Erasmus+ for Schools: Where Do I Start?
On 14 October our founder and director, Libero Dachille, spoke at International Mobility in Practice, an event organised by Move and Study at the Press Club in Brussels during the ErasmusDays. The title of the talk was a question rather than a statement: "Erasmus+ for schools: where do I start?"
It was chosen deliberately. A school usually knows the programme exists. Colleagues have mentioned it, somebody has forwarded a link, and then two years pass, because nobody knows which thing to do first.
This is the talk, written down. It is aimed at a school that has never applied.
Stage at the Press Club Brussels Europe before International Mobility in Practice, an ErasmusDays 2026 event.
Presenting at International Mobility in Practice, Press Club Brussels Europe, 14 October 2026
Two doors, and most schools should walk through the first
Erasmus+ funds two very different things for a school, and confusing them is where a lot of time gets lost.
Key Action 1 — Mobility. You send your own staff and pupils abroad: courses, job shadowing, teaching assignments, pupil groups. No partner school is strictly required to begin. It is funded by fixed unit costs rather than receipts, and a single member of staff can run it.
Key Action 2 — Partnerships. A joint project with schools in other countries, with shared results, a shared work plan and a shared budget. You have to find and keep real partners, and the administration and reporting are considerably heavier. It is powerful, and it is a hard place to start.
If you have never applied before, everything below is about Key Action 1 only.
Short-term project or accreditation
Same activities, two very different commitments. Almost every first-time school should pick the first.
A short-term project is one grant for one set of activities, running six to eighteen months, with a ceiling of thirty participants in mobility. You complete a full application each time, and you can run up to three of them. It is right for a first project, or for testing whether the idea works at your school.
Accreditation is recognition rather than money at the application stage. It lasts to the end of the programme period and then funds you annually through a light yearly request, without the same participant ceiling. It requires a multi-year Erasmus plan with real objectives, and it is right once mobility is simply part of how your school works.
Choosing badly here is the most common first mistake. If you cannot yet write a multi-year plan for mobility, a short-term project is the honest answer — and it is not a lesser one.
What you can actually do with the money
These are the eligible activities in a short-term school project, with their real durations.
For your staff
Courses and training — 2 to 10 days
Job shadowing — 2 to 60 days
Teaching assignments — 2 to 365 days
For your pupils
Group mobility of pupils — 2 to 30 days
Short-term pupil mobility — 10 to 29 days
Long-term pupil mobility — 30 to 365 days
Without anyone travelling
Invited experts coming to you — 2 to 60 days
Hosting teachers in training — 10 to 365 days
Preparatory visits — funded per participant
Two of these are missed by almost every school: you can bring an expert to your school, and you can host a trainee teacher from abroad. Both are funded, and nobody from your school has to leave the building.
The money, in plain euros
The grant is built from fixed unit costs published in the Erasmus+ Programme Guide. Nobody files receipts for these. The figures below were those presented in October 2026 — confirm the current ones before you budget, because they are updated with each call.
Travel is paid per participant by distance band — for example €211 standard or €285 green travel for 100 to 499 km, €309 or €417 for 500 to 1,999 km, €395 or €535 for 2,000 to 2,999 km.
On top of that: individual support at a daily rate set by destination country group, dropping to 70 percent from day 15; linguistic support of €150 per participant; and inclusion support of €125 per participant with fewer opportunities, plus real costs.
The admin, which takes an afternoon
Boring, free, and best done now rather than in February.
Create an EU Login account — one username for all Commission systems. Five minutes. Use a school address that will outlive the person who creates it.
Get your OID — register the school once in the Organisation Registration System and you receive an identifier you will use for every future application.
Upload the school's documents — legal entity form and the supporting papers the system asks for. Your secretariat can do this in one sitting.
Find your National Agency — every country has one, and in some countries more than one depending on language or sector.
And then the call nobody makes. Your National Agency runs free information sessions, publishes the national priorities, and will look at a draft before you submit it. They would far rather talk to you in November than reject you in March. Almost no first-time school picks up the phone. Be the school that does.
The year, and where the deadline sits
Dates for the next call are published by the Commission each autumn. Confirm yours with your National Agency before you plan around them.
October to December — register the school, ring your National Agency, agree internally what you want to do and who will carry it.
January — write the application. Allow three weeks of real work, not a weekend, and have someone outside the project read it.
February, midday Brussels time — the main round closes. Submit two days early. The system is slow on the final morning, every single year.
Spring — results. If you are refused you receive the evaluators' comments, and they are the best free advice you will ever get.
From the autumn — the project runs. The grant is largely paid in advance, so you can book.
You are planning activities that happen more than a year later. Never promise parents or staff a trip that depends on a grant you have not yet been awarded.
What a strong application has that a weak one does not
From the receiving side you can usually tell within two pages. Four things separate them.
A real need, not a general one. Weak: "we want to open our school to Europe." Strong: "thirty percent of our new intake arrives with little French, and our staff have no training in language support."
Objectives you could check. Weak: "improve the European dimension of the school." Strong: "by June 2029, six teachers trained in language support and a shared set of materials in use in all first-year classes."
Activities that match. Weak: a list of courses in attractive cities. Strong: every activity traceable to one of the objectives, including who goes and why that person.
Impact somebody owns. Weak: "results will be disseminated widely." Strong: a named person, a named staff meeting, a named date, and the thing that changes in the classroom.
Write it so that a stranger reading it can tell what your school will be like afterwards. That is the whole test.
After the yes: where schools come unstuck
These are the five we see from the hosting side, every year.
One person carries everything. Then they leave, or go on leave, and the project stops. Two names on every task from day one, including one person in the management team.
Four months of silence after the yes. Term swallows it, then everything is crammed into the summer. Put the real dates in the school calendar the week the grant is confirmed.
The host stops hearing from you. Agree a rhythm with your partner, even a short monthly email. Silence followed by a panic two weeks out is the classic pattern.
Nobody watches the budget until the end. Unit costs make this genuinely simple, but someone still has to open the spreadsheet once a month.
Participants chosen late, for the wrong reasons. Whoever happens to be free is not a selection method, and it shows in the final report and in the results.
None of these are failures of ambition. They are all failures of routine. Put the routine in place in the first month and the project runs itself.
Your first ninety days, starting tomorrow
None of this requires a decision from anybody above you except the last step.
Week 1 — register the school. EU Login and OID. One afternoon for your secretariat.
Week 2 — ring your National Agency. Ask when the next information session is, and go to it.
Week 3 — write the need in one paragraph, taken from the school plan. Show it to two colleagues.
Week 4 — find one course or one partner. One is enough to make the application concrete.
Week 6 — take one page to your director: what, why, what it costs the school, what it changes.
Not every application succeeds. A refusal arrives with the evaluators' comments on your own project, which is the best free advice in the system. Schools that apply a second time usually get there.
The four things worth remembering
First time: short-term project, not accreditation.
Register the school in October, not in February.
Ring your National Agency. Almost nobody does.
Write the need, then the activities. Never the reverse.
Thank you to Move and Study for the invitation to Brussels!
If Malta is on your list, tell us four things to start: how many participants, what they study, your dates and the duration. We will tell you what we can host — and what we cannot:
info@lexema.net
Your Erasmus project, our mission.
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