Erasmus Policy Statement (Overall Strategy)

As suggested in the Erasmus application, we publish our overall Strategy as described in our proposal of May 2013.

1st Part: international strategy

Our High School wants to offer our students the possibility to have an international experience both as a host institution coordinating work placements in local companies and as a sending institution.
Both are important: receiving international students would be a way to expose all our ICT students and staff to foreign people. Offering a room in a student's or teacher's place can be a win-win option for both of them. We can say the same for the mentorship program. Our mobility coordinator has traineeship and working experience in most European countries and can help all of them to organise the exchanges.

- Partners: We choose partners with ICT experience and if possible countries where students can improve their English. Being able to work in this language is a must for our students. English should be the country's first or second language (as in Holland for example).

- Geographical area: It is not important. All areas following the previous requirements can be interesting. We are happy to receive students from any country as well. No restrictions.

- Our main target is students and their mobilities. When possible we can also participate in staff programs. Our main objective is giving our students the possibility to be prepared to work abroad when graduated. Being able to participate in international projects from our island is also interesting to help our local economy. As they study ICT and the main language in the web is English, e-commerce allow us to sell products and services in a global world. Physical products have geographical barriers from our island but they don't exist in the Internet.

At the moment our institution, offering only a short cycle, does not participates in the development of double/multiple/joint degrees.

2nd Part: strategy for the organisation and implementation of international cooperation projects in teaching and training in relation to projects implemented under the
Programme.

Not applicable at the moment


3rd Part: expected impact of your participation in the Programme on the modernisation of your
institution (for each of the 5 priorities of the Modernisation Agenda) in terms of the policy objectives you intend to achieve. 


We will divide the answer into 5 parts according to the 5 priorities of the Modernisation Agenda:
1) Our institution is located in the island of Menorca. Most of our young students have never been abroad. Receiving Erasmus students and also sending our young people abroad is a good way to open their minds and encourage them to continue travelling, learning and studying. At the moment it is easy for students to pass from the vocational studies we provide to the university degrees in ICT. And a significant percentage of our students go to Universities in the mainland of Spain, mostly Barcelona, Palma and Madrid. We can also expect that some of these students return to our island and help
improving their future employers work or even become entrepreneurs.

2) Only having a short cycle and our students being able to pass easily to the universities, one of our goals is to teach our students how to learn and how to keep their knowledge updated in an always changing ICT field as it is the web applications. Like this the idea of going to the universities is a wish for most students. There is a way to recognize at the University some of the subjects done during the vocational studies. This encourages the students to continue their studies.

3) Being a small High School offering a short Cycle in ICT we cannot help much in the cross-border co-operation, at least not as much as a University. Most of the decisions about these fields, hiring staff for example, are taken at the local government in Palma. The only think is to make our students aware of the international co-operation opportunities. Being an important tourist destination also helps to expose our staff and students to international relations. Having read the document we are happy to see that the proportion of students expending a traineeship abroad will raise to 20 %. This possibility will improve the quality of our studies.

4) At our High School we do not do any research at all but we can help our students to get into business. At their final module they do a project focussed in opening a company with the knowledge they get studying ICT. Besides, a lot of teachers have experience as entrepreneurs and try to transmit their knowledge to the students. At the moment, in our island some embryonic projects are being prepared related to increase the ICT industry in our island. As a ICT department we try to be involved in some of them. Maybe some spin-offs will appear in the future. As it is said in the document, “exploit the transformational benefits of ICT and other new technologies”, we try to produce knowledge workers.

5) As a small High School, we depend on the local government in Palma for funding, human resources management, etc. We cannot decide much about where to invest. The only think we could do is to cooperate more with private companies to get support. We already cooperate with institutions that receive our students to do traineeships and they come to our school to explain their work.