Accompany me! Erasmus Project

Project Title

Accompany me!

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

The number of unemployed youth and early school leavers is constantly rising in most European countries, while at the same time many European companies are facing a shortage of skilled labor. To counteract both of these alarming tendencies, several attempts have been made to open the European market for young people. With our project “Accompany me!” we wanted to follow up the idea of attracting students not only to their national labour market, but also widen their view towards the international market. As high youth unemployment rates reflect the difficulties faced by young people in finding jobs, we wanted to prepare the ground for both students and companies for collaboration that has an impact not only on their future, but also on their motivation to continue school and not leave it too early.

The idea of “Accompany me!” was to bridge the gap between the worlds of education and work through collaboration between schools and companies. Students were working in national and international teams and solving realistic and practical tasks, which were given by different companies. All their work was presented in blogs and these are published on project webpage. During the events teachers and mentors monitored and supported their group work. The students improved their key competences, such as solving problems, expressing themselves verbally and in writing, reading, mathematics, social science and using digital tools. All communication was in English, so the development of language skills was significant. All this combined has given both students and teachers a valuable insight into the European labor market.

In this Project there were 4 partner schools. Lillesand Ungdomsskole (Norway) works together with an entrepreneurial agency and has experiences in entrepreneurial work at school. Integrierte Gesamtschule Thaleischweiler- Fröschen (Germany) has a lot of experiences combining school and working life. Their job was to enrich our project and to be responsible for the blogs and website. Tallinna Reaalkool (Estonia) has very good theoretical skills and they managed the budget, the timetable and were responsible for the monitoring and evaluating the project. They were also responsible for all documentation of the process and progress. SSOU MOSHA PIJADE (Macedonia) has good collaboration with local companies and their knowledge of connecting theory and practice were widened this project. They were responsible for the collection of ideas and lesson tasks, and supervising the establishment of partnerships between the schools and companies.

During the project period there were 3 transnational meetings (with 8-10 teachers from 4 countries at each meeting) and 5 Learning-Teaching-Training Activities (24 students and 8 teachers from 4 countries at each meeting).

The project raised the students’ ability for self-motivated learning, fostered the process of “learning to learn” as a way to improve academic skills, gained personal growth and increased motivation. Students are now aware of the differences and similarities between various companies in Europe. But even more importantly, they have become more tolerant and respectful towards people in different professions and cultures.

In the long run this project should lead to a lower drop-out rate and companies got the chance to establish cooperation with the participating schools, which might lead to permanent jobs for skilled laborers.

Teachers have gotten a collection of best practices combining entrepreneurial and practical skills.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 74360 Eur

Project Coordinator

Tallinna Reaalkool & Country: EE

Project Partners

• Integrierte Gesamtschule Thaleischweiler-Fröschen
• LILLESAND UNGDOMSSKOLE
• SSOU MOSHA PIJADE – Tetovo