the Treaty establishing the European Community provides that the latter's action shall contribute, inter alia, to the development of quality education and training; measures under this programme should promote the European dimension of education and contribute to the development of quality education with a view to encouraging life-long learning;

the extraordinary European Council on employment held in Luxembourg on 20 and 21 November 1997 recognised that lifelong education and training can make an important contribution to the Member States' employment policies in order to enhance employability, adaptability and the culture of entrepreneurship and to promote equal opportunities;

in its communication ‘Towards a Europe of Knowledge’, the Commission set out guidelines for the creation of an open and dynamic European education area capable of achieving the objective of life-long education and training;

in its White Paper ‘Teaching and learning — Towards the learning society’,the Commission stated that the emergence of the learning society entails encouraging the acquisition of new knowledge and to this end providing motivation to learn at every opportunity; and in its Green Paper ‘Education, training, research: the obstacles to transnational mobility’, the Commission highlighted the advantages of mobility for people and competitiveness in the European Union;

the Commission's aim, in line with the European Parliament's wish, is to attain a participation rate of around 10 % of schools under the Comenius action and of around 10 % of students in the mobility activities under the Erasmus action;

there is a need to promote active citizenship and to step up the fight against exclusion in all its forms, including racism and xenophobia; special attention should be focused on promoting equality and furthering equal opportunities for women and men; whereas special attention should be given to persons with special needs;

it is necessary, in order to reinforce the added value of Community action, that the Commission, in cooperation with the Member States, should ensure, at all levels, a coherence and a complementarity between the actions implemented in the framework of this Decision and other relevant Community policies, instruments and actions;

it is necessary to provide for the possibility of organising joint activities involving the Socrates programme and other Community programmes or actions that have an educational dimension, thus encouraging synergies and reinforcing the added value of Community action;

the Agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA Agreement) provides for greater cooperation in the field of education, training and youth between the European Community and its Member States, on the one hand, and the countries of the European Free Trade Association participating in the European Economic Area (EFTA/EEA countries), on the other;

provision should be made to open up this programme to participation of the associated central and eastern European countries (CEEC), in accordance with the conditions established in the Europe agreements, in their additional protocols and in the decisions of the respective Association Councils, of Cyprus funded by additional appropriations in accordance with the procedures to be agreed with that country, as well as of Malta and Turkey, funded by additional appropriations in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty;

this programme should be regularly monitored and evaluated in cooperation between the Commission and the Member States in order to allow for readjustments, particularly in the priorities for implementing the measures; whereas the evaluation should include an external evaluation to be conducted by independent, impartial bodies;

in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality as defined in Article 5 of the Treaty, since the objectives of the proposed action concerning the contribution of European cooperation to quality education cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, inter alia, because of the need for multilateral partnerships, multilateral mobility and Community-wide exchanges of information, they can therefore be better achieved by the Community owing to the transnational dimension of the Community actions and measures; this Decision does not go beyond what is necessary to achieve those objectives;

improvement of the European credit transfer system (ECTS) is an effective means of ensuring that mobility fully attains its objectives; universities participating in the programme are to be encouraged to make the widest possible use of the ECTS;