The project 'Peer Learning Activities and Resources to Underpin the Principles and Guidelines for Social Dimension across the European Higher Education Area (PLAR-U-PAGs)' is a 3-year project co-funded by Erasmus+ KA3 Support to Policy Reform. The project will run from June 2022 until May 2025.

Background

Enhancing the social dimension of higher education (HE) has been a central pillar of the Bologna Process since its inception. Despite the broad political commitments at the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) level, the Bologna Implementation Report clearly indicates that only a few countries have followed up with national action plans at the system level to strengthen the social dimension across the EHEA.

In the Rome 2020 Ministerial Communiqué, the EHEA ministers committed to tackling the social barriers and developing policies that encourage and support public authorities and higher education institutions to fulfil their social responsibility and to build an inclusive, innovative and interconnected EHEA by 2030.

The annexed Principles and Guidelines (PAGs) to Strengthen the Social Dimension of Higher Education in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) expressly spell out the key principles for social dimension enhancement for the next decade.

Aim

As the PAGs have recently been adopted, national authorities and higher education institutions are in the process of considering and planning how to implement them in their systems. The general objective of this project is to support national authorities and higher education institutions across the EHEA in the implementation of the PAGs for Social Dimension.

Outcomes

The project team will deliver:

  • peer-learning activities to deepen the exchange of good practices between EHEA countries at different policy implementation stages.
  • a PAGs toolkit to support national authorities and higher education institutions to check their current policies and practices in the social dimension, and receive advice on action points for improvement.
  • a comprehensive mental health action framework, including a self-assessment tool and guidelines to support the implementation of sustainable mental health policies at the national and institutional levels.
  • a central web portal on financial assistance and psychological counselling services to enable a Europe-wide network of cooperation and information sharing.

All the tools will be freely available on the inclusivehighereducation.eu platform and are directly implementable. As such they will contribute to a more inclusive EHEA in the short term.

Project partners

The project is led by the Ministry of Education and Training Belgium/Flemish Community (MINEDU-FC) and the Support Centre Inclusive Higher Education (SIHO) of the Flemish Community of Belgium. They collaborate with the Ministry of Science and Education, Republic of Croatia (MINEDU-CR), the Institute for the Development of Education (IDE) in Zagreb, and the European Students' Union (ESU). Three individual experts support the project team with the implementation of the project activities.