges they meet in their daily life concerning teaching methods, evaluation, living arrangements and free time. We aimed at improving their study results, preventing drop-outs and making our school more appealing. One of the goals was to give our teachers the chance to develop their skills in cultural awareness and global education and to encourage them for international activities. We wanted to find strong partners with whom to evolve our co-operation further. The partnership with schools from abroad was targeted to lower the threshold to use international connections in teaching. In this way we were also implementing the municipal internationalization stragedy of Sotkamo. We were getting ready for the accrediting phase. We aimed at having more teachers and students interested in entrepreneurship education. With this project our teachers have become more aware of the skills needed in working life in future.
More than half of our students are sports students, and most of them live away from home, so we have mainly focused on developing the studying methods and well-being of our students. A great number of our students travel abroad for training camps and competitions, and many have international contacts through social media, so education for international understanding has become more and more important. Our universities have recently changed their entrance criteria in a way that emphasizes the high school diploma more than before, and that gives us an extra incentive to try to improve our students’ effective studying and a healthy life style. The latest curriculum (LOPS 2021) for Finnish high schools requires new ways of thinking and acting from our teachers, for example in the fields of social awareness and entrepreneurship. To meet these requirements was one of the reasons to seek help from the project.