Erasmus+ Staff Mobility for Teachers: The Complete Guide

Erasmus mobility courses let teachers and school staff train abroad under Erasmus+ KA1 funding — here’s how the whole process actually works in practice.

If you’ve never been through it, the terminology alone can be off-putting: KA1, National Agency, European Development Plan, Europass Mobility. None of it is complicated once you’ve done it once, but the first time round it helps to have someone walk you through the actual sequence rather than just quoting regulation text at you. That’s what this guide tries to do — the practical side, not the legal side, which you should always check directly at erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu.

What KA1 Staff Mobility Actually Covers

Erasmus+ Key Action 1 funds short-term mobility for people who work in education — teachers, head teachers, counsellors, administrative staff — to go abroad for structured training, a course, or job shadowing in a partner institution. It sits alongside the better-known student mobility strand, but the goals are different: it’s about the school or organisation improving, not the individual collecting a stamp on a passport. Every rule about eligibility, funding rates, and deadlines is set and updated by the European Commission and the national agencies, so for anything time-sensitive always confirm directly through your National Agency rather than relying on a course provider’s summary of it, including ours.

Who Can Actually Take Part

In most cases you can’t apply as an individual out of nowhere. Your school or organisation needs either Erasmus+ accreditation or an approved KA1 project, and staff mobility gets planned inside that framework — usually tied to a European Development Plan the school submitted when it applied for funding. So the practical first step, if your institution doesn’t already run Erasmus+ projects, is talking to whoever coordinates international relations or professional development at your school. If nobody does that yet, your National Agency’s contact page is the right place to ask how a school starts from zero.

Choosing a Course That Actually Fits Your School’s Plan

This is where a lot of the value gets lost in practice. It’s tempting to pick a course based on the city rather than the content, and while we understand the appeal — we run courses in Antalya, Rome, and Istanbul, among other places, and the setting is genuinely part of the experience — the mobility should still connect to something your school is actually trying to improve. Digital classroom tools, inclusive education, school leadership, wellbeing, language teaching methodology: whatever the priority is, the course topic and the write-up you bring back should speak to it directly, because that’s also what gets checked in your project reporting.

Where EMA Runs Its Courses

We run five-day courses across seven cities — Antalya, Istanbul, Izmir, and Mersin in Türkiye, plus Budapest, Bremen, and Rome. Each location has its own rhythm and its own reasons for being on the list; some schools choose based on flight connections, others because a particular city fits the theme of the course better, and some simply because a colleague went the year before and recommended it. The full breakdown of where and when each course runs is on our course centers page.

Antalya and Izmir tend to appeal to schools that want to combine the course with a milder climate and a slower pace outside session hours. Istanbul offers a much denser urban and historical backdrop, useful if part of your school’s interest is cultural or heritage-related content. Mersin is quieter and less touristic, which some groups actively prefer. Budapest and Bremen give a central and northern European perspective on schooling systems that can feel quite different from what participants are used to, and Rome adds a strong classical and cultural dimension alongside the training itself.

What a Course Week Actually Looks Like

Structure varies a bit by topic and city, but the general shape holds: sessions run across the working week, mixing input from the trainer with group work, discussion, and practical tasks teachers can genuinely adapt for their own classrooms afterwards. Most weeks also build in a cultural or institutional visit relevant to the theme — a local school, a museum with an education programme, a relevant public institution — because seeing how another country’s education system actually functions day to day is often as useful as the formal sessions. At the end of the course, participants receive a certificate of attendance and the documentation needed to complete a Europass Mobility record.

Job Shadowing as an Alternative Path

Not every mobility needs to be a structured course. Job shadowing — spending time observing and working alongside staff in a partner school or organisation abroad — is a separate and equally valid option under KA1, and for some goals it fits better than a classroom-style course, particularly if what you’re after is seeing a specific system or method in action rather than a curriculum of sessions. We outline how that works on our job shadowing page, including how it differs from a course in terms of planning and what you’ll need to arrange with the host institution beforehand.

Costs, Registration, and Timing

Our standard price is €400 for a five-day course, which covers the training itself — travel, accommodation, and subsistence are budgeted separately through your school’s Erasmus+ project according to the rates your National Agency sets. Course dates are published well in advance so schools can plan mobility around the academic calendar rather than around ours; you can check what’s currently open on the course dates page. Once you’ve settled on a date and city, registration is done through the registration form, and we’ll confirm your place and send the documentation your school needs for its own project files.

After the Course: What You Actually Bring Home

The paperwork side matters more than it seems at first. Along with the certificate of attendance, you’ll want a completed Europass Mobility document, since this is what a lot of accreditation reporting and future funding applications reference. Beyond the paperwork, though, the actual value of the mobility depends on what happens once you’re back — sharing what you learned with colleagues, adjusting a lesson plan, feeding it into a whole-school initiative. Schools that treat dissemination as part of the mobility, not an afterthought, tend to get far more out of the whole process, and it makes the next funding application easier to justify too.

Getting Started

If your school is new to Erasmus+ staff mobility, the honest advice is to start with the official channels — confirm accreditation status, funding rates, and deadlines through erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu or your National Agency — and then come to us for the course side once you know what you’re working with. We’re happy to answer practical questions about content, city choice, or timing even before you’ve finalised your project.