“ALL ABOARD” – Innovative actions and products to strengthen the competence of national expertise centers supporting inclusive education for pupils and students with special educational needs Erasmus Project

Project Title

“ALL ABOARD” – Innovative actions and products to strengthen the competence of national expertise centers supporting inclusive education for pupils and students with special educational needs

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 school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity; Disabilities – special needs

Project Summary

The name of this project – “ALL ABOARD – Innovative actions and products to strengthen the competence of national expertise centers supporting inclusive education for pupils and students with special educational needs” – describes also the aim of the project. The incidence and modes of implementing inclusive education practices vary in each European country. There is an increasing need to share the multiprofessional information on good practices and special knowledge on how to support inclusive education. It is also important to find flexible models to develop the training of the staff of expertise centers and mainstream schools. The main objective in this project was to exchange good practices and to create innovative actions and products, which would have input on the competence on each expertise center and in the end the results would effect to inclusive education practices in mainstream schools all over Europe.

There were altogether 4 participating organisations in this project. The coordinating organisation was Valteri Centre for Learning and Consulting (Finland) who initially brought these interested partners together for the purposes of developing the original funding application.The participating organisations were Stadped (Norway), National Star (UK) and GO! (Belgium). All these participants share the role of being a support/resource center and thus share the main challenges, needs and aims: How to support the local authorities, schools, teachers and parents to implement inclusive education? The main idea of the project was inspired due to the partner organisations experience and capacity when finding new ways to support inclusive education.The target group in this project covered directly the staff of the participant expertise centers and indirectly all those interested in utilizing the results of the project for implementing inclusive education.

This 32-months-project started in September 2016. The intellectual outputs of this project were “Box of Best Practices”, “Module of Thematic Webinars of Inclusive Practices” and a “Training Module for Supporting Inclusive Education”. The contents for these were gathered by on-line and face-to-face meetings, job-shadowings, training activities and the input of the multiprofessional staff of each participating center.

The first phase was mainly to build up the “Box of Best Practices” to support the implementation of inclusive education and to create and produce the project webpages. This first phase also included three Job Shadowings for gathering the materials and ideas for the Box of Best Practices. Now the product is ready and available on the project webpages http://all-aboard-erasmus.eu/.

During the second phase we created the “Thematic Webinars on Inclusive Practices”. Each participating country chose the themes for their Thematic Webinars on Inclusive Practices.The Webinars were recorded and made available on the project website for future reference. Partners also promoted the webinars and their recordings amongst their stakeholders so that they could be of benefit to as large a group as possible. We also created “The Guidelines” for creating a webinar to support the philosophy of distribution. The main idea was to offer very practical support for those interested in sharing their expertise and experiences through webinars. The Guidelines are published on the project website.

During the second phase in this project we also produced our third intellectual output “Training Module for Inclusive Practices”. The main idea was to build up a five-day-Training Module on inclusive education. The Training Module was piloted in Belgium October 2018. This training module can now be offered as a new KA1 training programme.

Sharing of the experiences and products happened throughout all project phases but especially during our last phase when we shared the products through multiplier events. The project process and results were presented to relevant organisations and participants during the National Seminars and the International Seminar. Participant organisations in Norway, Belgium and UK implemented a one-day National Seminar. The two-day International Seminar took place in Tampere, Finland at the end of April, 2019.

The project was implemented as described in the application. The staff participating in the project have benefited from cooperating with and learning from the other participating organisations. We have also spread the knowledge of the project to our networks and got positive and interested feedback. Our Training Module piloting got very good feedback and so did the National and International Seminars. The products of this project will be disseminated by the participating organisations in many future occasions. The project webpage will be updated and we are hoping to be able to provide our Training Module as a KA1 course, which would enable distributing our results even more on European level.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 133863 Eur

Project Coordinator

Valteri-koulu Onerva & Country: FI

Project Partners

• National Star Foundation
• HET GEMEENSCHAPSONDERWIJS
• Statped