By implementing our project, we wanted to enhance the overall professional development of the City of Oulu student welfare staff. Via attending structured courses, we wanted to improve our competencies to meet the needs of students, school communities and families in the following key domains: early school leaving, study burnout, bullying, and conflict management skills. Further goals of our project were improving and activating language skills and building networks with European educational organizations to enable further Erasmus projects.
Our Erasmus project "Professional Education and Development for the City of Oulu School Psychology and School Social Work Services" was inspired by the realization that none of the more than 60 school social workers and school psychologists in the City of Oulu had ever taken part in Erasmus projects run by schools. This was partly because Erasmus programmes are, by nature, mainly targeted at teachers and students, and partly because schools did not seem to be aware of the possibility to include other than teaching staff in their Erasmus projects. It occurred to us to set up our own Erasmus project, so that we would be able to tailor a project that would serve both national and local goals and needs of student welfare work. The goals and needs related to our project were based on the Student Welfare Act and on the City of Oulu local curriculum and local student welfare strategy.