Inclusion Support in Erasmus+: Extra Funding for Participants with Fewer Opportunities

Most schools budget an Erasmus+ mobility the same way for every staff member: one travel grant, one subsistence rate, one course fee. But the Programme Guide sets aside a separate, additional inclusion support budget line specifically for participants who face a genuine barrier to taking part — and it’s worth more than most coordinators realise.

What “fewer opportunities” actually covers

The Guide doesn’t leave this to interpretation. It lists eight recognised categories of barriers that can make it harder for someone to take part in a mobility activity: disabilities; health problems; barriers linked to education and training systems; cultural differences (including migrant or refugee background); social barriers (from family circumstances to social marginalisation); economic barriers (low income, precarious employment, financial hardship); barriers linked to discrimination (gender, age, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or a combination of these); and geographical barriers, such as living in a remote or rural area with poor transport links. These categories come from the European Commission’s own Inclusion and Diversity Strategy, and a staff member can qualify under more than one of these at once — the categories aren’t mutually exclusive, and none of them requires a formal diagnosis or certificate to be considered valid grounds for extra support.

Why this isn’t just a footnote

Inclusion isn’t an afterthought bolted onto the funding rules — it’s written into how applications get scored. Erasmus accreditation for VET, school education and adult education lists “promoting values of inclusion and diversity” as one of the action’s core objectives across all three fields. And when your school’s Erasmus Plan is assessed, the “Activities” criterion — worth up to 20 of the available points — explicitly credits applications that plan for the involvement of participants with fewer opportunities. In other words, naming a real inclusion support plan in your accreditation application isn’t just good practice; it’s part of how the application is actually marked.

The two Inclusion Support budget lines, and what they’re worth

Once a mobility is underway, inclusion support in school education staff mobility comes in two separate forms:

• Inclusion support for organisations — a flat contribution of 125 EUR per participant with fewer opportunities, paid as a unit cost to cover the extra work of organising a mobility around that participant’s needs. No itemised receipts required; it’s a fixed contribution based on how many such participants take part.
• Inclusion support for participants — covers 100% of eligible real costs directly linked to that participant’s needs (and, where relevant, their accompanying person’s), including travel or subsistence costs that fall outside what the standard Travel and Individual Support categories already pay for. This one is different from most Erasmus+ budget lines: it isn’t a fixed unit rate, and it isn’t automatic — the request has to be justified by the applicant and approved by the National Agency.

The same participant-level inclusion support can also fund something schools often don’t expect: covering a staff member with fewer opportunities who takes on the role of an accompanying person for someone else, or who needs support to take part in a preparatory visit. And separately, any mobility activity — not just the ones built around a participant with fewer opportunities — can claim additional financial support for whoever accompanies that participant or a minor who needs supervision.

A detail worth knowing before you plan a preparatory visit

Preparatory visits — a short trip by staff to the host organisation before the real mobility, to sort out logistics in person — normally aren’t available for the “Courses and training” format, which covers most of what schools book through providers like ours. But there’s a specific exception: participants with fewer opportunities can exceptionally take part in a preparatory visit for any type of activity, including Courses and training. If a staff member’s barrier means they’d benefit from seeing the venue, meeting the host, or confirming accessibility arrangements before committing to the course dates, this is the mechanism that makes that possible — and it’s easy to miss if you’re only looking at the standard preparatory-visit rules.

What this means in practice

None of this changes what a course itself covers — the training content, the job shadowing vs structured courses choice, the certificate at the end are the same regardless of funding category. What changes is what your school can claim on top of the standard grant when a staff member’s participation depends on it. If you’re drafting or updating your school’s Erasmus Plan, naming a concrete inclusion support approach — who it’s for, how a staff member requests it, what your National Agency needs to see — is worth doing before you submit, not after a participant’s need becomes urgent.

Browse our job shadowing and structured course options, or start a registration once you know which mobility format and support your staff member needs.