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Coming To Inclusion In Greater Europe
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

This a bilateral KA1 Erasmus+ mobile partnership between St Mary's Primary school, Manchester, England, and Tjärnaängskolan, Borlänge, Sweden. It started in a perceived togetherness in a meeting in Manchester in spring 2013. Both schools operate in an environment of a large positive migration of pupils and challenges for modern school development. In key areas, professions and practices, the project aims at contributing to better international understanding and respect with the European dimension before our eyes. Our ultimate target group is "The New Young Europe" and we feel that the project's planned activities greatly contribute to the most important of the EU's objectives for 2020. Our activities will be supportive to higher employment, improved skills among staff and pupils, reduced rate of dropouts from school through a well founded higher motivation of pupils tired of school. The project participants are those that are in the forefront to meet the target group. More specifically, for each partner, is referred to initially approx. 7 representatives of a) the mother tongue teachers (MTT) for the large groups of newcomers, b) and c) the Class teachers in classes with great cultural diffusion, d) Teacher who works at the Receiving Unit and is among the first to meet the newly arrived, e) the Special teacher at receiving school who has an important coordinating role, and, f) and g) the Headmaster and her Deputy responsible for a continuing good school development in the context of relatively new situations. We will glance at prority areas such as maths and science, youth unemployment, links between church and society, integration/inclusion and parents' involvement. We will use digital facilities like e-mail, Skype and Facebook. We will aim at being even more comfortable with relevant social media in a process of higher professionalism. For the two schools and for the above mentioned five categories (and seven participants), we plan for mobilities incl. job shadowing, studies, discussions, exchange of experiences and self-reflection. Mobilities start with a group from Manchester to Borlänge in October 2014, followed by the Swedish group's visit to Manchester in April 2015. After that a return visit from St Mary’s in October 2015. A concluding mobility will take place in April 2016, when the Swedish group comes to study at St. Mary's. During the project we will reconnect with our colleagues, communicate the results to politicians, meet in a reflection of found experiences and plan for the next phase. We will monitor and evaluate progressively, have reports working and at the end of the project add final results and submit the final report. Reporting will be done regularly to colleagues, school faculty, parents in user councils, politicians and the media. Newspapers will be invited to press conferences and to write a report as the project runs. We aim at strengthening the cooperation between the two schools in the long run and make activities concrete. Further mobilities of staff and pupils will make the English language even more popular in Tjärnaängskolan and the Somali and the Swedish language more known at St Mary' . Our mission is to facilitate staff ‘s job shadowing and other exchanges to promote learning from partner colleagues. The method will be democratic, creative and with an ambition to try and see into the future. We shall always anchor activities with staff colleagues to leave no one behind. Democratically, we want to make sure that pupils are close to our activities and that they can take an active role in planning for the future. But start with modest exchanges in the form of postcards, handwritten letters and simple messages through email and SMS. For the project in the short term, after the two years of collaboration, we want to see how a) aware we have become of the richness of our multicultural environment, b) much more proficient and safe in exploiting new knowledge staff has become, c) our schools and also the local community is gradually changing as skills develop in this area, and, d) our two schools focus on how to build an increasingly more European-international - and therefore humble! – approach within the daily school work. In the long run, we want to see that society in which pupils in preschool, common school and then in the community can enrich each other and realize how fruitful and necessary a mixture of cultures is. All this experience gained will characterize most school work in the future. And we foresee that from the two schools will then spread, in each country, the same experience via the nearby community to become a good example for surrounding schools.

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