Our school is a vocational school where young people can acquire the skills and qualifications necessary to study at university or a university of applied sciences. Those of our students who have not gathered any work experience yet or who are not yet qualified in any job need to do a work placement with different companies and institutions. The work placement is a vital part of their education at our school and it makes up 50% of the 11th grade. As Europe is growing together ever more and many companies and universities want their applicants to have spent some time abroad while gathering work experience, we want to enable our students to do exactly that as a part of their work placement and education at our school. The aim of the project is to give some of our students the chance to work and live in a foreign country for a longer period of time. When working abroad our students improve their key competences and hard - as well as soft skills in terms of the labour market. They develop skills like entrepreneurship, digital skills and multilingualism, which are indispensable today. Since our students live in host families they have the opportunity to learn the language of their host country as well as get to know about the culture and traditions of the European country they visit and become more independent individuals during their stay abroad. They contribute to the cohesion of the European society. In addition to the theoretical knowledge they get at school, they gather practical work experience abroad and benefit profoundly for their future lives. Students at our school volunteer to spend time abroad. They are 16 to 17 years old and for most of them it is the first time that they spend three weeks abroad without their families. We require them to be open-minded and flexible and also able to adapt to the new challenges they face abroad. They have the chance to get to know their host brothers and host sisters before the stay so that they know what to expect. Thus we want to make sure that the guest students don’t really feel like strangers once they arrive at their destination. Supervisors at our school and our partner schools carefully choose the students who go abroad and the companies where the guests will be working. Mutual visits by the supervisors make sure that the companies are well briefed before the trainees arrive. Thus existing partnerships between schools and companies will be strengthened and new ones will develop. Our partner schools are in Finland and Italy. Our students in Finland communicate in English and improve their language skills. Their marks at school usually improve after such a stay. Since Italian is a language which is also taught at our school and a mandatory second foreign language for some of our students they benefit for their Italian skills at school. We as a vocational school of secondary education want to do our bit to make sure that Europe and the European Union become palpable in the lives of our students.