Spain

Colegio Nuestra Señora de Monte-Sión is a school located in Torrent, a city of about 85,000 inhabitants in Valencia city metropolitan area. At our school, there are 78 teachers and 3 psychologists currently working at our school. Located in a conflicting neighborhood with many dysfunctional families and a great social and economic polarization, we have a mix of 1200 Spanish and Valencian speaking students as well as immigrant ones aged 3-18 (students from Ukraina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Equador, Romania, …) There’s also a high presence of gypsy students in our school. Although inmigrant students represent a small percentage, almost a 3% of all the students, this percentage is being constantly increased year by year. Therefore, and also taking into account the charism of our school, characterized by being an open school to all and the reality of immersed multicultural classrooms, one of our school objectives during the next years is to have teachers ready and well prepared for the reception and integration of inmigrant students or refugees in our school, given the current geopolitical situation in our world. In this sense, last year, we applied for a KA101 project about cultural diversity and refugees, which was granted by our National Agency.

To complement these training courses for teachers, participating in this project, we will be able to share and compare our knowledge on receiving inmigrant students with other partner schools and learn altogether about best practices to integrate them in our school. Also, it will offer our students the opportunity to interact and experience life in foreign countries and would help them become global citizens. Most of our students may not have the chance to make these exchanges and, therefore, it will be an excellent opportunity for them to enrich their lives and their understanding of the world around them and making them more tolerant to new inmigrant or refugees students arriving to our school.

Our school is linked to the Amigó Foundation, which contributes to the social and individual transformation of excluded and vulnerable youngs. The Amigó Foundation has projects for refugees and inmigrants inclusion and this year we started a common Learning-Service project with them where students from our school help young inmigrant students with the learning of Spanish language in the afternoon.

At our school, there are 78 teachers and 3 psychologists currently working. Since 2005/06, our plurilingual project enables our students to be taught in four different languages: Spanish, Valencian, English and French. To reinforce it we took part in a multilateral Comenius project in 2013-15 and since then we have participated in several Erasmus+ projects:

-In 2016, we hosted an Erasmus+ KA101 project (job-shadowing) and four Greek teachers visited us to see CLIL lessons and Cooperative Learning methodologies.

-In 2016-18. We were granted an Erasmus+ KA101 project on CLIL, Cooperative learning, Creative Thinking and English.

-In 2018-20, We are coordinators of an Erasmus+ KA229 project on Improving Students Wellbeing at School.

-In 2019-21, We started a new Erasmus+ KA229 project as partners about Tackling Early School Leaving through innovative and out of the box methods.

It is also important to mention that special education students’ needs are a priority for our school. In each Primary and Secondary Education grades, we have groups of 8-14 pupils with special needs who are helped to avoid early school leaving and/or exclusion.