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Higher education student and staff mobility project
Start date: Jun 1, 2014, End date: Sep 30, 2015 PROJECT  FINISHED 

At Leeds Beckett University we have enjoyed being part of the Erasmus programme since 1997. Responsibility for organising Erasmus+ mobility lies with colleagues across the University including faculty administration teams, teaching staff, colleagues in central services such as the Accommodation Team and Insurance Team and is coordinated by the International Office, specifically the Study Abroad Team who compiled this report. As an institution our objectives in taking part in the Erasmus+ programme form part of several university strategies. The first of our 5 key themes in the University Strategic Plan 2010-2015 is ?Putting students at the centre of our activities and providing a flexible and relevant curriculum with excellent teaching and learning?. Student success is therefor at the heart of the University and we are driven by offering a high quality learning experience including a range of off-campus activities such as exchanges, traineeships, volunteering and work placements. Although not finalised, the University is in the process of creating a new Employability Strategy. This strategy will recognise the importance of intercultural experiences and work-based learning gained via student mobility. Another aim of the University is for all students to graduate with the following attributes: ? Being enterprising (able to problem solve, plan and evaluate, be creative and an effective communicator) ? Having a global outlook (able to engage effectively and responsibly in a multicultural and globalising world) ? Being digitally literate (able to confidently and critically identify and use information and digital technologies to enhance academic, personal, and professional development) Participating in student mobility programmes will significantly contribute to all three of these but especially the first two. To enhance the student experience we are committed to increasing our EU and non-EU cohort on campus in Leeds as well as providing more opportunities for our UK students to study abroad as part of their degree programme. In order to facilitate collaboration in teaching, transfer of knowledge and training for staff we are committed to encouraging staff mobility. Our goal for exchange partnerships is to establish relationships with partners on the basis of course content and in some cases similarities in organisational profiles although we also recognise how difference learning and living environments can lead to the development of students. As you will see in section 6 of the report we had 102 participants. 92 of these were students: 47 on traineeships and 44 on study placements. Of these 47 were female and 44 were male. 16 student participants were identified as coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. 11 staff members where reported as undertaking a mobility period: 10 for teaching and 1 for training with being 5 female and 6 male. We also had another colleague who undertook a preparatory visit which we funded from our Organisational Mobility fund and is not reported here. The team understands that there may have been errors in the data. The National Agency is contacting the European Commission but it was not feasible for us to check our data so we have provided commentary on the results as they are presented in the automatically generated fields in the report. The satisfaction of both inbound and outbound students in relation to support on visa and instance issues was surprisingly low given the support we have in place, especially for insurance. We will take measures to rectify this. Some areas for improvement have also been identified in relation to accommodation. There was a good rate of satisfaction for quality of academic treatment, academic support, integration and receiving grant payments on time but there is always room for improvement so we have outlined in the relevant sections how we intend to improve these results. We are pleased with the overall satisfaction rates for inbound and outbound students and for outbound staff outlined in section 7.2.2. In section 9.1 there was an average improvement across all competencies listed of around 77%. The detail is consistent with what we would hope for or expect e.g. a greater improvement for traineeship participants because it presents a more challenging environment with greater room for development in non-academic areas. These improvements closely match those defined in our Graduate Attributes. The lowest area of improvement was in IT skills and social media which we believe reflects the fact that our students are competent in this area before their mobility period. Rates of improvement for staff were also as expected. Examples of impacts outside the university have been briefly mentioned and include aspiration-raising work with young people of pre-university age and additional collaboration with European and non-European overseas partners as a result of or inspired by our engagement with the Erasmus+ programme.
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