Every study tour we run in Europe ends up in the same conversation.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re sat with a students’ union in Ljubljana, a vice-rector’s office in Kraków, a studentenwerk in Munich or a Nordic student council that’s just finished explaining its housing company.
Within about twenty minutes somebody will raise mobility – who goes, who doesn’t, what it costs, how the credit gets recognised, and what they’re doing about the students who never leave. It comes up more often than money does.
Mobility is one of the things the whole European Higher Education Area was built to deliver, and much of the machinery being half-baked into the LLE exists because of it.
The European Credit Transfer Scheme is a mobility technology before it’s a workload one – it exists so that a semester done in Bologna counts in Bergen. The diploma supplement exists so an employer in one country can read a transcript from another. The learning agreement exists so a student knows before they go what will count when they get back.
European ministers signed up at Leuven in 2009 to a benchmark that by 2020 at least 20 per cent of graduates should have had a study or training period abroad. Almost nobody hit it, but the target has shaped fifteen years of institutional behaviour – mobility windows in curriculum design, recognition committees, credit transfer rules, the lot.
The reason they care is that the benefits are unusually well evidenced. Students who go come back with language, with confidence, with a network, with a labour market that’s suddenly bigger than the one they can cycle to. They’re more employable and they know it.
And for the institutions, a mobility relationship is a research relationship and a recruitment relationship in tandem – which is why the conversation in a European rectorate is never really about students.
Half a billion v seventeen thousand
You’d therefore think the UK’s return to Erasmus+ would be straightforwardly good news, and in principle it is. Association starts in January 2027, the first academic year of participation is 2027-28, and the contribution for 2027 is around £570 million – a 30 per cent discount on what standard Trade and Cooperation Agreement terms would have demanded, which would have been nearer £810 million.
The agreement covers 2027-28 only, with a review ten months after association begins and everything beyond 2028 to be renegotiated alongside the new EU budget round.
The trouble is that in 2018-19, the best full pre-pandemic year, UK higher education completed 16,575 outward student mobilities – 9,289 study placements and 7,286 work placements – plus 3,566 staff mobilities. On the Commission’s slightly different counting, which works in mobility periods attributed to a year rather than completed mobilities, the UK sent 18,133 and received 30,497.
Whichever series you use the shape is the same, and it’s the shape nobody will want to talk about in the run-up to an election – we received somewhere between 1.7 and two participants for every one we sent, every year.
It’s a thin base to rebuild from. Around 0.5 per cent of the UK student population went in any given year. The Joint Research Centre’s work on UK uptake found that disadvantaged students were 20.4 per cent of Erasmus participants against 31.7 per cent of the student population, that 75.2 per cent of European languages students went while 0.5 per cent of medics did, and that languages accounted for 41 per cent of all UK participants. Modern languages provision has been collapsing steadily ever since.
Then there’s who’d do the rebuilding. The institutional coordinator roles that survived got repurposed onto Turing, which was an annual bid, outward only, with no charter and no inter-institutional agreements to maintain. Bilateral agreements lapsed, and European partners have spent those five years rebuilding their portfolios without UK slots in them – getting back onto a partner list in Leuven or Barcelona means displacing somebody who’s been reliably sending students since 2021.
And we have five years of evidence about how well the sector spends mobility money it’s already been given. In 2021-22 UK providers bid for 31,887 higher education Turing placements and delivered 13,779. In 2023-24 they bid for 22,847 and delivered 17,388, and in 2024-25 24,031 and 16,871.
Whole-scheme spend in that first year was £51.5 million against a £98.5 million allocation. The widely quoted line that Turing has delivered more participants than Erasmus rests on comparing Turing’s planned placements at application stage with Erasmus actuals, which isn’t a comparison.
There are two cohorts between association and a general election, and the first of them will be half a year once providers have got the Erasmus Charter back and rebuilt their agreements. “We paid half a billion and hardly anyone went” is an easy headline, and it’s easy to predict that it’ll be a true one.
We used to do this by accident
Spain built SICUE in 1999 because Spanish students mostly study in their home city and always have. Poland built MOST in the same year for the same reason. The Netherlands built Kies op Maat because a Dutch student’s institution is determined by which train they can get. None of these countries have the leave-home-to-go-to-uni traditions we do, so they had to construct on purpose the thing our sector produced as a by-product.
We never needed a domestic mobility scheme because going away to university was one. The eighteen year old who moved 200 miles to a city they’d never visited was doing SICUE, with a three year duration and no learning agreement.
But that’s the bit that’s going, as students increasingly live at home, work 20 hours a week, and choose by bus route rather than by course. The mobility our system delivered by default is being withdrawn from the students who’d benefit most from it, and nobody has proposed anything to put in its place because nobody has framed it as mobility policy at all.
Which is why we need a domestic mobility scheme, aimed at broadening the horizons of and deepening the experience of those who aren’t leaving home to go to university.
What about
The schemes have already encountered every problem a UK version would.
On credit, the answer everywhere is the learning agreement signed in advance, with the home institution pre-committing to recognise what’s on it. Slovenia’s four-university agreement guarantees full recognition of anything agreed beforehand, with a minimum of 15 ECTS a semester. Portugal’s polytechnic scheme grants automatic equivalence. Hungary’s law says credit must be recognised if the course descriptions match by 75 per cent or more. Nobody treats recognition as a discretionary favour, because a scheme where the home quality office decides afterwards isn’t a scheme.
On fees, there are two working models. In Spain, Poland, Switzerland and Slovenia the student stays enrolled and pays at home, the host charges nothing, and no money changes hands between institutions. The Dutch do the opposite and settle up – €85 per credit actually achieved in 2026-27, paid on completion rather than enrolment, with the student never seeing the transaction and never paying twice.
On the unit of exchange, everything new starts small. Šląski Most, signed in February by seven Silesian institutions with the science minister fronting it, starts at a single module with an ambition to build towards a semester. Poznań’s PoMost does the same across eight institutions. Kies op Maat is a minor or a course, not a year.
On money, Spain’s Séneca grants were withdrawn in 2013, but Madrid has just conceded the point and brought them back as the Becas Luisa de Medrano – €900 a month for nine months, 2,300 grants, €18.8 million, conditional on the student changing province. Portugal’s university scheme carries no student funding whatsoever. Belgium’s inter-community scheme cost just €200,000.
Accommodation would be an issue. None of the European schemes guarantee a bed – the best any of them manage is Poland’s “subject to availability”. Here it’s worse, because students sign twelve-month PBSA tenancies in November for the following September, which makes a semester swap impossible unless institutions pair beds directly.
A term in Sunderland
The obvious objection to all of this is that a domestic scheme would accelerate the sorting it claims to fix – give a student in the north a semester in London and you’ve helped them leave. But that gets the problem backwards. People have stopped moving to plenty of towns, as recruitment concentrates into the big selective institutions in the big cities and everyone else stays within commuting distance of where they grew up.
Which means the design has to run the other way from every European scheme. What you’d want is asymmetry – money that pays out in one direction, conditional on destination rather than on an institutional partnership, which is how Spain’s new grants work and how every other place-based funding stream in this country already works. And you’d want the Dutch settlement model rather than the Spanish one, because if the point is inflow to places that have lost it, the receiving institution should be materially better off for hosting rather than doing it as a favour.
The first-best answer is still to get residential mobility back up, and a serious mobility agenda would be going at maintenance, at halls costs, and at the collapse in the proportion of students who can afford to move at all. A term isn’t a substitute for three years. But if those numbers aren’t coming back on their own, then a semester in a city that barely receives home students is worth a lot more than nothing – to the student who’s never lived anywhere else, and to the marginal modules that stay viable because somebody filled some seats.
In the FT at the weekend, the benefits were described in the usual way:
In the UK, moving away to university is regarded as a sheltered first step towards adulthood; the trials and travails of student life are fertile fodder for books, films and television shows, from Brideshead Revisited to The Young Ones and Fresh Meat. While some novels and shows focus on the more chaotic, dysfunctional and funny aspects of student digs, multiple studies have shown that students who live away from home are more likely to engage fully in academic life and gain a sense of community and belonging. They can access the full spectrum of extracurricular elements — the societies and sport, the comedy, theatre and music — and learn to stand on their own two feet (and, with any luck, how to cook and clean).
It’s a version of the case for university that gets made because it happens to be true for the people making it, and because the studies behind it are measuring the kind of engagement a residential model is built to produce. What it can’t see, because it isn’t looking, is the growing number of students getting the whole of higher education from a bedroom at their parents’ house, a bus timetable and whatever gap exists between lectures and a paid shift. For them, belonging and community and “the full spectrum of extracurricular elements” aren’t things a student either has the character for or doesn’t. They are things a timetable, a curriculum, a set of lockers and a students’ union either build around a commute or don’t bother building at all.
We’re about to spend £570 million a year moving students across borders, in a country that spends very little on getting them to move across counties. In many ways, they’re the same problem, and one we should fix.
