SPINE is an innovation project with the major aim to enable young professionals within equine sector to enter the international labour market.

Looking into the national vocational education and training systems in equestrian schools it is viewable that the education is mostly focused on the demands of the national market. With increased global opportunities for equestrian professionals there is a need to establish an educational system to provide the required knowledge, skills and competences for an international career.

The target group should be all professionals, educated within national equestrian schools wishing to enable themselves an opportunity to create an more international professional profile.

The project seeks to develop language skills and knowledge primarily in English together with an understanding of how the equestrian industry works in different countries regarding national traditions and cultures in horse sector. This will be included in creating a curriculum for an extra qualification (EQ) with high international standard regarding knowledge, skills and competences fitting to the equestrian labourmarket.

The European project parners are working close toghether in the vocational and educational training field. All of them do have a profound overview of the existing educational products. The needs analysis is based on the experience of these partners. Especially for the equestrian sector there is no education avaliable which prepare young professionals enough for the European labour market.

The added value to do the project with these established project partners is to guarantee the transnational spreading of the knowledge, skills and competences within the Extra Qualifications (EQ) on the same high level all over Europe.

Most equestrian educations are only fitted to the national labour market and needs. Therefore the students are not prepared enough to work in an other country than their own. Student feedback in previous projects also strongly points out the need to be trained in different work environments regarding historical, social and cultural circumstances in the equestrian professional sector in different European countries.

The innovative part of SPINE is to create an international qualification which prepares young professionals for the European labour market. This project of education is meant to be shared between different schools in Europe. The involved schools are the main important stakeholders for the equestrian vocational education in their countries. The schools are going to develop an Extra Qualification (EQ) with a unique curricula. It will contain the needed learning pathway, containing training and teaching subjects relevant for the international equestrian market. It also emphasizes that the students going through this qualification have to collect experiences in different schools and different countries and practice their professional skills and competences in various social and cultural environment.

Expected result is to create an Extra Qualification (EQ) used to complement a national VET education.

Three Transnational Project meetings was carried out in Flyinge (SWE) October 2017, Barneveld (NED) March 2018 and Golegã (POR) May 2018. The work done in these three meetings has resulted in modules that was tested and evaluated 2018-2019 in three different learning/teaching /tranining activities held in Germany, France and Norway. These activities did also bring together students from all Partner schools.

Read more about the project.

Project leader
Flyinge AB, Sweden
AnnCatrin Carlsson anncatrin.carlsson@flyinge.se

Projectpartners
Deutsche Reiterliche Vereinigung e.V. (FN), Germany
Markus Scharmann MScharmann@fn-dokr.de

Ypäjä Equine College, Finland
Päivi Laine paivi.laine@hevosopisto.fi

Ridskolan Strömsholm, Sweden
Becky Evensen becky.evensen@stromsholm.com

Atheneum Martinus Bilzen, Belgium
Muriel Coppin murielcoppin@gmail.com

Aeres Group, Netherlands
Monique van den Hoeven m.vdhoeven@aeres.nl

IFCE, France
Eric Deyna eric.deyna@ifce.fr

Stiftelsen Norsk Hestesenter, Norway
Contact: Evija E. Lie evija.lie@nhest.no

Escola Nacional de Equitacão
Maria Margarida Carmo Costa mktplaneamento@gmail.com

Erasmus