"Growing skills on farms for budding learners with disabilities. European VET provision for learners with SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) is improving, however this Partnership aimed to accelerate it through the use of rural and urban farms. The European Commission for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion have highlighted in a published report that there is a significant political understanding for improved inclusive education and uptake for learners with SEND. This Partnership aimed to show the potential farms have as an educational setting and to increase the uptake, quality and quantity of VET courses on offer across Europe. The sharing, development and transfer of this knowledge has a clear goal. The goal is to provide strengthened social inclusion through improved competences in VET curricula so that SEND learners can be provided with permeable pathways into employment. This objectives of this Partnership were to: - Share knowledge of outreach to promote access for disabled learners onto courses in farms as permeable pathways into the labour market, - Develop inclusive and accessible schemes of work for learners with disabilities, - Provide stimulating, inspirational collaboration to motivate and aid VET teachers’ and staffs’ continuous professional development. The proposed Partnership consisted of three countries: the UK, Italy and Romania. The high quality international dialogue and exchange of best practice took place through focused planning, support and collaboration.Within the UK, the Enso Group is an experienced non-governmental group that supports, coordinates and creates connections between European countries and organisations. They seek to enhance the Erasmus +’ aims of sharing best practice internationally in order to provide better educational opportunities and therefore exceptional career pathways for all. Within Italy Avofid, a farm hosting SEND learners and their families, aimed to be part of this innovative Partnership. Avofid was new to the Erasmus programme and opportunities it offers. Avofid provides support, VET learning and socialisation for those with disabilities. The courses include creative and educational workshops. Additionally there are cultural excursions and free social time for SEND learners. This in turn provides rest-bite for families involved.Simion Mehedinti is a high school in Romania for students with disabilities. Their courses include mechanics, carpentry, tailoring and construction. The staff aims to improve provision for their learners and across Europe and hope to add-value to the project by influencing perspectives on SEND VET courses and employment. The activities proposed provided a synergy between VET education and training. Throughout the Partnership, project partners collaborated through shared virtual platforms. There were two initial meetings to refine plans and activities for the final learning event. The initial meetings took place at Avofid in Italy and Simion Mehedinti in Romania. This provided all participants with an opportunity to observe and discuss VET courses in situ.The main learning and training event was held online due to Covid-19 travel restrictions. Most of activities were prepared remotely before the event to meet the objectives of the Partnership. This included the sharing, collaboration and review of outreach material and schemes of work. During the two-day online event, partners reviewed the prepared materials - Powerpoint and video presentation of a 10-module horticultural course entitled ""Growing skills on farms for budding learners with disabilities"".The project contributed to greater social inclusion of people with disabilities thanks to the cooperation of three partner organizations and the creation of educational materials for themselves and other teachers, carers or organizations dealing with people with disabilities.The fact that there are more and more materials of this type makes us jointly build awareness of the problems of people with disabilities, their access to education and work, and the problems faced by their relatives or carers. Thanks to this, more people can use these materials, get inspired to improve them or create their own, tailored to the needs of a specific group.Enso Group and Simion Mehedinti already had experience with the precise methodology needed to implement this project. Avofid shared their experiences in more practical aspects of horticultural courses and work with people with disabilities. Thanks to the participation in the project, the team had become motivated and energised with better skills set for inclusive teaching and outreach for SEND VET courses which is what we aimed for in relation to the project's objective.The target group of SEND learners had increased opportunities on farms locally and through across Europe. Partners produced a newsletter of the project that is reaching learners and which will be instrumental in encouraging and influencing to further their knowledge in VET and SEND. This helps with more inclusive learning and include better pedagogy for different learning styles and abilities.This Partnership envisages better quality VET curricula available on farms and material available to increase the uptake upon these courses. The longer term results will aim to have more SEND learners on courses on farms and also to have an increase in paid employment. This impact is not only changing the lives of SEND learners and their families but could also contribute on how companies value SEND employees. The way to ensure that this is transnationally available is to disseminate the results of the Partnership on platforms such as EPALE, Enso Academy, Enso 4 Green, partners websites and partners social media pages."

Early school leaving is a problem faced by the European countries in the 21st century with a major impact upon societies from all the European countries that is the reason why the European Commission has as a target the reduction of ESL to less than 10% by 2020 for education and training, following a previous policy from 2003 that aimed the reduction to 10% by 2010. Social exclusion, insufficient awareness of educational disadvantage, learning problems, and poverty and school curricula are some of the factors that lead to abandon education prematurely. So as to support the disadvantaged children from 4 schools from Romania, Turkey, Italy, and Portugal decided to work together. According to The Education and Training Monitor statistics the latest rates of ESL in the partner countries are: RO 19%, POR 15%, IT 14%, TR 35%, The SWOT analysis from all partner schools shows some common problems: the tendency for ESL increased compared to the previous years (, IT 7%, TR 11%, POR 8%, RO12%), lack of students’ motivation .The main needs to be addressed through this partnership are: foster social inclusion, facilitate the access, and improve quality of education. The election of the project topic was chosen from the necessity coming from improving the school’s curricula by finding an optim and innovative way far from the educational stereotypes. Thinking to a sustainable training of pupils, thinking to social exclusion and to the threats of disadvantaged areas, and to the more and poorer skills communication we have chosen to appeal to rebirth of traditions as an educational bound between cultures. These were the ideas which led us to select out project partners: Turkey, Italy and Portugal. Being aware of the importance of united and educated Europe we elected to have the next objectives for our project: -to promote traditions among children -to make children be aware of their own culture and customs -to consolidate by promotion the cultural and unique parameters of each country, social cohesion, active citizenship, intercultural dialogue and fulfillment of children - to be aware of the roots of their own culture and in the same time they will see the similarities between the traditions of each country involved in the project. -to promote language learning and linguistic diversity - to improve education by creativeness -to prevent early school leaving -to make the target group be aware of being European citizens We thought to select 30 disadvantaged children from each country in order to get a improvement in their personal and educational development by learning through traditions and inheritance. The activities of the project are meant to develop their social skills, their interest in learning, their social inclusion teaching them that are more than they are country’s citizen but better they are European citizens. Becoming aware of their roots in workshops, attending courses of folklore and English language, participating to fairs, transnational meetings, training activities, being proud of their traditional handmade products students from the target group and the other added students will have the chance of escaping ESL and be socially integrated. The teachers involved in the project activities will have the opportunity to develop their educational career and to find a new way of lifelong learning. The partners from community, the parents, the stakeholders altogether with the social media channels and mass-media will discover the importance of national and European cultural inheritance as a mean for becoming stronger, active European citizens. The materials and the results of the projects will be available as educational staff, local regional, national and international communities, relevant NGO-s, parents and hopefully decision makers in school policy. We strongly believe that the workshops activities from this project could be a good start for a future job for small entrepreneurs trained in traditional hand made products, especially for disadvantaged areas