Today is 27 August. Exactly ninety-two days ago, the European School Education Platform (ESEP) removed all external provider courses from its catalogue. The reaction at the time was somewhere between "shrug" and "panic," depending on which coordinator you asked.
I want to write about what I have actually observed since then. Not the theoretical impact, the actual one.
What I expected to happen
In late May I had a rough mental model of how the next three months would play out.
I expected coordinators to scramble for two or three weeks, then settle into whatever the new default discovery method turned out to be. I expected a wave of bad-faith directories to appear trying to fill the gap. I expected some legitimate providers to lose bookings simply because they were hard to find. And I expected National Agencies to eventually publish some kind of guidance about where to look for courses now.
Some of that happened. Most of it did not.
What actually happened
Coordinators did not scramble as much as I thought. They were annoyed, yes. But most of them already had a shortlist of two or three providers they had worked with before, and they just kept using those. ESEP was more of a "browsing tool" than a "booking tool" for a lot of coordinators. Losing it hurt discovery of new providers more than it hurt existing relationships.
The wave of bad-faith directories did not appear. I was braced for a bunch of scraper sites and low-quality clones. There has been maybe one, and Google seems to have already deprioritised it. I think the barrier to spinning up a credible-looking directory is higher than I thought, or the audience is small enough that spammers have not yet noticed.
National Agencies have been almost silent. As far as I can tell, no national Erasmus+ agency has published new guidance on where to discover external provider courses since May. Some have added a line to their FAQ saying "check provider websites directly." That is it. This surprised me. It is a legitimate coordinator problem and they have not really addressed it.
Some smaller providers have lost real ground. The providers who had strong direct-marketing muscle (email lists, existing school relationships, presence at conferences) are fine. The ones who mostly relied on ESEP for discovery are in genuine trouble. I have had conversations with providers whose enquiry volume dropped by 60 or 70 percent between April and July. Two have already told me they will not run their autumn 2026 courses.
What did surprise me
Three things I did not see coming.
Coordinators are more sceptical of provider claims than they used to be. I wrote about this a few days ago. Enquiries include more specific vetting questions, coordinators are less willing to book on the strength of a brochure, and there is more comparison-shopping between providers than before. Losing ESEP as a "trust signal" has made coordinators do their own trust work, and they are doing it well.
Search engines have picked up the slack faster than I expected. In May I thought coordinators would default to word of mouth for provider discovery. What I am actually seeing is coordinators typing "Erasmus KA1 courses in Barcelona" into Google. The switch from a curated catalogue to open search happened faster than I gave people credit for.
The regional split has changed. Providers based in the traditional Erasmus+ hubs (Italy, Spain, Malta, Ireland) still get most enquiries. But there is a real uptick in enquiries to providers in less-obvious countries. Slovenia, Estonia, Iceland, Cyprus. I think the ESEP catalogue was actually flattening this out before, giving small-country providers proportional visibility. Without it, the marketing gap has become the discovery gap.
What has not changed
Course fees have not moved. I did a rough comparison across our top twenty providers between April and August. Median fee for a five-day KA1 programme was €480 in April, €490 in August. That is inflation, not repricing.
Enquiry-to-booking conversion has not moved. Around forty percent of enquiries turn into a confirmed booking, same as it has been all year. Coordinators who send an enquiry are serious.
The overall volume of KA1 mobility applications for the 2026 call did not drop, at least based on what I can see from provider anecdotes. This was the fear right after ESEP closed. It seems not to have happened.
Where this goes next
Three predictions, worth roughly what predictions in a blog post are worth.
One: somebody at DG EAC will eventually announce a replacement for ESEP's discovery function. It will take a year or more, it will be underwhelming, and the market will have already routed around the gap by then.
Two: the split between well-marketed providers and poorly-marketed ones will get worse before it evens out. Providers who were coasting on ESEP visibility need to rebuild direct marketing muscle now.
Three: search-driven discovery is now the default. Providers who do not show up on Google for their own topic-city combinations are effectively invisible. That is a completely different competitive landscape than what most Erasmus+ providers built for.
If you are a coordinator, none of this changes what you should do. Send three enquiries, compare, pick the best response, book early.
If you are a provider reading this, the 100-day retrospective is: the game has changed, and it is not going back.