Summary
Deliverable 5.1
Cross-border apprenticeships in European higher education typically involve multiple overlapping agreements — a student–company contract, a tripartite institutional agreement and an Erasmus+ learning agreement. Together they create administrative friction and make it harder to ensure arrangements are legally sound and equally protective of all parties.
D5.1, led by Savonia UAS, establishes the framework for a unified work and student agreement template suitable for use across EU4Dual countries. The report combines stakeholder interviews and focus groups with a systematic legal review of contract requirements in each partner country, and analysis of real contract examples from companies and HEIs.
The legal analysis identifies six contract elements mandatory across all ten EU4Dual countries — contact information, starting date, grounds of payment, working hours, holiday accrual and notice period — with country-specific requirements layered on top. Rather than proposing a single static document, D5.1 outlines a layered electronic contract: a mandatory minimum, a work-placement-specific layer, a country-specific layer that activates based on the host country, and an open layer for host-company appendices. The framework will guide the development of operational templates and a supporting platform in the next phase of the project.
