Ask anyone who has organised a cross-border apprenticeship in higher education and you will hear a version of the same story. The student signs a contract with the home company. The university requires its own tripartite agreement. Erasmus+ adds a learning agreement on top. By the time mobility actually begins, three documents are circulating in two languages, and nobody is entirely sure which one prevails if they contradict each other.
The APP-Mobility project’s deliverable D5.1 — Standardised Apprenticeship Work Templates, led by Savonia UAS, takes that paperwork pile apart and asks a more useful question: what is the minimum that every contract genuinely needs, and what is the maximum that any single template can sensibly carry? The answer points toward a unified, electronic work-placement contract — but one that respects, rather than overrides, the national legislation it operates within.
What the evidence said
The report builds on the same evidence base that informed D2.1 — a stakeholder survey, 58 in-depth interviews with apprentices, HEIs, companies and public authorities, and focus group discussions in early 2026 — but interrogates it from a contractual angle. Alongside the qualitative work, the team gathered the actual legal requirements for work, internship and apprenticeship contracts in each EU4Dual partner country and cross-checked them against nine real contract examples shared by companies and HEIs, plus the Erasmus+ traineeship learning agreement.
A few patterns stood out clearly. Most companies use one master contract template and adapt it to the student’s status. HEIs typically have their own tripartite internship agreement covering job description, duration, ECTS, remuneration, applicable labour law, absences, holidays, termination and insurance. Public authorities mostly host trainees on internship contracts rather than employment contracts. And students — perhaps the most telling finding — often do not understand what the paperwork is for, with some reporting they had signed no contract at all.
There was also a clear stakeholder consensus that host-country legislation should be the dominant frame during mobility. This protects trainees from double standards and exploitation, ensures equal treatment with local colleagues, and avoids the awkward situation of two legal regimes governing the same working day.
The mandatory minimum
The legal review produced one of the report’s most practically useful outputs: a comparison table showing which contract elements are mandatory under national law in each of the ten countries covered. The cross-country overlap is narrower than one might expect, but it is real. Six elements appear as mandatory across the EU4Dual countries:
- Employer and employee contact information
- Starting date
- Grounds of payment and pay period
- Working hours
- Holiday accrual
- Period of notice and grounds
Beyond this shared core, individual countries layer on additional requirements — a reason for fixed-term contracts in France and Finland, conditions of employer-imposed fines in Malta, parental information for employees in Poland, trial period specifics that vary from one month in Austria to six in others. The report also notes the formal requirements that vary by country: most demand a written contract, France and Hungary require the national language to prevail, and only Finland explicitly recognises electronic agreements in its legislation.
What a unified template would look like
Rather than proposing a single static document, D5.1 sketches a layered, electronic contract structure with four parts. The mandatory minimum applies everywhere. A second layer covers the elements specific to a work placement in higher education — the educational institution’s contact details, the supervisors from both sides, the end date, learning objectives, duties, and insurance coverage where the internship is unpaid. A third layer adds country-specific elements automatically once the host country is selected. A fourth, open layer allows the user to attach appendices the host company may require — IPR and NDA statements, health declarations, safety passes and similar documents.
The report is candid about what this requires. A static Word template cannot do this work; the contract needs to live on a platform that can apply national rules dynamically, support electronic signatures across borders, and remain easy for HEI staff to fulfil. The Erasmus+ learning agreement is suggested as a possible foundation, since it already exists in electronic form, though the cross-border signature flow is not yet seamless.
What this means for the project
D5.1 reflects a deliberate choice not to try to overwrite national systems. Apprenticeship as a formally recognised status in higher education exists only in a handful of EU4Dual countries — France, Austria and, in a specific form, Malta — and in those cases the report recommends using the existing nationally validated contracts rather than inventing parallel ones. The harmonisation effort focuses instead on the much more common case: a work-integrated placement that needs to comply with local law while remaining recognisable to a sending institution in another country.
The next stage of the project will choose the platform and build the templates against the framework D5.1 establishes. The full report, along with the comparison document M14 Acts on Work/Internship Contracts in EU4Dual Countries, is available on the APP-Mobility website.