Manresa, Spain
Institut Guillem Catà 

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. 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 over 1,000 students and more than 100 staff members. In the past few years, our school has been moving towards a Project Based Learning approach to enhance our students’ competence and placing attention on communication and digital skills. 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 cooperation skills, communication, critical thinking and digital skills. 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 4-year 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 – reduce our dropout rates (early school leaving) Besides, with the implications on teaching of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have upgraded our School Policy with the addition of a new specific objective: – Strengthen our staff digital readiness and to enhance online teaching. 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 4 of them are experienced Erasmus+ coordinators. So far, we have already been involved in 8 successful projects and 3 more projects have been approved in the last Call. 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 IT and Maths teachers who are willing to join the project team.