Dual education sits at the intersection of two worlds — the lecture hall and the workplace — and that has always been its strength. But when students try to take their dual programme across a border, the seams start to show. A French apprentice with an employment contract, a Finnish trainee on a mandatory placement, a Spanish student under a work-study agreement: on paper, they are doing similar things, but the legal status, remuneration rules and credit recognition behind them look almost nothing alike.
The APP-Mobility project’s first deliverable, **D2.1 — Typology of Work-Integrated Dual Models**, is an attempt to bring order to that picture. Led by ESTIA with editorial support from KIC, the report maps how dual higher education actually works across ten European countries and identifies why mobility within these programmes remains harder than it should be.
A common language for very different systems
One of the central problems the report tackles is terminology. “Apprenticeship,” “internship,” “traineeship,” “work placement” — these words travel poorly across borders. What counts as an apprentice in France (a salaried employee on a three-year contract) is not the same as an apprentice in Finland, where the term is rarely used in higher education at all.
To cut through this, the report builds on definitions from CEDEFOP, the European Training Foundation and the EU4Dual alliance, and proposes a typology organised around five model types:
- Less dual integrated model** (short internship) — under 20% of the programme is work-based
- Block format model** (long internship) — under 50%, delivered in one continuous block
- Partial alternation model** — under 50%, distributed with regular alternation
- Alternation model** — roughly 50/50 between academic and work-based learning
- Strong dual integrated model** — over 75% work component
Each type is then cross-referenced with three mobility patterns: optional mobility for interns, optional mobility for apprentices, and mandatory mobility for apprentices. The combination gives institutions and policymakers a shared vocabulary to compare programmes that, until now, have mostly been described in national terms.
What the evidence base looks like
The typology is not built on desk research alone. It draws on responses from 40 higher education institutions, 61 host companies and 62 students across Europe, followed by 58 in-depth interviews with apprentices, HEIs, companies and public authorities in the project countries, plus focus groups involving 28 organisations and a legal review of national frameworks in EU4Dual member states and APP-Mobility associated partners.
That triangulation matters. Survey data established the broad patterns; interviews surfaced the practical frictions; focus groups validated the findings; and the legal review anchored everything in what is actually permitted under national law. The country profiles that close the report — covering Austria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal and Spain — give a structured, comparable picture of each system on its own terms.
Why pedagogy matters too
D2.1 makes a point that is easy to miss in policy discussions: dual education is not only a structural arrangement, it is also a pedagogical one. The report dedicates a full chapter to the pedagogical framework underpinning dual higher education, drawing on the idea that learning in these programmes emerges from the interaction between institutional and workplace contexts — not from either one alone.
This framing has practical consequences. It means that constructive alignment between learning outcomes, workplace activities and assessment is not an academic nicety but a quality marker. It means mobility periods need to be pedagogically structured — with preparation, in-mobility support and post-mobility integration — not just administratively organised. And it means that competence development should be understood as progressive, with students taking on greater autonomy over time.
What comes next
D2.1 is the foundation for the project’s later work packages. The typology and country profiles will feed directly into the design of harmonised contract templates (WP5), credit transfer procedures and the joint programme structures that APP-Mobility is building toward. By making the diversity of European dual models legible — without flattening it — the report gives the consortium, and the wider Higher VET community, a starting point for genuine harmonisation rather than well-intentioned guesswork.