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Higher education student and staff mobility project
Start date: Jun 1, 2014, End date: May 30, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Montessori school is a school of about 1400 students, 350 of them perform Advanced Vocational Educational Cycles (computing, marketing, manager assistant, finance and administration), and childhood carers. The rest is distributed into Pre-school education, primary, secondary, high school, and an Intermediate Vocational training and educational cycle. It is located in the center of Zaragoza, the fifth town of Spain. We have experience in international tasks: Erasmus since 2007, before we were in Leonardo. Several Comenius projects, exchange visits with other schools in France and the UK. Teachers make exchange visits with British schools enabling our staff with a year leave in their contracts to ease the way. A bilingual English program is implemented in primary, secondary and high school. In our intermediate and advanced Educational and training cycles there is also English for specific purposes adapted to each cycle. The school considers globalization a cross-disciplinary process, that is developed by all its vocational courses by improving their level of language learning, by acquiring formal education in foreign countries, by adapting our curriculum to the companies’ needs, by giving support to those students who stay abroad with regard to cultural differences, by giving advice to them on how they should behave, about the accommodation they should take, or by putting them in contact with students that had previously had the same experience, by letting our students know about our Erasmus project through our web page, information meetings, gatherings with Erasmus students, articles. From the beginnings of our school in the Erasmus programme we have been adjusting the number of our mobility applications to the reality that is asked by our students. We have realized that in an environment of a high economic crisis, mobility abroad, in spite of the grant, is an activity that turns out to be expensive, for the family budget of our students. We have tried to compensate for that economic burden, by making them think that they are investing in their future, so that they will get more benefits in the long term than the cost they are undertaking now. We have been holding several meetings with the Erasmus coordinator oriented to this aim, with certain interventions of Erasmus students who have spoken about their experiences and anecdotes. There have been five mobility experiences this year. One of our teachers has gone with an Erasmus staff grant. Four students have undertaken a practice scholarship. Two of them have completed a subject that is necessary for obtaining the degree which is called FCT( formación en centros de trabajo)and the other two have carried out an internship period after obtaining their degree. Such students stood out for their good level of knowledge of English, for being mature, for having a high level of autonomy and for being strongly determined. These students had a good academic record. Before the selection process, the participants were informed about the Erasmus Program in their classrooms so that the doubts or questions that arose were solved and also the people who were interested could start preparing the trip. Finally, the selected candidates were assisted with their relationship towards the company. It has been noted that they all had the required level to carry out the mobility period successfully. The corresponding contracts have been carried out and explained both to the students and to the company chosen and all the tasks and the necessary documentation to perform the Erasmus mobility and to comply with the Education Department of the Aragonese Autonomous Community. Tutorials have been performed with the students and the company mentor checking that the Erasmus mobility goes right and finally the correct proceedings have been completed once the student has come back form his or her Eramus stay. With respect to results, we can confirm that thanks to the grants from the Ministry of Education, we have been able to give one more grant than we were alloted. So we have filled all the vacancies and an extra mobility position has been completed. One of our students has remained to live and work in the place (company and town) where he did his internship, Amsterdam. Altough the company has disappeared he hasn’t had any problems in changing his job or helping other students that have gone to Amsterdam. He has even given us some information about other companies that could receive students for their training period. This fact may bring the benefits of being able to send students of the Cycle of Multiplatform Applications to new companies that start up with challenging projects by encouraging the students to try to overcome their passive attitude towards going abroad. Likewise, we will try to acquire consistent partners to offer to our students and to defeat the discontinuity among the different specialities that makes it difficult to maintain long-term partners.

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