The UPPscale Erasmus+ project aims to create an innovative, non-hierarchical space for sustainable, collaborative transnational working that responds to the needs and interests of educators in early years settings, schools and universities. The project will be undertaken by five national partnerships of an HEI and a school/early years setting from Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, England and Spain, with a four-phase methodology.
1. University of Plymoutjh will lead on the state of the art overview of sustainable HEI-school setting partnerships, building on their earlier work on national partnerships and sustainable leadership.
2. VIA has internationally-recognised expertise in ICT and will lead on setting up and maintaining the infrastructure for internal and external communication.
3. Denmark’s national policy of ‘open school’ means that schools tend to be closely linked to their local communities. Drawing on this experience, Fortunaskolen will lead on developing case studies of community collaboration in supporting and developing educator careers across the five countries.
4. Ermington School will lead the development of teacher career trajectory case studies. Their long-standing interest in working closely with UoP is the foundation for examining ways in which teacher recruitment, retention and promotion are facilitated / mediated by HEI/school/setting collaboration in each of the participating nations.
5. Univerzita Karlova will lead the development of parallel student teacher career trajectory case studies because of their knowledge afforded by the breadth and depth of their pre- service training.
HEIs will support analysis of data emerging from case studies led by school project partners in their countries.
7. USC will lead the implementation of the professional development activities. Their experience in ICT will support project partners in sharing developments, challenges, successes and findings via blogging and reports.
8. O Cruce will coordinate the outputs into an online compendium of the professional development activities created by transnational partnerships.
9. Vrije Basisschool Buitenschool de Bergop’s interest in sustainable professional development means that they will lead the production of webinars that disseminate project learning on transnational collaborative working. These will introduce different models of collaborative working to early years settings, schools and HEIs interested in sustaining collaborative working relationships, and be disseminated via the project external website.
10. FMŠ Sluníčko pod střechou will lead the collation of project learning on educator career development and professional development. Ebooks will describe project findings in a readable format that will be disseminated via the project website
