Due to the law on appropriate education, the number of pupils who need extra support in our regular education has increased explosively at our school in recent years. In concrete terms, this means for our school that before the introduction of the Appropriate Education Act, about 65 percent of our pupils needed extra support to function in regular education. This has now risen to more than 80 percent of our students. For this it is necessary that our employees continue to develop themselves so that they can better guide / teach students with special needs (both cognitive and social-emotional) in the regular classes. As a result, these students can also be trained to become worthy interculturally competent global citizens in order to form an inclusive society together. The above is reason to want to achieve the following goals with this project: 1. Reduce early school leaving We want to reduce the rate of early school leaving. At present, an average of 12 percent of our students leave school prematurely. Nationally, this percentage is less than 2 percent. Our own research shows that at the moment we are not always able to offer our students who need extra support the guidance they need. Through this project, we want our employees to develop skills and competences so that they can better guide/teach our pupils who need extra support in mainstream education and thus reduce the percentage of early school leaving to a maximum of 6 percent over four years. 2. Contribution to an inclusive society In our view, intercultural learning contributes to the formation of an inclusive society. For an inclusive society, it is also important that we as a school contribute to combating polarization in society. This means that our employees need to broaden their horizons, have an open mind and develop their global citizenship skills. Through this project we can facilitate our employees to visit fellow schools abroad and in this way further professionalize themselves on the above points. The project will furthermore be characterized by long-term cooperation. This way of working will give the project more depth and contribute to our quality culture. With this we strengthen our network and our partnerships. This sustainable cooperation creates a continuous and qualitatively better interaction with partners from society, such as special education and chain partners.
We are a secondary school with three different locations. We submitted this application on behalf of the Oude Bossche Baan location. In addition to VMBO (Preparatory Secondary Vocational Education), EOA (First Reception for Foreign Languages) is also provided at this location. When the application was submitted, there were approximately 950 students at the school. Of these pupils, about 250 pupils attended EOA and the rest attended VMBO. We have now grown to 1200 students at 2 different locations. Within VMBO we offer all learning paths. In the upper years of VMBO, we offer five profiles (Economy & Entrepreneurship, Care & Welfare, Producing Installation and Energy, Mobility and Transport, Building, Living and Interior). We are a multicultural urban school with around 65 nationalities living together in one building. In total there are currently about 215 employees working at the school, this includes both education and education support staff. We are located in the brainport region. (https://obb.stedelijkcollege.nl/) A few years ago we participated in a two-year Commenius project together with a school in London, Antwerp and another school in Eindhoven. We have built a school in Kenya with students for several years. Our school is a member of the Global Citizen Network and we are an official UNESCO school. The global citizenship project team at our school guided the execution and implementation of this project. The project team consists of two people, Mr. Arjen Daelmans and Mrs. Marieke Vannisselroij. Before the start of this project, this team gained knowledge by participating in TCAs and various other training courses. In addition, by attending Nuffic's annual conference, acquiring and sharing knowledge within the Global Citizen Network and actively participating in the UNESCO network. The project team also shares information within the school and is actively looking for partners in the EU to further shape collaborations and learning from and with each other. The project team also encourages working with themes that fit within internationalization and global citizenship, both within regular lessons and theme days and project weeks. During the course of this project, the project team has been further expanded. This is to broaden the load and to ensure that projects continue to run in the event of a member of the project team failing.