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PON, INPSIEME, ITACA: Concrete funding opportunities to attract Italian students to your school
After years of uncertainty around the future of PON funds, PON funds are finally released again. Hundreds of Italian secondary schools submitted their PON projects in July 2017 and sent their students abroad for language learning and work experiences over the summer.
If you are looking for ways to diversify your student body, PON, INPSIEME & ITACA will help you attract more Italian students – straight to your school.
This article will help you identify these programmes and understand more about how each one of them works.
PON
PON stands for Programma Operativo Nazionale (National Operative Program). The programme, managed by the Italian Ministry of Education, channels funds from the European Union into Italian public schools to promote initiatives aiming at ensuring high quality in the national education and training system.
Schools can now apply for funding yearly and implement transnational mobility activities by submitting their projects under two main calls:
• Mobility abroad aiming at empowering European Citizenships and Linguistic competences – PON European Citizenship
• Mobility abroad aiming at facilitating school to work transition – PON Alternanza Scuola Lavoro (for work placement experiences abroad).
Beneficiaries can be students aged 16-19 who are enrolled in their 3rd, 4th or 5th year of secondary education. Each school can send abroad a group of 15 students and 2 accompanying teachers.
Since the launch of the new financial framework over 110.000.000 euro have been allocated to schools.
INPSIEME
INPSIEME is a well known programme funded by INPS, giving every year the opportunity to hundreds of secondary school students to gain a language learning experience abroad during summer. In 2018 some major innovations have been introduced to the programme as INPS published two different calls. Eligible students are those enrolled in a secondary school and aged up to 23 years.
In 2018 some major innovations have been introduced to the programme as INPS published two different calls:
• ESTATE Inpsieme 2018 – which corresponds for its content to the old calls published so far by INPS.
• Corso di Lingua all’estero 2018 (Language Course Abroad 2018)
In 2018 INPS assigned 23.430 scholarships for ESTATE Inpsieme to eligible Italian students with a total budget of almost 50 million euro and 1.070 scholarships within the Language Course Abroad call with a total budget of over 4 Million euro.
ITACA
Within the ITACA programme, eligible students can spend 3 months, 6 months or a full academic year in a similar level school in Europe or even overseas. Beneficiaries are students enrolled in their 2nd or 3rd year in high school. The call for next academic year has just been published.
The call for next academic year has just been published. Students can apply by November 2018 and seize the opportunity to leave for their learning experience abroad during the next academic year 2019/2020.
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