Services management for educational tourism destinations in European educational programmes

Abstract: Services management and administration services, terms that can be used alternately, are applied in various sectors, such as education, where the students are considered to be the users of educational services and the teachers can be considered to be both the users and the providers of those services. The European education policy, through the European Educational Programmes, aims at changes that can improve the functioning of schools, so that the European schools, through services management, could create and manage knowledge and offer services to the educational community. The teachers can make use of the services offered by the European Educational Programmes, which combine educational tourism destinations within the framework of European mobility programmes, so as to gain professional-educational experience and develop professionally. However, low participation of teachers is observed, especially from Primary Education teachers from Greece in those programmes. The present research tries to investigate the causes of this low participation in educational tourism programmes. The theoretical framework of the research consists of Herzberg’s motivation theory and the push-pull theory in order to determine whether Primary Education teachers from the prefectures of Imathia and Larissa are motivated either by themselves or by the school management to participate in all the procedures that a European Educational Programme such as Erasmus+ entails. The findings of the research highlight similarities and differences between the two prefectures in terms of the teachers’ motivation to participate in European Educational Programmes. The present research may help in the creation of a policy tool to facilitate the role of the administration of the educational services of the European Union and its member states for the better professional development of its teachers.