ENACplus goes on: European mobility to take over the real world again 

It’s been a long and difficult year and still we don’t see the end, but at the end of this tunnel we have chosen to see at least the light. That’s why we resumed, albeit with many doubts and uncertainties, but certainly with a lot of hope too, to reschedule the Erasmus mobilities. 

After months spent first managing the emergency and then, with resignation, cancelling what was planned the previous months, we took over the international projects one step at a time until, tired of the virtual world, we decided to try to recover the real one. 

We therefore spent the autumn contacting our European partners, to understand how they were organising themselves, how they intended to react to what was becoming the new normality, with restrictions and various precautions. We collected opinions, stories, experiences, together with documents and protocols. At the end of the second wave, we arrived at a crossroads: do nothing for another year or risk it and plan the flows for the following summer. To contain the risk, we opted for small groups leaving at least at the end of June, thus avoiding curricular internships during the school year. In addition, in order not to waste our efforts, we opted for a blended formula, that is, some weeks of online preparation during the spring followed by weeks of physical mobility during the summer. Our centres welcomed the proposal and so we started making concrete what until then had only been hypotheses. 

The ENACplus project, which was initially due to end on March 31, was therefore extended in order to be able to use funds already allocated by the National Agency INAPP and then we started confirming the groups. 

To date, 9 vocational training centres and Canossian high schools have confirmed their interest: about 50 students will participate in the weeks of online preparation with European partners from April 12th, while, starting from June 25th, the groups will go abroad to do the three weeks of internship in companies. Four groups will go to Spain between July and September, 2 have chosen instead Malta in June/July, also to improve the use of the English language, while 2 other groups, one of which shared between two high schools, will go to Ireland, one in July and one in September. 

Last but not least, we would like to highlight the participation of a tenth centre that chose another option, that of 100% virtual. A mobility that we will experiment for students for the first time and that we are building by talking to different partners in Europe. Among them, we will select the one that best suits our objectives, which may be a foreign school with which to share our goals, or a successful company in the sector that will commission remote work from our students.