The UK will rejoin the Erasmus study scheme from 2027, six years after announcing it would end its participation as part of a deal to leave the European Union (EU).
Britons will be able to spend a year studying at European universities as part of their UK degree courses without paying extra fees, and vice versa for European students.
Under the new deal, the UK will pay £570m to join an expanded Erasmus + scheme in 2027, which the government said represented a 30% discount.
Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said the agreement proved the government’s “new partnership with the EU is working”, but Conservative shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel said the deal was a “betrayal” of Brexit.
Patel said Labour were “obsessed” with “dragging Britain back under the control of Brussels” and undermining the 2016 referendum result.
In a post on social media, she claimed the move would “throw away billions of pounds of hard-pressed taxpayers’ money”.
But Thomas-Symonds, the EU relations minister, said: “This is about more than just travel: it’s about future skills, academic success, and giving the next generation access to the best possible opportunities.”
The agreement only covers the 2027-28 academic year, with any future access dependent on new deals.
The Erasmus scheme, named after the Dutch Renaissance theologian, was scrapped in the UK in December 2020, when the government announced its post-Brexit trade deal with the EU.
It enables students to study abroad at partner universities and higher education organisations by offering grants to help with living costs.
Participating students usually pay fees to their home institutions, with additional costs covered by the European Union, funded by taxpayers’ money.
Britain could have remained a member of Erasmus after Brexit, but then prime minister Boris Johnson said the programme did not offer value for money.
The UK argued that before Brexit more than twice as many EU students came to the UK as British students travelled to Europe at a net cost to the UK taxpayer.
In 2020, the last year in which the UK participated in Erasmus, the scheme received €144m (£126m) of EU funding for 55,700 people to take part in Erasmus projects overall.
The UK sent out 9,900 students and trainees to other countries as part of the scheme that year, while 16,100 came the other way.
In comparison, the Turing scheme – named after British mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing – received £105m of funding in the last academic year.
This paid for 43,200 placements, with 24,000 of those being in higher education, 12,100 in further education and 7,000 in schools.
Ministers who introduced the Turing scheme in 2021 said it was designed to benefit more people from disadvantaged backgrounds and provide greater support for travel costs than the Erasmus scheme did.
While the cost of the new deal is roughly four times what the UK paid the last time it accessed the Erasmus scheme, it is not a like-for-like comparison.
The government is pointing out that under the Brexit deal the default price for rejoining the scheme – based on the UK’s GDP – was set at £810m a year, but negotiated down.
Since Brexit, the Erasmus scheme has been replaced by a bigger Erasmus +, which funds not only university places but also schools, adult learning and sport.
The EU’s last report says Erasmus+ supported more than 1.4 million people into some form of education in 2024, with a budget nearly double the size of its predecessor programme.
The government argues more than 100,000 people in the UK could benefit.
Supporters claimed Erasmus boosted the UK economy even after taking into account membership costs, and helped support universities financially.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer reopened talks in May, claiming that a youth mobility scheme could also be part of a new deal with the EU.
Alex Stanley, from the National Union of Students (NUS), said it was “fantastic that another generation of students will be able to be part of the Erasmus programme”, adding that it would represent a “huge win for the student movement”.
“Students have been campaigning to rejoin Erasmus from the day we left,” he said.
Welcoming the news that Erasmus was returning, Liberal Democrat universities spokesman Ian Sollom said it was a “moment of real opportunity and a clear step towards repairing the disastrous Conservative Brexit deal”.
Shadow cabinet minister Alex Burghart said the government had “seemingly caved in to the EU without getting anything in return”.
Burghart said that the Erasmus scheme was more expensive than the Turing Scheme, which was “a global programme rather than a scheme based on a blank cheque for Brussels”.
“Rejoining Erasmus, reopening costly energy integration, and edging back into EU regulatory frameworks looks less like pragmatism and more like pro-EU ideology,” he added.
Nell Eustace, a student from Bristol currently studying in Italy, welcomed the UK rejoining Erasmus + as the Turing scheme “has been much less reliable”.
“The government did not give my university enough money to cover all students this academic year, so only students from under-represented backgrounds received funding,” she said.
“I am relieved that the Erasmus scheme will be available to future students… but it does highlight how Brexit has affected those who weren’t even old enough to have a say at the time it was voted for.”
Emily Pike, a student from Devon, told the BBC she had to strike her own deal to study in Italy because Turing funding was so limited.
“All of my peers from other countries were almost entirely covered by Erasmus funding,” she said.
Meanwhile 19-year-old Matthew Bailey said he had found the current paperwork “quite difficult” when organising to study abroad in the third year of his history degree at Southampton University.
“But now with the Erasmus scheme it hopefully will make it easier. Now I plan to go to Copenhagen in summer 2027,” he said.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: BBC
