Holywell is an international community; in our community we speak more than forty different languages! We are fortunate to be culturally so wealthy. For us, it has been natural to get involved in international projects. Since 2017, the school has been exchanging work done by Yr5s students with a partner school in Pontevedra, Spain.
This year, we have embarked in a new adventure, together with Bromet, Oxhey Wood and Parkgate schools, plus two more schools in Spain: CEIP Victoria Díez and The British School of Tenerife, we put together a project and applied for funding from Erasmus+. Erasmus+ is a student exchange program that supports education and professional development across Europe. The British Council is our link to Erasmus+ in the UK.
We applied in March 2018 and have been delighted to learn that our project, ‘Who do we think we are? A cultural heritage project’ had been selected and more than 194,000 euros have been approved for the six schools involved. The funding has been given for two academic years, 2018-2020, and has been granted to exchange good practice and to promote teacher and student exchange programs.
This autumn, our first international projects, in the classroom, have already started and our first study visit to Spain will be in June 2019. Fifteen Year 5 students have been chosen and will travel to Hornachuelos, near the city of Córdoba, for a week, to experience learning, working and living in this village of Andalucía, Spain. The next academic year,2019-2020, another group of students from Holywell will be chosen to go to The British School of Tenerife. Children from Hornachuelos and from Tenerife will also come to visit our school to learn about our cultural heritage.