Varpaisjärvi School is a combined primary and secondary school in Pohjois-Savo in Finland. The number of staff, at the moment, is about 20 and we have about 220 pupils. With this application we will establish a 12-month European Development Plan for the time period from June 2016 to May 2017. Our project title is 'Motivating pupils in the language classroom'.As our project title indicates, our focus this year is on language teaching and the main objective is to improve the quality of language teaching by tackling pupils' motivation. This will be done by enhancing staff competences and by bringing new teaching methods and tools into use. With the help of an Erasmus+ grant, one language teacher from our school will attend an in-service training course for language teachers in Cardiff Wales, in the UK during summer 2016. The course is organised by International Study Programmes and the title of the course is 'Creative activites and motivating materials for the secondary classroom'.The expected result of our development plan is more effective and motivating language teaching in our school. We believe that giving our teachers new inspiration, enthusiasm, updated tools for teaching and a change to improve their language and teaching skills, will result in more motivating teaching. This will further have an impact on the pupils' motivation because they have a change to try out a variety of learning techniques and tasks.As a long term plan, we hope that more teachers will become interested in European courses as means to maintaining and improving their teaching skills. The idea is that sending teachers on European courses would become a permanent part of our school's development plan.