Nousiaisten lukio is an upper secondary school with about 200 students aged between 15 and 19 and 12 teachers. Our school offers a curriculum of general education which lasts three years and leads to a national exam called matriculation examination. After taking the matriculation examamination the students are able to apply to universities and polytechnics. Our school offers a very extensive curriculum of both sciences and humanities, including English, Spanish, German, French and Russian as foreign languages.

Our school is situated in the village of Nousiainen which has about 5000 inhabitants. Nousiainen is situated about 20 kms from the university town of Turku (200 000 inhabitants) and about 200 kms from Helsinki, the capital of Finland.

Most of our 200 students come from Nousiainen and Masku, which is the neighbouring village. Almost all our students are Finnish and they speak Finnish as their native language, with the exception of a few students who have one parent from a foreign country and who might speak another language at home. There are no refugees or students from Roman families. Most of our students come from middle class families.At the moment there are no students with special needs.

Our school is a national school and it follows the national curriculum.

Our students generally do well at school and after leaving school they are able to find a place of further study either at a university or a polytechnic. They are generally interested in school and among our students there are some top achievers as well. Our goal is to make sure that all our students finish the school with good grades. We do this by offering excellent lessons which benefit the students and by demanding work outside the lessons as well (homework). We also offer visits to other institutions, for example the university of Turku or the nuclear power plant of Olkiluoto.

Our school has participated in one Comenius project in 2012-2014 as well as various science projects which have taken our physics students to Cern in Switzerland and astronomy students to La Palma in the Canary Islands. We have also hosted three assistant teachers from Germany at three different times. They stayed between 3 to 8 months at our school.

At the moment we are concentrating on using ICT as a teaching and evaluation tool, especially  because the national exams are becoming completely computerized. We have Google Apps for Education as our main teaching platform but teachers use other computer platforms as well.

As stated earlier, our school has hosted three German assistant teachers in three different occasions. The idea was to offer a chance to a young teacher from another European country to get to know the Finnish education system, as well as give our students a chance to have lessons in different subjects in English (CLIL education). Also, this gave our students a chance to interact in English with someone from another European country. Since the school doesn’t have students from other countries, we consider this very important in order to increase our students’ international awareness. Our main goal in participating in this Erasmus programme is the same: we would like to offer a chance to teachers from other countries to get to know the Finnish school system and exchange ideas with them. At the same time, we would like our students to see and hear from foreign teachers and hopefully we will benefit by having the visiting teachers tell about their own country and perhaps offer some short teaching periods during the lessons of different subjects.

Our priority is to make sure our students are able to perform accoring to their best abilities in the national exams and that they are able to get a place of further study in a good institution.

Generally both our students and our staff are very happy to teach and study at our school. Since the school is rather small, all teachers and students know each other and the atmosphere is very relaxed and easy-going. Despite this, the lessons are demanding and our students compare well in the national exams.

There are no major changes coming in the school year 2017-2018.

The key person in charge for this project will be our language teacher Ms. Laura Kinnunen who has worked for us for 9 years and who is very experienced in international exchange programs. She was responsible for our foreign assistant teachers as well as our Comenius project. Other teachers will assist her if needed and she can count on the full support of our school director, Ms. Anett Blom.