Info and contact: www.vtikortrijk.be (chris.debacker@vtikortrijk.be) VTI 4 is a secondary education school (only for those pupils aged 12 - 14 starting the first two years of secondary education, our ‘first grade’ pupils) that consists of two entities, one located in Harelbeke, the other one in Gullegem. Both are implanted in a rather rural to suburban area of the bigger provincial city of Kortrijk. Pupils who have finished primary education can, if they prefer to do so, go to one of both schools to get a technical, vocational and professional education and training before moving up to VTI 2 and VTI 3, located in the city centre of Kortrijk. Both schools, Gullegem and Harelbeke, together count 160 pupils for 40 teachers. Most of these teachers are teaching in both Gullegem and Harelbeke and are in close contact with their colleagues teaching the next two years (pupils aged 14 – 16, our ‘second grade’ pupils). Of course there is also a very close cooperation with VTI 1, our typical ‘first grade’ school in the city centre of Kortrijk. Because of the upcoming reform of our secondary education system, our school is preparing for what is coming our way. One of the main aims of this educational reform is creating a ‘wider first grade’, focussing on the development of basic competences, skills of all pupils instead of pure knowledge. Making this happen asks for a totally different approach than our current working method. Therefore, in this educational project, we want to develop a wider view on learning and we are looking for other educational working methods such as activation learning strategies to offer skills developing education. In October 2012 our school was officially screened. After the screening we were assigned to rethink our evaluation system for our different subjects and courses. The goal is to look for new evaluation methods and to link them to competence-aimed education. We want to integrate different evaluation systems. Self-evaluation, evaluation of attitude, skills and knowledge. We will try to work out a transparent evaluation system per course/subject for parents. In recent years we found that the school population is becoming more and more diverse. Immigrant families are settling in the outskirts of Kortrijk more and more. The pupils that are moving on to our school in the Kortrijk city centre are increasingly confronted with this multiculturalism. This isn’t always very obvious for pupils coming from a classic, Flemish culture in the villages around Kortrijk. It turned out that there is a need for a professional approach for our teachers dealing with the issue of diversity within the student population. To find an answer to solve this problem of dealing with this diversity and because of the necessity for a competence developing education a team of 4 people from our school (1 principal, a coordinator and 2 teachers) will follow the course ‘Finnish lessons for European schools’. Then, by job shadowing in a Finnish school and by studying and observing the school system there, we hope to see how youngsters over there are developing their skills in the best possible way. We also want to see how pupils, only later on in this process, really select a more specific vocational/professional training in terms of what they are good at and what they are really interested in. We aim to turn ‘equality’ into one of our core values and understand how ‘included education’ can be realised by team teaching. To find an answer to these needs concerning the diversity of our pupil population 2 people from our staff already took a course ‘diversity in education’. As a first step in the course of the project (after following structured courses) there will already be a first dissemination to our other VET-schools ( VTI 1, VTI 2 and VTI 3). Contacts between these schools and sites are very close especially because lots of our colleagues are part-time teaching in multiple school in our VET school VTI Kortrijk. The next step is planning an educational seminar scheduled for the school year 2015 – 2016 during which a session will be devoted to developing competency education and new forms of assessment. There will also be a session on diversity of our pupil population and how to deal with this.