“Mobilise YOURself – studying and working in the EU“ is the title of our project through which we want to make a contribution to the agenda “Europe 2020“ in the context of a three years strategic school partnership.
Young people are the unexplored resources of Europe, however their situation makes us feel worried in many places because of rising poverty and thus, concluding social problems and high rates of unemployment on the one side. On the other side, apprenticeship training positions often stay vacant and universities complain about too little capable students or too many university dropouts due to lacking qualifications, lacking motivation or simply lacking awareness of what their profession should look like in the future.
We are deeply convinced that only we as Europeans can face and solve this entire set of problems together and that it is the task of our schools to prepare young people for the manifold challenges of today’s working environment and professional world at its best. Wanting to contribute exactly to the aspects mentioned above, we want to focus on the topic “Europe-wide study and profession orientation” and especially to reflect on effective, sustainable and successful transitions of young people from primary school to the working environment in a critical way and to examine those transitions Europe-widely together with young people. Furthermore, we primarily want to point out and strengthen the connection between general and professional education and the working environment and, what is more, higher educational institutions, to support key skills in terms of entrepreneurship, teamwork, digital knowledge and foreign language acquisition, to raise efficiency and motivation for learning in general and to work on reasons and opportunities of early school dropout prevention in this context.
Our strategic project team consists of seven partner schools altogether, which are secondary schools from different geographical regions in Europe with different economical, historical, political and social backgrounds and come from the following countries: Germany as coordinating country, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Latvia and Poland. Besides the choice of partners from old and new EU member states we have inexperienced as well as already experienced schools regarding European school partnerships in our team in order to set new impulses as well as to bring in experiences from earlier Comenius or Erasmus+ projects. The target group for our project topic and for the participation in mobilities should especially be 14-18 years old students at the partner schools.
During the course of the project three transnational project meetings are planned at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the project. Furthermore, we will have four learning, teaching and training activities, during which workshops regarding the topics application training, human resources management, mechanisms of the European labour market and the economy, healthy way of life, job profiles and expectations regarding your own future career and finally job training and study possibilities in the EU should be offered and organised.
During the three-year project time all involved persons, the students in particular, but also the teachers, shall work on different kinds of activities with regard to the topic “Study and profession orientation” such as preparing information booklets, preparing and carrying out video presentations and power point presentations, organising poster exhibitions, carrying out and analysing statistical surveys, conducting statistical tests regarding job orientation, planning and carrying out a job fair and finally, visiting job training companies, universities and other institutions.
Finally, through the intense work on our project topic and its activities we expect a long-lasting and diverse increase in competence for all persons and organisations being involved. Primarily, intercultural competences and a better understanding of European values and a (re-)construction and development of a positive attitude towards the European idea should be supported and widened. Furthermore, IT and language competences as well as teamwork should be trained and especially the development of creativity, decision-making and conflict resolution competences should be supported in a sustainable manner.