Vea is the coordinator in the Craft Skills for Garden Conservation-project and responsible for the Soil Mangement-topic. Vea is a Norwegian vocational education college specialising in green design and environmental subjects. The school started in 1923 and is owned by the Norwegian government. Vea offers part time higher vocational education (EQF5) with about 20 programs, of which some alternate every second or third year. Vea also offers vocational education on EQF-level 4 in floristry and horticulture. It is a boarding school with approximately 250 students and 36 employees. It is situated in rural surroundings on the banks of the lake Mjøsa, 120 km north of Oslo.

Vea covers higher vocational education within horticulture, landscaping, garden design, green health, interior, plant installations, floristry and more. The Garden Heritage course is of particular relevance to the CSGC-project as is the Master of Skilled Crafts. The school has a highly competent staff, both educational and professional within horticultural related areas. Vea is an ambitious educational institution, where development and international work is an important part of the strategic plan. The Erasmus+ KA1 Accreditation and now this application, is strong evidence of that. These ambitions are important. Not only for the school/organization itself, but most important to Vea’s students, staff and for the Labour market Vea supports. Vea has been working with international projects funded by EU since 1997. The experience from these projects has been an important part of the development at Vea. Being a rather small school related to relatively narrow and specialized Labour markets, this transnational work has been crucial for keeping up to date finding new pathways.

Together with the international experience already mentioned, Vea’s tertiary vocational study program Garden Heritage is highly relevant. The idea for this project started because of the need for appropriate places for learning and training for the students at GH. Cooperating with Gunnebo House and Gardens in Sweden and Schönbrunn in Austria, gave the students the opportunity to do the craft skills-training in other cultural heritage-contexts than Norway can provide, adding extra transnational dimensions. This experience has been central to this CSGC-project. Over the last three years, Vea has worked on several projects (funded by DIKU) within digitization and the use of technology in a green context, for pedagogic applications. In the CSGC-project, Vea, together with the project partners will use all these experiences and develop some of them further. In particular, experience and competence in the use of Drone and 360 cameras, and development of VR-applications will be relevant for this project.