The mandate of the working group and broad outline of the work were clarified. The London Communiqué has given explicit mandate to Eurostat and Eurostudent in the field of data collection. For the next two years the focus will lie on the social dimension, in the sense of “participative equity”.

The working group will not participate in the data collection itself but will rather act as a political steering group, facilitating the contextualisation of the data.

Apart from the organisations that received the data collection mandate (Eurostat and Eurostudent), the working group is composed of 10 countries (Luxembourg - Chair, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, France, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Latvia, Russia, Switzerland and UK), the European Commission (DG EAC and Eurydice) and 3 consultative members : EI, ESU and EUA. ACA will also participate as a partner.

The working group should strive for sustainable data collection which will continue after 2009. For Eurostat also the convergence with EU data collection is essential. Meanwhile, it should be observed that in the context of Bologna stocktaking, Eurydice will be active in the field of data collection on transparency tools (ECTS, DS and qualifcations framework) for all Bologna countries and on mobility and portability of student support for 33 countries.
The fact that the geographical scope of the Bologna Process is wider than the number of countries where Eurostat and Eurostudent can be active remains a major challenge.