Firstly, we wanted to maintain an attractive educational programme in order to consolidate or even increase student numbers in the Technical College. Furthermore, we wanted to provide the participants with the opportunity to enhance their foreign language skills and to use their second languages outside of partially bilingual classroom settings and effetively take them out into the real world. Moreover, one main objective was to enable potentially all our students of the Technical College to make use of the school's international opportunities and do an internship abroad. These aims were founded on the knowledge that applications including enhanced forerign language skills, experience abroad or specialist intercultural competencies have a bigger chance of acceptance, both in comanies and at colleges and universities. During the mobilities the participants' linguistic and intercultural skills were to be broadened and augmented in real-life work- and job-related situations as well as in social and free-time settings. The programme was intended to provide especially those students with such an opportunity who would previously have shied away from participation because of financial constraints (e.g. typically unpaid internships).
As enrollment at BBS II Stade had been persisently decreasing in the areas of full-time schooling, the school needed a stand-alone educational opportunity to set itself apart from local competitors. For over a decade we have successfully been facilitating experiences abroad for our vocational students; before the start of this project, however, this hadn't been possible in other courses. Having introduced an international branch in the Technical College/ Economics and Administration, the project was mainly aimed at respective students in order to enable them to fulfil their potential through the acquisition of key skills. This was to provide them with greater chances on the labour market as well as prepare them for international courses at college or university. Thus, the project "Fit for Europe" continued the school's successful tradition of offering interships abroad with the Erasmus+ programme and gave a further part of our clientel the financial and organisational opportunity to gain international qualifications through relevant experiences abroad.