· guidance
How to choose a KA1 course without wasting your grant
Six questions worth asking a provider before you write their course into your application.
The catalogue of Erasmus+ structured courses is enormous, the marketing is uniformly excellent, and the difference between a week that changes something in your school and a week of slides is almost invisible from the outside. Six questions usually reveal it.
1. Who is in the room, and how many?
Ask for the maximum group size, not the average. Anything above twenty makes individual feedback and real practice time arithmetically impossible, whatever the programme claims. Ask also whether the group is mixed by country and role — it usually helps — and whether the provider will run the course for your school alone if you have enough people.
2. What will I take home in writing?
A good answer names artefacts: a lesson sequence, a rubric, a project outline, a policy draft, an action plan. A weak answer names topics. If the provider cannot say what you will physically leave with, plan for slides.
3. Who teaches it?
Ask what the trainer does when they are not delivering courses. People who still work with learners bring current examples and know which methods survive contact with a real timetable.
4. What exactly is certified?
The standard document is a certificate of attendance stating contact hours. Ask how many contact hours per day are counted, and whether cultural activities are inside or outside that number — National Agencies do look. Ask separately about Europass Mobility, which is issued through a National Europass Centre and is not the same thing as the provider's certificate.
5. Which documents do I get for the application, and when?
You need a course description, the provider's organisation details including OID (and PIC where relevant), and a signed invitation letter. These should arrive within days of asking, not after you pay a deposit.
6. What happens if it goes wrong?
Cancellation terms, minimum group size, what happens if the provider cancels, and who is the named contact during the mobility. Get it in writing. A provider that has thought about this has run enough courses to have had something go wrong.
Our own answers to all six are on the course catalogue and in each course page. If any of them is unclear, that is a failure of our writing — tell us and we will fix it.
Planning a mobility?
Tell us your dates, group size and priorities. You get a proposal, a draft programme and the documents your application needs.