1. Equal opportunities for all pupils: Provide learning and development opportunities to pupils who would otherwise not have had this opportunity due to their home situation: many pupils find themselves in a vicious cycle of poverty, learning disadvantage, and a difficult home situation that offers few opportunities to discover their talents. Additional goals: Increase self-confidence, independence and self-esteem. - Increase learning motivation (address school fatigue and truancy issues). - Strengthen pupil's well-being and reduce pupil's unqualified dropout rate. 2. Provide pupils with better job opportunities by teaching them the 'skills for life: entrepreneurship, organisation and communication' and developing an international business mindset. 3. To acquire subject knowledge, realise curricula, and facilitate and support the transition between secondary education and the world of work. 4. Increase communication skills, general and subject-specific knowledge and skills in English. 5. Strengthen the functioning and reputation of the school and place it in a global context.
Handelsschool is a school which offers vocational and technical secondary education. A lot of pupils arrive with a dent in their self-confidence and a lack of motivation, and a lot of them have negative experiences in education due to the 'waterfall system': this manifests itself in school fatigue, truancy and lack of motivation. Often, the choice to study at our school is a 'negative' choice: not from an intrinsic interest, but because they were no longer allowed to follow general school education. Our school is strongly committed to equal educational opportunities and this is why we continue to specialise in giving back motivation, learning to learn, giving opportunities to pupils who would otherwise leave secondary education without a diploma. The specific needs of our pupils are our main reason for organising an overseas placement. We are a mixed school with a large number of less privileged pupils (GOK (Equal Educational Opportunities) score of 59%): we have particularly encouraged these students to participate in a foreign internship experience. A foreign internship is a motivation for our pupils to prove themselves. Moreover, they develop 'skills for life' there, thus the transition to the working field will be smoother.