The project titled “The future is at STAKE: Supporting The Acquisition of Knowledge for an Enjoyable and conscious way of learning” has achieved its main goals successfully. The teachers of Károlyi Mihály Bilingual Vocational Grammar School of Economics were enriched by new methods, competences and attitudes that can aid the creation of a learning environment that supports the learning process more effectively and enjoyably. This way we can nurture the personality and competences of our students in order to better cope with the expectations of the future job market. In the framework of the project the participants engaged in mobility activities that provided competence development and experience that could probably not be acquired in a Hungarian training context. The project comprised methodology courses in addition to job shadowing and professional exchange of experience in partner schools in different European countries. We have formulated a development plan based on the local pedagogic programme, the internationalisation strategy of our school and our headmaster’s management tender. This plan includes all those fields and competences that we intend to develop in order to tackle the challenges of education and learning in the 21st century. For the sake of effectiveness we assigned mobility activities to the individual fields so that the participants were able to become experts of a given method or area of development.

During the three-year project period the participants of 10 mobilities could get acquainted with innovative methods such as the development of teachers’ and students’ personality and creativity, the more effective utilisation of ICT tools, the methods of teaching Science in an interdisciplinary way, a more efficient way of exploiting the potentials of knowledge acquired informally, the CLIL approach, preventing early school dropout, team building, form teacher skills, handling stress or fostering active citizenship. We have managed to forge partnerships with several European secondary schools, and and we were able to visit two of them in the framework of this project. The aims of the job shadowing visits were to to get closer to their national education system and learn the methods they applied with success. In the course of executing the mutually agreed work plans in the host institutions, the participants were able to observe the methods of motivating students, the advantages of the project method, the practice-oriented approach to teaching Sciences or the enjoyable and motivating practice of robot programming.

Beyond the professional background of the participants, the primary requirement for joining the project team was an active participation in the elaboration of the goals of the project and a dedication to the objectives. During the elaboration process the participants proved that they would contribute to reaching the project’s goals in an enthusiastic and professional way. Based on their professional fields all the participants selected several development areas, and we sought mobilities that match the given area and can secure the development of the relevant competences. In order to achieve the complex development of our institution, we planned a relatively high number of mobilities. All mobilities concentrated on separate, well-defined areas. The project team consisted of the 10 mobility participants, the colleagues who were in charge of the preparation phase, the project management and the teachers who supported the dissemination and evaluation phase, adding up to 26 members.

Due to the pandemic situation we were able to realise 10 mobilities securely out of the planned 13, the last three job shadowing visits were cancelled because of the school lockdowns. Our colleagues have gone through a wide array of competence development during their mobilities and returned with quite a number of methods, good practices that can be applied well in our daily practice, in addition to a renewed, proactive attitude. They have all strengthened their professional commitment and the international experience helped in reinterpreting the Hungarian educational practice. The competence development thus acquired greatly overlapped with the previously expected learning outcomes.

The effectiveness of the new methods and their level of integration into the practice of the institution were intensively evaluated by all stakeholders utilising surveys and oral feedback. The objective of the evaluation was to find out how effective and enjoyable the methods can be.

We can state that our school has become an even more supportive environment for learning as a result of the widespread utilisation of the acquired good practices, and as a consequence, our students can enter higher education or the job market with up-to-date, well-convertible knowledge and skills. As a result of the project the effectiveness and attractiveness of our school increased and thus we can secure our long term successful operation.