Erasmus+ for VET and Adult Education Staff: How the Rules Differ from School Education

Job shadowing, teaching or training assignments, and courses and training — the three staff mobility formats and their duration limits are identical across vocational education and training (VET), adult education, and school education in the Programme Guide. What actually differs between the three sectors isn’t the formats. It’s who can apply, how far staff can travel, and which funding caps apply.

Who counts as an eligible organisation

School education keeps this narrow: schools providing pre-primary, primary or secondary education, plus local and regional public authorities with a role in school education. VET is built around providers of initial and continuing vocational education and training and other organisations active in the field. Adult education is, by design, the widest of the three: eligible organisations include adult education schools and learning centres, civil society and volunteering organisations, counselling centres, libraries, museums, cultural and community centres, and organisations working specifically with persons with disabilities, older people, or people at risk of poverty or social exclusion. A community library running adult literacy sessions can be an eligible Erasmus+ organisation in a way a library with no education mandate couldn’t in the school or VET strands.

VET’s extra geographic reach

For school education and adult education staff, job shadowing and teaching or training assignments have to take place in an EU Member State or a third country associated to the Programme. VET has a specific exception: organisations holding an Erasmus accreditation in VET can send staff on job shadowing and teaching or training assignments to third countries not associated to the Programme at all — with Belarus and Russia specifically excluded. That’s a meaningfully wider map than either school or adult education staff mobility gets under the same activity types.

ErasmusPro: a VET-only badge

VET also has a learner mobility format with its own name: long-term learning mobility of VET learners, branded ErasmusPro, running from 90 to 365 days. School and adult education have long-term learner mobility options too, but neither carries a distinct programme name — ErasmusPro is specifically a VET identity, tied to the sector’s push for longer work-based placements abroad.

The course-funding cap that doesn’t apply to adult education

Both VET and school education cap what a project can spend on “Courses and training”: a maximum of 50% of the total awarded project grant, reduced to 20,000 EUR for projects with an awarded grant of up to 40,000 EUR. That cap doesn’t appear anywhere in the adult education funding rules for courses and training. In practice, that gives adult education providers more flexibility to weight a project heavily towards staff courses if that’s what actually serves their organisation’s needs, without running into the same ceiling a VET provider or school would hit.

What stays the same

Outside of these differences, the mechanics are consistent: the same three activity definitions, the same 2–60 / 2–365 / 2–10 day windows, the same requirement for a learning agreement before the mobility and a Europass Mobility (or equivalent) afterwards, and the same route into the programme — either a short-term project for organisations applying for the first time, or an Erasmus accreditation for those planning mobility on a regular basis.

Whichever sector your organisation falls under, the course content itself doesn’t change with the funding stream. Browse our structured courses and job shadowing options, or start a registration once you know which mobility format fits your staff.