The purpose of this school staff training project has been to develop teachers' and other school staff's professional competence by attending international training courses in various European countries. The focus was on improving teaching methods, learning about integration of migrant and refugee students, developing teachers' professional and emotional skills, learning to know European culture and local sights and also enhancing international co-operation. Another important objective was also to improve teachers' language skills and thus make it easier to take part in international projects. Finding new partners for international projects during the courses is important as well. Taking care of everybody's mental well-being and learning how to deal with problems and learning difficulties turned out to be very important.
When planning to apply for this project the teaching staff of our upper secondary school in Hyvinkää was facing several challenges due to requirements of the new national curriculum (LOPS 21), and adjusting our teaching capacity to the new Hyvinkään lukio combining the previous two smaller school units of Hyvinkään Sveitsin lukio and Hyvinkään Yhteiskoulun lukio in August 2020. Starting to co-operate with new colleagues and teaching a wide variety of students in large groups demands also soft skills and emotional intelligence. All in all, the needs for teachers' supplementary training have constantly increased in secondary schools. Furthermore, our school has a profile of natural sciences, which requires a continuous development of teachers' professional competence so that we could offer our students good and up-to-date education in all the subjects also in the future. This is one of the reasons why these 4 teachers (one English teacher and 3 teachers of Finnish language), one student counsellor, two school secretaries and also one of our three principals were interested in joining this educational project in order to get new ideas and skills for our educational developing and planning assignment. The mental strain for school staff as well as the students in this challenging situation (worsened also by covid-19 pandemic) called for guidance on how to cope with everyday school work.