Heroes and Cultural Identity Project

How to set up your own Comenius Project

1. Check out the formal side of how to apply for a project and how it works on your national website. Download the application forms and make a careful note of the dates for submission, etc.

2. Decide whether or not you want to coordinate a project.

ADVANTAGES	DISADVANTAGES
You can decide who are the partners	You have to find enough partners
You can control dates of meetings	Lots of work and responsibility
You can set locations of meetings	Lots of form filling
You can shape the initial project idea	You need to coordinate all partners and see they get on
You can chair and run meetings	You need to organise agendas, chairing and so on

3. Whether or not you choose to coordinate a project, think about how it will work with your own school. Which students and which classes will be involved? Which staff members will work with you on the project? What will be the balance of staff and students in terms of the project meetings. (We got into difficulty with this at Stevenson because after the project had been started they changed the funding arrangements, and so we have had a large staff group travelling and few possibilities of bringing students along). So think about how much money will be available for the project and how far it can stretch in your school.

4. If you want to coordinate a project or participate in someone else's then you can look for potential partners on the following sites:

http://partbase.programkontoret.se/
http://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm

If you do not want to coordinate stop here.

If you want to coordinate a project read on:

5. You will need to find a good idea around which it can be built. In my experience it is important to take account of the following factors:

The idea should be quite broad and capable of expansion, for two reasons: a) each country has a different way of working, different kinds of syllabuses and curriculums. If you choose something that is very precise and very narrow you may not find others who are able to work with you, and a minimum of four schools are needed for a project to run; b) an idea which cannot develop in new directions may run out of steam early on. The idea needs to be flexible so that at the meetings of the project you can take it forward in new ways and maintain interest.

The idea should fit the criteria set by the EU. The EU funds projects in order to forward its aims, such as intercultural exchange, social inclusion, promoting European cooperation and so on. Each year the EU announces its priorities in terms of next year's applications. You should check to see what these priorities are and ensure that your application is framed in such a way as to fit into as many of these as possible. For example, when we were considering the Heroes Project there was a stress on involving the new member states, and so we made sure that we looked for partners in that area.

6. Get in touch with your national agency and have an informal discussion with them about your idea. They can let you know if you are on the right track.

7. Get to work very early. It takes a long time to get a project organised, especially if you are coordinating it. Application forms need to be submitted in February/March and you will need to collect lots of information from the potential participants. So you need to know who they are quite early. It is best to start looking for partners in the spring and summer of the year before.

8. Make sure that you have several potential partners. Not everyone who applies for a project will get national agency approval and since there is a minimum of four countries for it to run you need to have more than that applying. The first time we applied for the Heroes Project we started with 6 applicants. Only later on did we discover that several of the applicants had applied for other projects at the same time and so were not going to get approval. In the end the project did not run. So the second time we had 9 applicants. 6 were successful and so the project could run.

9. Do the paperwork early. It takes a lot of time to collect the necessary information for the application form. You need all the partners' details. They need time to translate the project aims and pull their team together.

10. Consider a preparatory meeting. It is a good idea to have a preparatory meeting before you submit your application form. What might seem like the perfect idea in your country, may be seen differently by others. Your application form will be better if you can sort out as much as possible of the project in advance. A preparatory meeting needs to be applied for a least 6 weeks before the date of the meeting itself. It is usually the case that only one person can come from each institution and there need to be at least 3 participants. (For the Heroes Project we had a preparatory meeting in Turkey, with Scotland and Norway also attending).

I hope that these suggestions are helpful. If you are thinking of a project there are many people in the Heroes Project who have a great deal of experience (and a lot more than me), so ask them. In addition, I have only discussed Comenius. There are, of course, many other types of programme such as Leonardo on offer.