2. Research methodology
According to the Erasmus+ Programme Guide, sustainability of outcomes is the capacity of to continue and to use the achieved results after the project completion. This means that the sustainable results should be exploited in the longer-term perspective4. To achieve the sustainable outcomes, the mobility projects should be designed and implemented in such a way that sustainable change can be achieved by further exploitation of the results at the sending institutions. Therefore, the main objective of the study was to measure long-term impact of teachers’ mobility on the entire school, as well as to determine factors that make projects sustainable after the completion of mobility. The study was carried out in two phases. In 2016, a quantitative and qualitative analysis was conducted in schools that took part in the first call for proposals concerning school education staff mobility. Projects that had already been completed, and those where all planned mobilities had already taken place, were selected for the study. Two years later, we returned to the same schools to check the extent to which the effects of mobilities turned out to be lasting and contributed to institutional development of educational institutions. The objective of quantitative approach was to assess the sustainability of the outputs two years after the end of the projects. The aim of the qualitative approach was to find evidence of changes that had taken place as a result of mobility, to identify factors that determined the success of a project and to verify if the sending institution fostered broad impact of the project and sustainability of its outputs. Research questions The most important questions that the results of the study were intended to answer were the specific long-term effects of mobilities and benefits of international experiences of school education staff for the institutions. The analysis of these benefits was also intended to show whether the change in the strategic approach to staff mobility as part of Erasmus+ (projects implemented as a result of institutional plans of schools and not as a result of individual
4. See: Erasmus+ Programme Guide, Version 1(2019): 24.10.2018, European Commission Directorate General Education & Culture (DG EAC), Brussels 2018 , p. 314.
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