EDUCATION COMMITTEE Thursday, 13 June 2013 Agenda Point 4 - International cooperation in education and training Introduction This note presents an overall picture of the international cooperation that the Commission carries out in the fields of education (mainly higher education but also youth), both in terms of regional programmes and policy dialogue. It excludes bilateral cooperation projects in the fields of education and training implemented by Europaid. 1. International cooperation programmes Erasmus Mundus Erasmus Mundus was launched in 2004 to foster the international mobility of students and academic staff and promote the global visibility of EU higher education. These objectives are achieved through 3 main types of projects: support to joint masters and doctoral courses, the award of full scholarships to students and academics from non- EU (and to a limited extent EU countries) and support to promotion projects aiming to enhance the profile, visibility and attractiveness of EU higher education worldwide. Erasmus Mundus has become the flagship action for the EU's relations with the wider world with 138 joint master courses, 42 joint doctoral programmes and over a hundred of academic partnerships selected with nearly 50,000 scholarships awarded to students and academics in the last decade. 2009 saw the launch of the second phase of the Erasmus Mundus programme, a strengthened and more generously funded programme, with the introduction of a new action aiming at funding Erasmus-type mobility with targeted regions of the world. The budget for Erasmus Mundus has reached over 1.6 billion Euros for the 2007-2013 period (647 million Euros from Heading 1 and 976 from Heading 4). Jean Monnet Jean Monnet activities aim to stimulate teaching, research and reflection on European Union issues at higher education institutions throughout the world. With projects across the five continents, in 76 countries, it reaches up to 250 000 students every year. Between 1990 and 2012, the Jean Monnet Programme has helped to set up approximately 3,900 projects in the field of European integration studies, including 177 Jean Monnet European Centres of Excellence, 956 Chairs and 2,190 permanent courses and European modules. Tempus: enlargement and neighbouring countries, Central Asia and Russia The Tempus programme supports the modernisation of higher education and creates an area of co-operation in countries surrounding the EU. Established in 1990, it has supported to date over 4000 projects and more than 14000 individual mobilities of students and academic staff and over €1.5 billion in grants have been provided to beneficiaries. The scheme now covers 27 countries in the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 1
North Africa and the Middle East. The annual Tempus budget amounts to around €70 million, and individual projects receive funding between €0.5 and €1.5 million, lasting 2 or 3 years. The total budget allocated to the programme between 2007 and 2013 amounted to 483 million Euros. It finances mainly two types of actions: - Joint Projects based on multilateral partnerships between higher education institutions in the EU and the Partner Countries, targeted at institutional level (curriculum development activities, university governance and management, relations between Higher Education and society.) - Structural Measures for the development and reform of educational institutions and systems at national level in the Partner Countries. Alfa in Latin America The ALFA Programme began in 1994 to reinforce co-operation in Higher Education. The programme co-finances projects aimed at improving the capacity of academics and universities in Latin America. The first phase, ALFA I (1994-1999), with a budget of € 31 million, ran until 1999 and involved 1064 institutions operating 846 projects. The second phase, ALFA II (2000-2006), with a total of 10 selection rounds represented a budget of €54.6 million distributed to 225 projects held by 770 institutions organised in networks with an average of 9 institutions from Latin America and Europe. The third phase, ALFA III (2007- 2013), has a budget of € 75 million (significant budget increase) with an upgraded programme structured along the Tempus model: Joint Projects and Structural Projects. Intra-ACP academic mobility scheme The intra-ACP academic mobility scheme promotes cooperation between higher education institutions and supports mobility in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) regions. The programme aims to increase access to quality education that will encourage and enable ACP students to undertake postgraduate studies, and to promote student retention in the region along with mobility of academic and administrative staff, while increasing the competitiveness and attractiveness of the institutions themselves. The mobility scheme provides support to set up inter-institutional university cooperation partnerships within the ACP regions; and provides support to individual students, researchers and university staff to spend a study / research / teaching period in the context of one of the cooperation partnerships. Edulink The aim of the Edulink programme is to foster, through cooperation projects, capacity building and regional integration in the field of higher education through institutional networking, and to support a quality higher education system, which is relevant to the needs of the labour market, and consistent with the socio-economic development priorities of ACP States. The second phase of the programme was concluded with a call for proposals with a global budget of € 23 Million in 2012. The global budget over the 2007-2013 priod reached 48.3 Million Euros. 2
Bilateral agreements with industrialised countries Bilateral agreements were set up between the European Union and some industrialised countries outside Europe to fund innovative projects that focus on academic cooperation and student mobility. The programmes under these agreements give support to consortia of higher education and training institutions working together to improve their educational services, compare and modernise curricula and to develop joint study programmes with recognition of credits and qualifications. Unlike other international programmes in the area of education and training, these bilateral schemes are based on matched funding, i.e. each euro invested by the EU should in principle be countered by an equivalent investment by the respective partner country. Since the inception of these programmes, 300 projects have been funded with a total amount of almost € 100 million. These projects involved some 890 European universities and vocational training institutions, and over 800 institutions across North America, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The projects launched to date support around 11,000 student exchanges. eTwinning Plus under Comenius The European Commission’s 'eTwinning' network, which has encouraged 100 000 schools in 33 European countries to talk to each other and work together via the internet was recently extended to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Tunisia on a pilot basis. Youth in Action and support to informal learning Over the period 2007-2011, a budget of 123,3 million Euros was allocated to cooperation with third countries which allowed for the support of almost 6400 projects reaching 93000 participants (young people, youth workers and volunteers). 2. Sectoral policy dialogues with third countries Policy dialogue in higher education with international partners is aligned with the external priorities of the EU, and takes place within existing cooperation frameworks such as the Enlargement Strategy, the European Neighbourhood Policy (for example in the framework of the Eastern Partnership) or the different (multi-sector) partnership agreements with emerging or industrialised countries such as the High-level People-to-People Dialogue between the EU and China, the Education and Training Dialogue within the EU and Brazil Strategic Partnership and the EU-Russia common spaces Eastern Partnership Platform 4 (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus) The Eastern Partnership (EaP) was launched in May 2009 as a strategic policy initiative aiming at a significant strengthening of EU policy with regard to the Eastern partners in a bilateral and multilateral framework. The partnership established four policy platforms reflecting the main areas of cooperation between the Partner countries and the EU. Each of them adopts a bi-annual work programme. 3
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