Erasmus+ is back. Please don't file it under "the International Office's problem." - July 2026

By Roger Horam

The UK signed the legal text in Brussels in April. From 2027 we are back inside Erasmus+ on the same footing as EU member states and other associated countries, with the British Council confirmed as National Agency. The 2027 Call for Proposals is expected in November, with most partnership deadlines falling around February and March 2027, and funded projects starting in the second half of the year.

Most of the coverage has been about students going abroad. Fair enough — that is the part that changes lives most visibly. But there is a second conversation the sector has barely started, and it is the one I want to have here.

If you are a UK academic who holds a research portfolio and a teaching load — which is most of you — Erasmus+ Key Actions 2 and 3 are not a distraction from your research strategy. Handled properly, they are infrastructure for it.

Here is the case, with the caveats included.

1. KA2 is the cheapest consortium due diligence you will ever buy

A Horizon Europe RIA is a substantial bet on people you often barely know. You have met them at one online kick-off, exchanged three emails through a broker, and now you are proposing to spend four years and several million euros with them.

A KA2 Cooperation Partnership is a fraction of that: a lump-sum grant, three-plus organisations from three-plus countries, two to three years. It is a low-stakes environment in which you discover — cheaply, and before it matters — who answers emails, who delivers on time, who can actually run a workshop in their own country, and who cannot manage a WP.

I would go further. The partners you most need for a strong Horizon Europe Cluster 2 proposal are usually the hardest ones to recruit cold: the schools, the VET colleges, the municipal authorities, the youth organisations, the employer bodies. These organisations live in the Erasmus+ ecosystem. They know its rhythms, its reporting, its expectations. Meeting them there and then bringing them into a research consortium is a far more credible sequence than the reverse.

2. It solves the beneficiary access problem that sinks a lot of good proposals

Every social sciences evaluator has read the sentence "we will recruit 2,000 teachers across six countries" and quietly wondered how.

A letter of support is a promise. A live KA2 partnership is a delivery route with named organisations, existing consent processes, established relationships and a track record of moving people through activities. When you write the recruitment and dissemination sections of a Horizon proposal on the back of an operational Erasmus+ network, they read completely differently. So does your Impact section.

This is not a small technical point. In competitive social sciences and humanities calls, the difference between a 13 and a 14.5 is very often whether the pathway to real beneficiaries is asserted or evidenced.

3. The flow runs the other way too — and this is the underused move

We talk endlessly about exploitation and uptake in Horizon proposals, and then write vague paragraphs about "policy briefs and stakeholder engagement."

Erasmus+ is a proper downstream vehicle. Research findings become curricula, training modules, micro-credentials, professional development frameworks, accredited qualifications. KA2 and the KA3 policy strands are the mechanisms that carry evidence into practice at European scale.

Naming that route explicitly in a Horizon impact section — this is where the findings go, this is the instrument, these are the partners who would carry it — is significantly more persuasive than another dissemination table. And for those already holding Horizon grants, a 2027 KA2 bid is a genuinely strategic follow-on rather than a change of subject.

4. It funds the half of your job that nothing else funds

Here is the part I think matters most for individual academics.

Research funders pay for your research. Nothing much pays for the intellectual work of your teaching. Erasmus+ does: joint curriculum development, blended intensive programmes, joint masters, teacher education, work-based learning design, assessment and recognition frameworks. If your institution is serious about education-focused promotion routes, KA2 gives you fundable, international, peer-reviewed evidence of exactly that.

And then there is Capacity Building in Higher Education. Let me be blunt about this one: since the ODA cuts and the unwinding of GCRF and Newton, UK academics with long-standing partnerships in the Western Balkans, Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere have had very little to work with. CBHE is not a like-for-like replacement, but it is the most substantial instrument now available to UK institutions for structured capacity work with partner regions. Some of those relationships have been kept alive on goodwill for five years. From 2027 there is something to put behind them again.

5. KA3, and the value of not being the lead

KA3 covers policy support, forward-looking projects and policy experimentation. These consortia are frequently practitioner- or ministry-led, and they routinely need something the lead partner does not have: rigorous evaluation design.

That is an unusually comfortable role for a UK researcher. You are not carrying the coordination burden. You are the methodologically indispensable partner, with a defensible evaluation workstream, access to a policy audience, and a seat at a table you would struggle to reach through research funding alone.

Being a partner is a perfectly respectable ambition, particularly in year one.

The caveats, because they matter

The money works differently. KA2 Cooperation Partnerships use lump sums. There is no full economic costing and no overhead recovery in the form your research office expects. Have that conversation with your finance team early, not at submission. Some institutions will need to think carefully about how these sit alongside FEC-based portfolios.

Outputs are not automatically publications. The default deliverables are toolkits, curricula, frameworks. If you want papers, design for them from the start — build in the data collection and the ethics approvals. Nobody will do it for you at month 30.

Association is currently for 2027 only. Continued participation from 2028 is a separate decision, informed by how the first year goes. That sounds like a reason to wait. It is the opposite: a project funded in the 2027 call runs its full 24 to 36 months regardless, delivering well into 2029 and beyond. If you want to be inside the system while the 2028–34 conversation happens, 2027 is the entry point.

What to do between now and November

Register the organisational ID if your institution has not. Search the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform for who has been funded in your field over the last five years — those are your partners, and many of them will be actively looking for a UK institution for the first time since 2020. Talk to your international office and your research office in the same meeting, which may itself be novel. And be honest about whether you want to lead or partner in year one.

The call lands in about four months. Consortium-building has already started elsewhere in Europe.

What are you planning for the 2027 call? I would be interested to hear where UK institutions are positioning themselves.