Institut Guillem Catà, Spain

We are a public secondary school in Manresa, near Barcelona. We are in a neighbourhood with a high degree of cultural diversity and many of our students come from disadvantaged social backgrounds. In fact, our school is considered to have a high diversity rate by the local administration due to the important percentage of immigrant students (around 40% in Compulsory Secondary Education). On offer, there is compulsory secondary education (12-16 years old) as well as post compulsory education (16+), and we also have vocational training courses in health services, personal image, carpentry, trade and commerce and community services. We have a total of 950 students and 100 staff members. Our most important objective, among others, is to prepare our students for a highly demanding society within the framework of European values of democracy, solidarity and equality. Regarding the quality system in the school, we've had an ISO9001 certification since 2012. The school’s SWOT analysis shows, among our weaknesses, the students' poor performance in collaboration and co-operation skills, communication, critical thinking. Also, we have an important number of students with lack of motivation issues who are dropping out of school at an early age. These are the reasons why our School’s Policy has placed a special emphasis on tackling these problems by designing a plan of annual objectives with contents and activities aimed to: - offer an integral education and training in terms of quality, participation, innovation and continuous improvement. - promote methodological changes in a student-centred approach - strengthen our students’ skills by using active teaching methodologies and promoting the use of ICT - enhance entrepreneurship - reduce our drop out rates (early school leaving).

This project would give us the chance to continue implementing these strategies as well as creating new ones to consolidate our objectives. We have an experienced team in Erasmus+ projects that consists of 8 people, and 3 of them are experienced Erasmus + coordinators. So far, we have already been involved in 6 successful projects. Besides, the School Management fully supports the Erasmus team and some of its members are actively involved in the ongoing projects, both in design and implementation. We also have a group of very creative and talented teachers who are willing to join the project team. Therefore, in case of someone unexpectedly leaves his post, we have more than enough experienced teachers to take over. Our expertise relevant to this project capitalizes on the past experiences mentioned above. Among others, we should highlight the following assets: - Implementing project-based methodology and entrepreneurship on the curriculum some years ago (large interdisciplinary projects where four or five teachers are involved and where the students have to work in groups). - Our area has a very rich cultural heritage - Barcelona.