Erasmus+ Priorities: Inclusion and Diversity
Priority
Understanding the Key Priority
Inclusion and Diversity is one of four key Erasmus+ priorities. Erasmus+ promotes equal opportunities and access, inclusion, diversity and fairness across all areas, with focus on organisations and participants with fewer opportunities.
Practicalities
Putting a Priority into Practice
Putting this key priority into practice takes involvement from beneficiary organisations and stakeholders in Erasmus+. Here’s how:
Inclusive Approach
Organisations should have an inclusive approach when they design projects and activities, to make them accessible to a diverse range of participants. Rest assured, organisations aren’t expected to do this alone! National Agencies, like Léargas, and other stakeholders are also involved and can offer support.
Inclusion and Diversity Plans
Stakeholders will draw up inclusion and diversity plans based on the overall principles and mechanisms at European level. These are necessary to best address the needs of participants with fewer opportunities, and to support organisations working with these target groups in Erasmus+ participating countries.
Inclusion and Diversity Strategy
An Inclusion and Diversity Strategy covering all programme fields is devised to support easier access to funding for a wider range of organisations, and to better reach participants with fewer opportunities. It also sets up a framework for Erasmus+ funded projects that work on issues related to inclusion and diversity. This Strategy aims to address the barriers different groups face when accessing opportunities in Europe and beyond. The list below is not exhaustive, but shows some example barriers:
- Disabilities
- Health difficulties
- Barriers linked to education and training systems
- Cultural differences
- Social barriers
- Economic barriers
- Barriers linked to discrimination
- Geographical barriers.
Project
From Priority to Project!
Feeling inspired, but unsure how you can apply the priority to your own project? Take a look at the work of some previous Erasmus+ projects that focused on Inclusion and Diversity.
Our blog post Erasmus+ School Exchange Partnership: Promoting Inclusion by Celebrating Culture, Language and Heritage features Siobhán Sheerin, who is the Deputy Principal of Beech Hill College in Co. Monaghan. In 2019, the school received an Erasmus+ grant of €65,000 to organise a 24-month School Exchange Partnership with a secondary school in Lithuania. The project addressed the concerns of some pupils who felt they ‘didn’t belong at school’, and were losing connection with their language and heritage.
Or check out Erasmus+ Job Shadowing: Including Children with Special and Additional Needs in the Maltese Classroom. Annie Asgard, an Erasmus+ Coordinator and English as an Additional Language teacher at a Galway school, outlines what she and her colleagues learned during an Erasmus+ School Education staff mobility project, focused on the ethos of inclusion.