The I.E.S. Villa de Vícar is a public Secondary School (12-18 years old students), created in 2000 and located in Vícar, Almería, Spain. The school has got 64 teachers and 651 students of 19 different nationalities, divided in 23 groups. Over 22% of our students have nationalities other than Spanish.

The School is located in an area of fast economic development. The main economic activity is intensive agriculture. Most of the population around are newcomers who have arrived over the last 40 years from both other areas of Spain and overseas.

Our School is involved in a number of programmes and projects promoted by the regional education authority in Andalusia, some of them listed here: Gender equality; ICT schools; School coexistence; School: space for peace.

Our school has been awarded for this last mentioned programme by the regional education authority for the last five years. The School has also cooperated with the local Town Council in the applica>on for the UNICEF Child Friendly Cities recognition that has been successfully granted in 2014.

The regional education office has included our School in the Bilingual programme (Spanish-English) which is being implemented from 2016-2017 school year. Our School is yearly evaluated by the AGAEVE -the regional evaluation agency in Andalusia- since the School takes part in the "Quality and improvement of results" programme.

A large amount of our teachers are involved in long life training programmes and some of them have experience in tutoring courses for other teachers. Over the last three years different teachers’ groups have been specifically working on key competences implementation.

One of our major concerns is working on motivation and employment guidance. We aim at decreasing our rate of early school leaving (currently about 20%) trying to provide our students with motivations and expectations about their future, broadening the range of possibilities for their employability.