Erasmus+ for UK schools: what changed and what it means for your trips
If you run trips at a UK school, you've probably watched the post-Brexit funding picture shift more than once. The 2026/27 round is the most settled it's been for a while — and for primary and secondary schools that want to send pupils or staff abroad, the route back into Erasmus+ is clearer than many heads realise.
What's actually on offer
Two funded strands matter most to schools. The first is staff training and job-shadowing — sending teachers or support staff abroad for short, structured professional development. The second is group mobility of pupils, where a class or year group travels to a partner school for a defined learning purpose.
Both are paid on the same unit-cost basis as the rest of Erasmus+: travel against distance bands, subsistence per day per person, plus organisational support to cover your admin time. For a typical secondary school sending a group of 15 pupils plus accompanying staff for a week, the funding usually covers the great majority of real cost.
What's changed
The headline change for schools is how front-loaded the application is. Assessors now weight the design of the learning programme — pre-mobility preparation, the in-country activity, the post-mobility follow-up — much more heavily than the destination or the headline pupil numbers.
In practice, this means a strong school bid spends as much time describing what happens in the classroom before and after the trip as it does on the trip itself.
What it means for your trip planning
Three practical implications. Start partnership conversations early — four to six months before the deadline is normal. Loop your safeguarding lead in at the concept stage, not at submission. And brief your governors before the bid is written, not after the grant lands.
The schools that do best on Erasmus+ in 2026/27 will be the ones that treat the funded trip as part of a curriculum plan, not as an add-on to it.
We've put the full school-specific picture into the 2026/27 Funding Map — what's funded, indicative budgets, key dates, and the six myths we hear most often from schools. Download it below, or book a 30-minute discovery call to talk through whether your school is a fit for this round.