FOS ‘Marie Curie’, the secondary school for biotechnology and tourism, is a very innovative school, located in the centre of Meran. We have 40 classes with approx. 700 students and 100 teachers, who offer their knowledge and skills in their lessons. The main subjects are modern languages, business education, geography, IT, mathematics and Natural sciences. All our five-year courses lead to the Italian final exams that qualify our students to go to university.

With the incessant improvement of our teaching staff, we try to optimize our teaching approaches in order to offer our students a modern education to be fit for their future career or higher education. Since we commenced with CLIL back in 2008, we have been working hard to improve our linguistic and pedagogical skills in order to offer up-to-date lessons. These lessons have been highly appreciated not only by our students, but also by their parents. Moreover, we would like to offer our students modern, innovative and technology-based lessons. We are positive that the use of modern technologies will help to individualise our curricula in order to offer our students a personalised learning space and a self-evaluating learning process.

Our school is an inclusive school, which would like to provide the best learning opportunities for all students in preparation for their future job perspectives in a modern, ever-changing and demanding world. To be fluent in different languages and to be able to use digital devices are some of the sought after skills for a modern job.

Being surrounded and influenced by two cultures (Austrian and Italian), we are sure that understanding, knowing and accepting different languages and cultures is an important part of living in a peaceful environment. The knowledge of our two official languages (German/Italian) as well as the knowledge of the other modern language we teach (French, Spanish and Russian), is obviously a key skill for their future.

Entrepreneur skill education is another key subject for our students of the tourism classes as future entrepreneurs.

In order to promote multilingual, communicative, oral and social skills, we are a founding member of the YPAC (Youth Parliament to the Alpine Convention – https://www.ypac.eu/), where students and teachers from all participating schools from the Alpine countries meet annually in another country to discuss issues regarding the environment, infrastructure, tourism, economy and lifestyle of the Alpine regions. The official language of the meetings is English as people come from seven countries all speaking different languages.

Furthermore, we have established a branch of study in our school curricula that deals especially with the EUREGIO (a voluntary cross border association of the three regions of Tyrol/Austria, South Tyrol/Italy and Trentino/Italy) and topics regarding these regions.

Moreover, we have been carrying out different projects like Comenius, Erasmus+ (e.g. STEPS4SCHOOLS – sustainable tourism educational project with partner schools in Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Portugal and Slovenia) and a school twinning project with a school from Serbia.