The UN and UNESCO define education as a vital tool in developing ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) to a global phenomenon. In Europe this has been taken into account in curriculums widely but too often ESD is considered as an ‘add on’. Instead it should be a natural and essential part of school culture in order to educate students towards a sustainable way of life. There were four schools taking part in the ECORoad project, from Finland, Great Britain, Iceland and Belgium. Each of the selected partner schools have been committed to ESD for many years and they were well known for this work within their local communities. Each school also had a local specialist partner for supporting the schools' work to implement ESD. The ultimate target for ECORoad was to change pupils’, families’ and the whole community’s way of life to a more sustainable one. During the project we focused to improve each participating school’s culture to enable and support teachers work and school’s daily life within ESD. Through local and international trainings teachers learned new skills and developed their practices in designing and delivering ESD for their pupils. In addition to the local goals, the project wanted to influence the wider audience by producing a booklet, “Roadmap to an ESD school”. There were five project meetings, four of which focused on a specific area of school culture. Based on theories we divided school culture into four parts 1) Professional orientation, 2) Organizational structure (leadership and management), 3) Teaching and learning and 4) Student-centered focus. Before each project meeting there was self evaluation for the staff about the current practice in the specific area of school culture. During the meetings schools shared the results of their self-evaluations- their strengths and areas for development- and, in consultation with their partner schools and specialist partners, drew up an action plan with three targets for development. These targets were then implemented at school and the outcomes shared at the following project meeting. This kind of working methodology was good and it structured the development tasks into smaller parts. Between project meetings ECORoad also organized four teachers’ trainings into different aspects of ESD. Those themes were 1) Health and wellbeing of our establishment, 2) Outdoor education, 3) Living to learn or learning to live and 4) School's ecological daily life. Each participating school organized one training together with their specialist organization. Training programs included workshops of different methodology of ESD, job shadowing, visiting different schools and nature activities. After each teachers' training week there was an organized survey for participants and the feedback was very positive. Teacher trainings were useful for the whole project, because after the training sessions more participants felt ownership for the ECORoad project. We produced and published a booklet, ‘A Roadmap to an ESD School’ to encourage and support other schools to embrace ESD. The booklet is a comprehensive guide on how to develop a school culture which supports ESD based on our own journey. The booklet is universal and contains practical instructions and questionnaires. It was printed for the dissemination events, but it is freely downloadable from the ECORoad project’s homepage at https://ecoroad.weebly.com/. The ECORoad project had objectives for four different target groups: pupils, teachers, project schools and other schools nearby and far. Based on surveys and self-evaluations implemented in the project, it can be seen that ECORoad has influenced the school culture for implementing sustainable development. The surveys made at the beginning and at the end of the project showed that the awareness of sustainable development among staff in project schools had increased and that pupils got more school experiences related to the theme of sustainable development. Examples how we improved our school culture and practical examples of activities made by pupils can be seen in the booklet “Roadmap to an ESD School”. During and now at the end of project each participant has developed their own dissemination plan e.g. consultations, presentations, articles. The main message in dissemination events has been 1) education has important role for promoting sustainable development, 2) the school culture affects how sustainable development is implemented in teaching and school’s daily life and 3) “Roadmap to an ESD school” shows some of our steps to be taken toward ESD school. There are still many possibilities to improve ESD in project schools, but it can be said that these schools are now ESD centres of excellence in their own area. ESD is now more integrated into the school culture and the project has ensured that ESD is not a passing project in these participating schools but now embedded in their core values.

All the schools involved in this project have the environment at heart. We promote a healthy lifestyle, inclusion and lifelong learning in our endeavour to provide a holistic education to our pupils who come from multicultural backgrounds (including immigrants).The main objectives of the partnership for permaculture in schools are the following ones:• To develop Care of the Earth, environment and People• To develop the key competences, such as ITC skills and linguistic competences• To encourage students to cooperate with European partners since early ages• To promote a European dimension amongst all participants, develop internationalization and be open-minded.• To improve students’ and teachers’ communication, group working skills, the use of English language.• To compare methods of teaching and learning, values of education, school organization and curriculum in order to look for innovative ways of teaching and learning and introduce pedagogical innovations.• To find a creative approach to special needs / physically impaired students and people in general.This project will show that Permaculture is much more than environmental awareness or a gardening technique. It’s an ethical design science that assimilates land, resources, people, and nature in ways that supply human needs as well as benefit the environment.The role of a European school today is to encourage internationalisation. We need to think of a common Europe, be proud of our own culture but at the same time respect the other ones. This is an interdisciplinary project using the subject of permaculture garden in schools to awaken the knowledge on other countries in Europe. It shares knowledge but not in a stereotypical way, it explains and encourages celebration of the unique identity of partner countries but crucially asks children to evaluate these from another's perspective. By working on this project, as well as improving their knowledge on the environment, pupils will improve their skills in geography, history, the arts, foreign languages and knowledge of other cultures.

The motivation behind the project is the assumption that creative imagination is a powerful tool in the process of learning and emotional-behavioral development, an assumption grounded in scholarship that empazises the importance of play in child development and learning. The project meets a growing interest in Europe on creativity and entrepreneurial learning from early age and is hence in accordance with EU´s education policy where one of its four priority areas is on enhancing creativity and entrepreneurial learning from an early age (EU´s Education and Training 2020). The aim of the project is to implement and illustrate in multiple ways how sandplay and storytelling can be of benefit in educational setting both as a tool to initiate creative thinking and expression for pupils of different ages and abilities in their regular schoolwork and as a therapeutic method for pupils with disabilities such as poor learning skills or attention and/or emotional problems. There are certain indications that by incorporating sandplay and storytelling as a part of the curriculum for all pupils could affect overall academic and social performance and thereby increase the equality of all children in the school system. The participants are sandplaytherapists, teachers,special need teachers, psychologists and headmasters from three schools in Iceland, Ireland and Romania along with managers from two Centers in Iceland and Romania.Undertaken main activities and results: 1. An implementation of sandplay and storytelling as a tool to initiate imaginative thinking and creative expression among special needs and mainstream pupils in their regular school work. Results of the use of sandplay and storytelling in special needs and main stream education were very successful according to teachers that applied this method in all three countries. Sandtray play sessions were beneficial to pupils with social and emotional difficulties as well as learning difficulties and all teachers intend to continue using this method. Sandplay and storytelling helps pupils to escape into an interior world for a period, become relatively stress-free and release their innate creativity. All of this has a positive influence on their emotional stability and aids progress in literacy when they tell/draw/write about their creation. Another benefit arising from the session is that such children return to the classroom much calmer and refreshed. They are then much more likely to engage with the work of the classroom for the remainder of the school day. Sandplay and imaginative storytelling as a therapeutic method for students who have disabilities such as poor learning skills or attention and/or emotional problems was administrated in each participating country. 4 pupils came to 12 sessions each year. Implementation in all 3 countries was run by 3 sandplay therapists and as a part of a comparative research project. 2. A testing of sandplay and storytelling as a therapeutic method. A research project that involves a comparative study, implemented in the three European countries, on the effect of a regular use of sandplay and imaginative storytelling on learning and emotional-behavioral development of pupils with poor self-image, learning difficulties and/or emotional problems. The project took to 8 pupils from each country. The research study builds on and develops further a 4 years study in the years 2005-09 in Artunsskoli.Before and after the participation in the project, with 13 months interval, a battery of standardized tests and scales, among others the intelligent scale WISC, was administered in collaboration with a psychologist. Qualitative results were attained by case consultation with dr. B. Turner that was arranged with regular Skype meetings.The case analyses clearly show that the children addressed their inner conflicts or deficits and that they were able to progress through many of their intrapsychic challenges toward a more integrated in-tact mental functioning. According to B. Turner it is difficult to deciper the relationships between the apparent successes or struggles in the children´s Sandtray Plan and story work and their WISC scores. Some children do successful work in sand and story and their scores that both increase and decrease, as well. Successful work in the sand is a series of trays that shows an engagement with a conflict and its improvement or resolution, and or the child´s ability to construct progressively more organized with higher degrees of relationship between the figures, the earth and water. The use of water indicates an ability and willingness to probe more deeply into oneself. Story development is seen in progressively more complex and imaginative stories, showing explanations for why things are how the are, dialect, description, and so on.