Info and contact: www.vtikortrijk.be (sigrid.vansteenkiste@vtikortrijk.be) VTI 1 Kortrijk is a secondary school for science and technology focussing on vocational education and training. We also organize an Arts department as well as a so called OKAN (i.e. a school where newcomers in our country are guided to adapt to our language, schooling system etc.) Our pupils are on average between 12 and 18 years old. Compared to similar ‘equal opportunities’ schools in our region, our school has significantly more pupils. Equal opportunities means that our school scores high for different indicators such as: - Educational level of the mother. - Right on school allowance (grant) - Home language not Dutch - Living in a poor neighbourhood (25% of our pupils are coming from a region with low opportunities) Also the presence of our so-called OKAN class (for newcomers) makes that there is a big diversity in pupils population on all our VTI school sites. Our teaching staff consists of 193 teachers. The school is of course open to pupils with disabilities (hearing impaired, visually impaired, …) To find an answer to the needs for ways and methods for competence developing education and different ways for assessment 3 members of our staff will follow a course ‘Finnish lessons for European schools’. The programme of this course consists of a visit to ‘practice schools’ ranging from primary education to secondary education with a wider, what we would call ‘first grade’ (ages 12 to 14), assessment systems away from the classical grading system, competence developing education based on team teaching and the individual coaching of pupils, … This expertise with examples of good practice is not to be found in our own country. Based on this we take it that the course will give us a lot of theoretical content. The job shadowing that we are planning with our team of 3 in Finland should be more practical. We don’t know our partner in this project yet, but we would opt for a Finnish school because they have most expertise in this area as we found in all the specific studies literature we consulted. To find an answer to these needs concerning the diversity of our pupil population 4 people from our staff will take the 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. Dissemination in different work groups, the school board, the school’s newsletter, the pedagogical debate within the larger school community ‘Onze-Lieve- Vrouw van Groeninge’, on different smartschool platforms of all school in our school community, … The participating team from this project will be considered as an ‘expert team’ (in our school as well as in the larger school community) playing a leading role in the reform of secondary education in 2016. As such the team will have responsibility and will be supporting in the process of change within the own school VTI 1 as well as in the other VTI school in the outskirts of Kortrijk.