In the last few years transnational interest in questions of school improvement has increased. Professionals involved in everyday school affairs – principals and teachers – now have the opportunity to participate in the EU exchange and education development programmes. Many of the programmes have seemed highly successful, however, it is unclear whether these programmes have had significant effect on the actual everyday education because often they have not been designed based on latest findings nor thoroughly evaluated for effectiveness.

For this reason, the Zurich University of Teacher Education, the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and the Department of Education of the Principality of Liechtenstein have designed a Certificate of Advanced Studies programme. It offers a unique collaboration of Dutch, Swiss and Liechtenstein teachers and educational specialists.

In designing the qualification programme, we considered principles of effective further training (Lipowsky 2010) and chose a specific topic: understanding correlations between challenges in society and education with an international dimension, and creating solutions to these challenges locally.

The programme combines content, setting (exchange between participants), practice transfer, and expert feedback in a format most beneficial to providing participants with a deeper understanding of school systems and school change. Besides understanding the school system, participants will be able to recognize specific needs for school improvement in their own school. Gaining the know how to successfully introduce and manage a transfer process (Jäger, 2004) is also part of the CAS-Programme. Finally, another innovation of this programme is a careful evaluation component.

The programme includes several elements:

• School visits in partner countries serve the point of entry into the content of the programme. This insight offers a platform to study in-depth chosen themes of the current trends in educational developments.
• The programme allows for time to grapple intensively with central questions regarding educational developments as discussed in the joint modules. Participants examine their perceptions from everyday educational life with respect to international interrelations and generate solutions to the challenges of education in the work place.
• Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on their own everyday work in-depth, to search possibilities for local responses to educational challenges, and to pursue an individual idea through a small project in one’s own school or educational institution.
• Carefully chosen theoretical inputs by experts help analyse everyday practice and open up insights into the international dimension of educational developments (vgl. Brückel & Schildknecht, 2011).

The whole programme will be attended and evaluated by researchers of both Universities (Zurich and Amsterdam). The aim of the evaluation is to gain information about «successful transfer» (Lipowsky, 2010). For that, the evaluation examines two main questions:

1. Does the programme meet the aims? Do the participants find the combination of content, setting (exchange between participants), practice transfer, and expert feedback helpful?
2. Do the participants succeed in implementing a small-sized change projects?

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