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Creating European Schools of Belonging

Project Information

Project Formation:

  • The partnership was formed on foot of an Erasmus partner-finding event in Estonia. Five schools - one each from Austria, Germany, Ireland, Portugal and Serbia met at this event. Over the course of this event, partners discovered more about their unique interests and capacity in the area of cultural and lingustic diversity. A number of subsequent communications, including an online meeting helped clarify the intentions and direction of the project and a decision was made to apply jointly for the small-scale partnership.

    Partner schools were very interested in the existing work by Laois Education Centre in the area of interculturalism and wanted to know more. From conversations with these organisations, it was evident that some of them felt they were challenged by barriers around language, culture or ethnicity. This presents a challenge for school communities especially in light of global migration, war and economic factors.

    A key aim is to learn about how other jurisdictions handle interculturalism and also share our own context, progress and experience in this area. We believe that by working together, we can enhance everyone's skills and capacity and produce an artefact at the end that will be of use not just in the associated schools but can we adapted for use in may other schools across the countries involved.

    This project focuses on identifying and developing practices which can be used in all partner organisations to support school communities in developing their capacity to engage more fully with all students, but particularly newcomer students and their families.

    All partner organisations are eager to acquire knowledge and practices that will support their own school communities.

Project objectives:

  • To develop an understanding of how each partner organisation supports their newcomer students and ensures that they are made feel welcome, valued and experience a sense of belonging in their school communities
  • To enhance partner organisations capacity to provide for newcomer students which will support to school communities in creating a community of belonging in their own schools
  • To collaborate with partner organisations in hosting a shared learning event where key findings and recommendations from our project can be disseminated to a wider network of transnational educational stakeholders (Co-created content and practices)
  • To build relationships with participating organisations which may lead to an application for a Cooperation Partnership in 2024

Tasks and responsibilities of each partner organisation in the project:

  • Laois Education Centre, is responsible for coordinating the project and ensure its smooth running. They will coordinate the project activities, the project schedule and communicate with partner organisations on timelines and activities as needed. Laois Education centre will also work with partners in preparing the agenda for meetings and support partners in implementing activities.

    All partners will engage in additional project management activities including:
    - preparing and planning for partner meetings
    - collating data and information on cultural and linguistic diversity in their own settings
    - providing content to project website
    - designing and preparing content for the project

Management of the project and cooperation and communication between partners:

  • A project management team consisting of one representative from each partner organisation will be formed. This team will have six partner meetings throughout the duration of the project. 

    The project will launch with a partner meeting event in February 2024 hosted by Laois Education Centre. At this event, partners will have an opportunity to meet and begin to build relationships which will enable collaboration as the project gets underway. Subsequently, the team will have four exchange of practice visits throughout the duration of the project. It will culminate in a Shared Multiplier Event in Ocober 2025.

    Following this launch, a project website will be launched which will be used a tool for updating partners with project progress and information gathered.