Certificate of Attendance or Europass Mobility? What Erasmus+ Actually Requires You to Keep

A course certificate and a Europass Mobility document serve different purposes — and one of them is never something a single organisation issues alone.

Coordinators ask us this fairly often once a course is over: “the certificate you gave us — is that the Europass document, or do we still need to do something?” It’s a reasonable question, because the two look like they might be the same thing, and the Programme Guide doesn’t exactly spell it out in one place. Here’s the actual distinction.

What the Guide requires you to keep

The requirement isn’t for a specific named certificate — it’s for documentation of learning outcomes. After a mobility activity, the participant’s achieved learning outcomes must be recognised by issuing a Europass Mobility document or a similar document, and the beneficiary organisation (your school) has to keep a copy as proof the activity was completed. That requirement sits alongside the Erasmus Quality Standards and is repeated across the school education, VET and adult education sections of the Guide, so it applies whichever sector you’re mobility-planning under.

Notice the wording: “Europass Mobility or a similar document.” Europass is the standard tool for this, but the Guide doesn’t lock you into using it specifically — what matters is that the achieved outcomes get formally recognised and kept on file.

What actually has to be in it

The document needs to record learning outcomes — defined in the Guide as what a participant knows, understands, and is able to do, broken into knowledge, skills, and competences — and it needs to trace back to what was agreed before the mobility even started, in the learning agreement or, for a course like ours, the course programme used in its place. In other words, it’s not enough for a document to say “attended a training course in [city] for five days.” It has to say what was actually gained.

Europass Mobility is co-signed, not issued by one side

This is the part that trips people up: a Europass Mobility document isn’t something either your school or a training provider issues on its own. It’s completed and signed jointly — your school as the sending organisation, and us as the host organisation — usually as part of a Learning Agreement drawn up before the mobility. Your school registers the mobility and provides the participant and sending-organisation details, typically through your country’s National Europass Centre; we fill in the host-organisation section, provide an identified mentor, and countersign once the training is complete.

Exactly how that registration happens varies by country and by school, since each National Europass Centre runs its own system — we’ve seen it arrive as an online approval link, a partially completed form we finish and sign, or a fully prepared document brought to the course for an on-the-spot countersignature. We’ve written up the full process, including a field-by-field look at the form itself, on our Europass Mobility guide.

Practically, that means the starting point is still your school’s Erasmus+ coordinator and their National Europass Centre process — but once that’s underway, we complete our side and sign; it isn’t a document you should expect a course provider to hand you complete and unprompted.

Where our own certificate fits in

We issue every participant a Certificate of Attendance confirming the course they completed, with a serial code that can be checked on our certificate verification page at any time — useful for your own records, for showing school leadership, or for a National Agency spot-check. It’s a separate document from Europass Mobility, issued by us alone, and you receive both.

If you’re not sure which one your project actually requires — or where your school’s Europass registration stands — that’s worth confirming with your coordinator before you travel, not after; it’s a much easier conversation to have in advance than to fix retroactively during grant reporting.

Comparing course options in the meantime? Our upcoming sessions are listed by city and date, and our registration form is short enough to attach directly to an internal proposal.