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I'M a Professional Active Curious Traveller
Start date: Jun 1, 2015, End date: May 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Our project IMPACT3 is supported by a consortium of 3 schools in Castelnaudary: Lycée Durand, coordinator, Lycée Andréossy and SEGPA of Collège Fontanilles. Our students are mostly from modest and rural origins and often reluctant to any educational or professional mobility. The consortium will work on international opening for initial and continuing training, mainly with Spain and Poland – historical partners in previous Leonardo projects that have strengthened the links with the cities of Mahón and Cracow. Our application is based on a 24-month contract culminating in 2 four-week mobility periods (46 students, 11 accompanying adults) in June 2016 & 2017. These will be punctuated by 8 one-week mobility periods for adult training. All the future participants are engaged in vocational training in 1° Bac Pro (vocational lower sixth form) in Sales, Business and Administration at Lycée Durand and in Electrical Engineering and Energy and Airconditioning Maintenance at Andréossy, while our collège students attend 3ème SEGPA (catering), which stands for 4th Form Vocational Adapted Education for children with special needs. Our project is meant to follow an ambitious, realistic and dynamic development: In June 2016, we will rely on solid foundations, to ensure our 17 trainees with safety and success: 5 from industrial Lycée Andréossy will do their training in Mahón in building companies, while those from the tertiary sector (10 in Lycée Durand and 2 in the Collège) will have their experience in Cracow (shops, restaurants). During this first peak, accompanying adults will be commissioned to expand the offer of partner companies. Thus, the project will grow in importance for the second mobility: 29 students (10, 15 & 4) will have the opportunity to do their training in the industrial or tertiary sector on both destinations. All in all, in line with the E.C. policy, we aim at "building on past experience, looking towards the future"! Regarding staff training, we analysed the consortium needs and decided to schedule 8 one-week job-shadowing periods (administrative & pedagogical) that will allow us put to good use new innovative practices. The objectives of IMPACT3 come in a variety of educational, professional and societal axes: the project will enable our students to improve their foreign language skills and to perform better in national examinations. It will also be important in our fight against school dropout and for the enhancement of our vocational sections. Finally, in our context of rurality and withdrawal, it seems crucial to provide our students and staff with the opportunity to develop their European citizenship, to convince them that international mobility means personal development and professional success. This last goal is closely akin to one of the project’s expected impacts: proving to people around us that even in the depths of our countryside, at the far end of the regional and educational authority area, we are expected to play a part in Europe’s future. In a nutshell: living in Castelnaudary, believing in Europe. Another expected impact also concerns misconceptions: SEGPA classes and Vocational Schools often suffer from a low esteem. This project thus works in accordance with other initiatives of ours in order to enhance the image of our students and vocational training in everyone’s eyes and in the employment world. These first repercussions obviously require a communication scheme and that is why we already got into partnership with local businesses and newspapers and institutional bodies (town council, Region, Consulate). Last but not least, we are very concerned about transmission and how the new skills and the sense of European citizenship will benefit all participants (staff and students) but also their colleagues and classmates. In the long run, we fervently want our project to fall within the scope of a larger international development of our consortium. We want our project to be inspiring and to exert its influence over the image of local and national vocational education. As this 24-month contract will take us to the merging of our two high schools in Sept. 2017, we have already initiated contacts with neighbouring vocational schools for the future creation of an even more ambitious project relying on the expertise of IMPACT3. Because of its repercussions and benefits, IMPACT3 appeared to us as a natural name: "3" stands for our 3 schools and the 3 participant countries. Our students came first to a variation, in English: "I'M a Professional Active and Curious Traveller". As a symbol of teacher-student cooperation and for the international clarity in the language of Churchill, we kept this name. Eager not to leave the language of Monnet in the shade, we opted for a second acronym to IMPACT3: “Impulser la Mobilité Professionnelle pour les Apprenants de Castelnaudary Tous les 3”.
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