We are a secondary school in Bruges (Belgium, Flanders) offering 6 years of general secondary education. Currently we offer education to some 656 pupils and employ some 75 teachers. The school wishes to optimise its functioning in order to constantly guarantee and improve the education it offers. We want to do this more systematically by using the principles of the EFQM-model (European Foundation for Quality Management). This model can be used as an instrument for self-evaluation when introducing elements of improvement, to introduce new visions within the school and as a general structure for the management of this organisation. Our school is facing a big change in staff in the near future and wants to further develop teamwork, cooperation within the divisions and professionalise staff. Following the current developments in society, our school also wants to offer innovative education. To acquire the principles of internal care for quality by means of the EFQM-model, three members of our staff (one representing the management, the management team and the teachers) will follow a long term course ‘Teach, Learn and Quality’ in an international context. This way the participants will come into contact with foreign schools with similar interests in quality development. This 6-day TLQ-course was selected via the Internet and is organised in Lisbon, Portugal. Secondly the school wants to engage 3 staff members in job shadowing in a school with plenty of experience in working with the EFQM-model. Using e-twinning we found a school from the Spanish Basque Country that has received a number of awards over the previous years for its qualitatively high work with the EFQM-model. This way, the theoretical knowledge acquired during the TLQ-course can be verified in a genuine context of teaching. Building on the experiences gained during the TLQ-course and job shadowing, our school wants to introduce an instrument from the EFQM-model to expand and improve the organisation in a qualitatively high way. The members of staff who will participate in the ‘Teach, Learn and Quality’-course and job shadowing will report about their experiences in general staff meetings and to the management team to share and communicate the principles of the EFQM-model. The management team can ensure an internal development of new initiatives by the working team ‘quality development’. This will validate further dissemination of knowledge and experience and will create a platform for other staff members. In a first stage, we want to use the EFQM-model to focus on our management system, the functioning of the separate divisions, professionalising staff, innovative teaching methods (IT, self-study). In a further stage, the other activity areas of the school can be tackled and improved following the EFQM-model. We believe that working in an international context will offer the participants a positive perspective on European cooperation and may result in other European partnerships. We will keep in e-twinning contact with our Basque partner school, which might lead to a long-term partnership. In the meantime we are working on an exchange project with students, as a spin-off of the EFQM-project, which will focus on multilingual Europe. This will form a firm foundation for further quality improvement and European partnership. In the future it could be arranged to share our quality plans and provide each other with feedback.