The aim of this project is to ensure professional training for teachers through specific classes where they will learn how to work with students with difficulties and implement their knowledge in their lesson plans. Teachers will also work on developing their emotional intelligence, which will become a tool for inclusion and tolerant behaviour. Goals of student exchange programmes are development of self-confidence in students who come from lower-income families, tolerance and empathy towards differences, appreciation for multiculturalism, possibilities of progress in local community and especially, student inclusion with the emphasis on the students who moved here.
There are 608 students in Fra Kaje Adžića Pleternica Primary School, which includes eleven smaller rural schools. Students from those rural schools enroll in school in Pleternica in the fifth grade. There has been a significant increase in the number of students with difficulties in achieving educational goals in the last five years. This phenomenon represents both a challenge and an obstacle to teachers who need to educate themselves further in this field. Most of our students come from rural areas where their educational needs are not completely met. Those are situations in which one teacher teaches two or more classes simultaneously or when there are only a few students in the entire school. Students from these areas tend to face more difficulties in social conducts and harder accept differences between students when they reach the fifth grade. There has been an increase in the number of Ukrainian students in the last year and we have been working on their inclusion as well.