Project Grant Summary The Athene Vocational High School hereby submits its 14th project grant proposal for the Mobility Programme administered by the Leonardo National Office. Prior to this application, Athene has submitted 13 requests and won grants for all but one; that is to say, Athene has won grants twelve times. The reason why we have been continuously involved in the Leonardo Programme (which is now called Erasmus Plus Programme) is that its goals are well aligned with those of our school, faculty and student body. Hence our continued participation offers us tremendous benefit. Since the change of the regime, tourism has grown markedly in the Hungarian, even during the recent economic downturn. As a growing industry, there is a high-demand for well-trained experts. Echoing the world-wide trend of the recent past, employment in the tourism sector has grown by 35%. This year, for the same reasons mentioned earlier (regarding our alignment and the global demand for skills), we would like to add 2 more departments into our application: logistics and business trade. The faculty, students and those hosting work placements, are collectively of the opinion that gaining international experience is important for one’s professional development. This year’s beneficiaries are those who do tourism, logistics and business studies in our school. Aside from professional, practical experience, our other objective is that our students improve their basic language skills and gain industry-specific vocabulary by being in a native environment. The project aims are to: • Gain practical, professional experience in an international, multi-cultural environment; • Achieve the goals as set forth in the ECVET guidelines; • Measure the experience & skills gained as relates to each of the studies’ modules; • Further extend the ECVET method – this year we have developed 2 evaluation surveys which we would test and then pilot; • Improve foreign language skills. The individual capabilities are essential for students to thrive in an international environment. In the summer of 2015, we will place 21 students to 4 countries. The placements will last 8 weeks for most of the students, while for the Logistics it will be 6. The programme consists of 2 parts. The first part focuses on developing linguistic, cultural and work placement experience. It will be organized partly by the host, and partly by the sending or the intermediary institutions. This year too we have added an emphasis on the study of world heritage sites as such has grown in importance due to their educational nature. As part of the preparation, the students must compile their own tour packages which they must cover during their placement; such is particularly important as it serves to guide each individual. For the Logistics majors, this will cover visiting operational facilities, logistics basises and spending time in the various departments of the host company. From the second week, the students will begin their work placements (in either hotels or logistic departments). The host’s programme coordinator will mentor the students. This programme extends to four other institutions: 4 four-start hotels in Germany, a coordinating team in Ireland placing the students into hotels (as apprentices), a school in Spain whose structure resembles ours and who is connected to many tourism companies and an Estonian organization that coordinates EU-wide programmes and who are able to create opportunities for students majoring in logistics. Our partners play significant role in organizing several elements of this programme, such as transfer, accommodation, board, training, monitoring, evaluation and administration. Aside from fulfilling all the reasons given previously for this programme, one further significant benefit for the participating students is that they will earn a Europass certificate which will be advantageous to them when they enter the job market. Our school recognizes this placement as fulfilling the students’ obligations to intern in order to graduate. While the content and structure of this new application is similar to our previous ones (for our 2013 season), this new proposal will extend our scope to the new, participating majors refer to logistics and trade students and validate tools for our operation of the ECVET guidelines.