CONTEXT ET OBJECTIVES SEPR has been developing a voluntarist policy for 25 years in order to allow students to have a vocational and personal experience abroad and to give an international standing to their studies. The aim is also to fight against youth unemployment and youth drop-out. Objectives for the students : - Learning further vocational skills - Learning new foreign langages - Getting new abilities such as maturity, autonomy, self-confidence, open-mindness, adaptability - Opening to the world, get an European identity - Fighting prejudices and stereotypes - Becoming openminded professionals and boosting the French economy. For SEPR : - Enhancing the European scope of our vocational training centre - Encouraging students and their family to enter the vocational training pathway and do a placement abraod with the Erasmus+ program - Being a local and regional actor with an international scope as well. PARTICIPANTS 20 vocational highschool students will be selected for this project. They are between 18 and 22 years old and are enrolled in the following trainings : jewellery, cabinet-making, graphic design and fashion design. They are mostly modest socio-professional group. Many of them have never travelled abroad and don’t know Europe very well. Moreover, they are not self-confident enough and can hardly speak a foreign language. It is absolutely necessary for these students to broaden their vocational outlooks with the prospect of the labour market. ACTIVITIES Before the placement : - Meeting with administrative and pedagogical staff to explain the project - Beneficiaries information and selection - Sending of the students application to our foreign partners - Meeting with the students and dealing with the following topics : accommodation, transport, language, multicultural life, stereotypes, prejudices… - Linguistic training for students - Preparation of all the administrative documents - 4 or 5 weeks-placements in Italian, Finnish, Spanish and German companies. - Visit in the company caried out by a SEPR teacher - After the placement : meeting with the students in order to assess the benefits of the placement on a vocational, linguistic, cultural and personal point of view - Last meeting with all the teachers involved (july 2016) in order to assess the whole project. METHODOLOGY - Collaborative work with the international office manager and assistant, the vocational high school director and the pedagogical team - Regular meetings with the students before the placement - Regular communication with our foreign partners : vocational training centres and companies - Assessment of the placement for each participant (teacher visit) - Assessment of the overall project with all parties involved : positive aspects and aspects that must be improved. IMPACT AND EXPECTATIONS For SEPR : - Involvement of the overall teaching and administrative staff in a federative European project - Involvement of our vocational school in an European network, in order to deploy the European Commission policy - Better quality of our vocational training thanks to mutualization of good practices - Better esteem for vocational training pathway - Equality between vocational training and general / academic training pathways For the participants : - Fall in the young people unemployment rate and better employability on the labour market - Desire for mobilities abroad - Better involvement in their vocational training after the placement, fall in the drop-out rate - Better creativity, open-mindeness, entrepreneurship - Better examination rate - Better linguistic skills. POSSIBLE ADVANTAGES IN THE LONG TERM - Fall in the young people unemployment rate - Better esteem and image for the vocational training pathway.