The Ziekenhuisschool Stad Gent woud like to enable one English teacher to take the summer course 'Bringing British Culture to Life" at the Bell Teacher Campus in Cambridge during July 2015. This is a course for ESL-teachers with a C1-level of English. These are the course outcomes as described on the website of the Bell Teacher Campus: development of linguistic skills and intercultural awareness, enhancement of international cooperation and development in education, opportunity for post-course dissemination of knowledge to other teachers in school/locally and increased understanding of how to foster quality improvements to teaching and learning. Why do we think this course is necessary for one of our language teacher at out school? -Our school is situated within a hospital setting, this makes us a special needs school. We are a secundairy school,employing 36 teachers and educating 70 pupils (on average) from the age of 12 to 18. Our pupils stay in hospital for a longer period of time (ranging from two weeks up to two years). We have pupils from different kinds of schools, pupils with different backgrounds and different levels, pupils that take very academic subjects to pupils who do a vocational training. Within this diversity we also have a wide range of reasons why pupils are in hospital: psychiatric diseases, rehabilitation after an accident, brain damage, cancer, drug addiction and different kind of diseases. Our pupils get classes in small groups and everyone works with their own materials necessary to be able to go back to their school. Hence a lot of teachers like to extend their knowledge on how to correctly approach certain illnesses and problems. Nevertheless, extending their knowledge on their own teaching subject is as important. Within the hospital there are a lot of opportunities for extra schooling on how to deal with certain diseases. We should not forget to also apply for extra training withing certain school subjects. We would like to present our English teacher with the opportunity to become a better English-speaker, to feel more secure in front of the classroom as an English teacher and to keep the motivation high to produce high-quality lessons. Recently there was a devellopment in school policy enabling us to attract teachers with a masters degree, before we couldn't. This is very positive, now we can offer our pupils teachers with extended knowledge. But because we already have an professional bachelor English teacher with a lot of valuable pedagogical knowledge, we would like to further educate this teacher. So the teacher has more knowledge of the British language and culture, which is necessary to teach our eldest pupils. The English teacher can take this course under the condition that gained knowledge will be shared with the other language teachers of the school. In total we have 5 English teachers under employment. We also have French, Spanish, Dutch and Latin teachers. We want to promote and stimulate the 'learning-is-for-life-attitude'. We want to our teachers to feel heard in their need for extra schooling. -A lot of our pupils have to stay in hospital for a long period. Here, they are constantly confronted with their illness. We want to give them another reality: the reality of school. Through education we want to make them feel like they are just like their peers, they have to learn and study. We want to expand their reality by providing them with interesting and motivating lessons that takes them to other cultures and other worlds. With this we hope to give pupils some hope, motivation and succes within a confined space. These are some aspects that we find necessary to be able to give a lesson of high quality: a teacher with a lot of knowledge on their own subject, language and culture-wise, authentic learning materials, being able to offer our pupils the opportunity to correspond with pupils from other countries, to make our pupils think about other habits and traditions, other cultures and countries and other people. - After the teacher development course: the English teacher should have - improved language skills and more cultural knowledge, - new lesson ideas and methodologies, - contacts with foreign English teachers, - reflected about own class management, - a portfolio with authentic learning materials. All gained knowledge will be shared with the other language teachers by sharing the portfolio on our online platform 'Dokeos' and there will be a meeting at the end of August to discuss this course and its outcomes.