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Higher education student and staff mobility projec..
Higher education student and staff mobility project
Start date: Jun 1, 2014,
End date: Sep 30, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
CPIFP Pirámide is a vocational training school which has participated in several European programs (Erasmus, Leonardo, study visits, Leonardo Partnerships) and cross-border cooperation programs (Interreg, Pirefop, Piremobv).
Participation in the Erasmus program started in the 2008-2009 school year. Since then, 21 mobilities have been carried out within the program, all of them under the framework of work placements.
Our involvement in the current Erasmus+ program is aiming to:
• attract more students to higher vocational education.
• improve the employability of our graduates, expanding their employment opportunities throughout the European labour market, as well as improving the professional skills which are relevant to the internationalization of Spanish companies and entrepreneurs.
• get feedback on the design of our training programs, using the information provided by learners doing work placements and teachers doing job shadowing in European companies, as well as to identify the new needs of companies and the skills that should be strengthened in our trainees.
• increase cross-border cooperation with educational institutions, technology centers and companies from neighbouring regions, sharing different learning strategies and promoting innovation.
• promote new social competences among our students: adaptability to technological change and the globalization of economy; acceptance of multiculturalism; awareness of European citizenship.
Participating students: seven students of higher vocational training aged 20 to 22:
• 2 students of Higher VET Diploma in Analysis Laboratory and Quality Control.
Their mobilities took place in the UK and Malta.
• 2 students of Higher VET Diploma in Energy Efficiency and Solar Thermal Energy. Their mobilities took place in Finland and Malta.
• 3 students of Higher VET Diploma in Construction Projects. Two of them did their mobilities in the UK and one in Ireland.
Participating staff:
• 2 staff members teaching in the Higher VET Diploma in Analysis Laboratory and Quality Control have carried out a mobility in a French VET School.
The activities done by students involved three-month work placements in other European countries, which are equivalent to the 270-hour compulsory traineeships that all VET students need to do at the end of their training period.
The activities carried out by the two teachers consisted of attending chemistry lab lessons taught to VET students by their French colleagues, as well as visiting nearby enterprises that accept interns from the French VET school. These mobilities served the purpose of training the two teachers involved and validating those enterprises as receiving institutions for our students’ work placements in the coming years.
The project has had a very positive impact on the students, both at personal and professional levels: they have gained knowledge of the professional sector in which they will develop their career; they have improved their communicative competence and knowledge of the languages spoken in enterprises, particularly English; they have developed their ability to fit in a company in an unknown foreign environment; they have increased their awareness of being European citizens; they have learnt to use tools and work methods which differ from those used in our school.
As regards the teaching staff, the impact of the project involved: working with analytical procedures not commonly used when training our students; gaining knowledge of laboratory equipment for quality control that could be purchased by oue school to improve our students’ training; getting to know several companies that have their own quality control laboratory; establishing relationships with another VET school that can contribute to provide our students with work placements, and that in turn can send students who wish to undertake work placements in Spanish companies, with the aid of our own school.
Furthermore, our students’ mobilities have been carried out in enterprises which have improved their relationship with us and whose cooperation can be requested again in the coming years.
To conclude, the experience has greatly helped to enlarge our European partnership network in Ireland, UK, Malta and Finland and to strengthen our partnership with a VET school in southern France. This is but only one of the many actions that the province of Huesca undertakes to gradually close ties with the border regions of Aquitaine and Midi-Pyrénées in southern France.