When conducting our European development plan, we have considered three different needs of our teaching staff: 1. Developing skills to better integrate students with behavioural challenges. Both teachers and school counsellors need to improve their competences in working with difficult individuals who lack motivation for schoolwork and show delinquent behaviour (verbal, physical and cyber bullying). 2. Improve competences for efficient development of social skills of students with migrant background and acquire knowledge and skills about qualitative inclusion of students from a foreign language and cultural background into the class/school community, leading to better integration. 3. Significant improvement in foreign language skills (English in our case); we believe that training abroad would give the individual, and consequently the school itself, more confidence in the language use. The insight into learning a foreign language would give teachers the experience of how difficult it is for migrant students. One of our goals was also to build an international network, as we would like to become strategic partners in the future and participate in more international projects involving both teachers and students.
Vencelj Perko Primary School had not participated in any Erasmus projects before the successful application for Erasmus+ K101, but we were highly motivated. Our management tries to encourage the staff to participate in various forms of lifelong learning. Cooperation in an Erasmus project would allow our staff to acquire professional and linguistic competences to be disseminated through teacher meetings and working groups, job shadowing and throughout the school. We took a structured approach to planning the project: First, we examined the shortcomings of our organization and identified the three areas we needed to improve - developing competences for better integration of students with behavioural problems and better integration of students with immigrant backgrounds, as well as improving language competences and internationalizing our school. Our European development plan was conducted prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine, the problematic aspects that we had identified when writing the project escalated in the time of the pandemic and lockdown. The difficulties we pointed out in the original description tend to be even greater than they were in the beginning of 2020.