3. Training Program

The Hands training program will be held both in distance mode (in English, involving the whole group of attending professionals) and in face-to-face mode (different sessions involving participants from the specific country). Besides the evident usefulness in terms of training strategy, this will represent a way to adopt true and effective green practices: school professionals in training, indeed, will personally meet project staff based in their own country, then rationalizing both financial effort for the project and avoiding environmentally non-compliant flight travels. Project staff experts will be the subjects that will plan, organize the training, and will teach during it. The training program will last at least 15 hours, divided in five sessions of 3 hours each (this to respect availability and efforts of the attending schoolteachers and other school operators: online sessions lasting more than three hours are very unpleasant to be followed, and useless under a didactic point of view). Itis expected that at least 2 of these sessions will be held in face-to-face mode. The training program will regard 30 among teachers and other school Personnel. It will exploit the results of Activity 1 and Activity 2:

• the HandS transnational desk research;
• the HandS e-training toolkit;

and will mainly cover the same topics of the e-training toolkit (see Activity 2: Describe the content of the proposed activity).
During and at the end of the training, specific assessment activities will take place in order to assess all relevant aspects of the initiative (through the use of questionnaires, making on-site interviews, etc.).

HOW THE TRAINING PROGRAM IS GOING TO HELP TO REACH THE PROJECT OBJECTIVES?

The implementation of the HandS training program is the basis for a true and significant reaching of the project objectives on different levels:

• on the level of the first group of 30 trained teachers and school operators, that can address their acquired new competences on suicide risk prevention in secondary schools to: 1) students (and their families); 2) their colleagues and other professionals in the field of school education;
• on the level of other school staff that can benefit from the new care approach adopted by the school institution with related management and educational measures.
  It is clear that this project strategy (training schoolteachers and other school operators, and then diffusing these new approaches on the project topic until the level of school management) serves as multiplier factor of project usefulness and efficiency both under these two aspects:
• the production of training tools (the transnational desk research and the e-training toolkit) that can be used by other schoolteachers and actors in the circle of school education at least for five years and in a free-to-use way after the end of the project;
• the opportunity, for the trained teachers and school operators, to continue adopting the acquired training and new competencies during their school career – also as trainers of other schoolteachers – for many years after their HandS experience.