The jointly developed Mobility Scoreboard, by Eurydice and CEDEFOP, has this month been launched by the European Commission as a follow up to the ‘Youth on the Move’ Recommendation by the Council of the European Union in 2011.

The new Mobility Scoreboard provides a framework that serves to monitor progress made on promoting and removing barriers to educational mobility across European countries.
The new common online platform, informs about the persisting policy environments for learning mobility in European countries for both Higher Education and initial Vocational Education and Training (iVet).

The Mobility Scoreboard answers to important questions as - which countries provide the best guidance to prospective students? Students’ level of preparedness for mobility programmes?  or the effectiveness of recognition practices for foreign qualifications attained? Accompanying the launch of the score board is the Eurydice Higher Education Background Report, which maps the policy environments and trends therein, for international mobility according to the six indicators, covering the period 2015/16 and 28 EU countries. Key findings of the report by indicator include:

1. Information and guidance: initiatives increasing visibility of mobility opportunities are widespread, but only a small amount of countries have web portals that provide centralised access to supportive information.
2. Foreign language preparation: most counties have a compulsory period for foreign language learning, and mostly follow a ‘one foreign language at a time’ approach.
3. Portability of student support (grants & loans): merely nine higher education systems were found to provide full portability of domestic aid for both credit and degree mobility, with credit mobility more widely portable. Grants face more portability restrictions over loans. 
4. Disadvantaged learners /support provided to students from low socio-economic backgrounds: very few countries have set concrete targets, and few are found to monitor and hold information on the participation of disadvantaged students. Portable or needs-based grants are however widely available across the EU.
5. Recognition of learning outcomes: commitment to applying the 2015 ECTS Users guide is lacking in many countries.
6. Recognition of qualifications: with only six countries practicing automatic recognitions for all EU country qualifications, this indicator reveals a key area of improvement.

Stakeholders, practitioners and policy makers can now consult the new Mobility Scoreboard, as a one stop shop for monitoring positive developments and to identify obstacles to learning mobility in Europe, tapping into this information at a glance through dynamic maps that reveal those indicators for understanding current policy environments.

Mobility Scoreboard