On 15 April 2026, the UK and EU signed the legal text to bring Britain back into Erasmus+, the flagship exchange programme.
For decades, it has sent hundreds of thousands of young people across European borders to study, work, and as anyone who has done it will tell you, to become someone slightly different from who they were before.
This Saturday, the UK will take to the Eurovision stage in Basel with a song called “Eins, Zwei, Drei”.
The coincidence is almost too neat to be true.
The song nobody’s reading carefully enough
Look Mum No Computer, the performance name of Sam Battle, a British musician and inventor who runs This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, has written what the music press has mostly treated as novelty.
It has silly rhymes, rhymes “pepperoni” with “okey-dokey”, and is faintly ridiculous. Watch the video more carefully, though, and something else emerges.
The narrator is trapped in a cubicle. On the wall behind him hang three clocks – Berlin, Ramsgate, Vienna. The joke is the middle one, a small English seaside town imaginatively squeezed between two great European capitals. Britain, always adjacent to a larger world it pretends not to need.
Then the scene shifts. He is in overalls, in a workshop dense with wires, patch leads, circuit boards, and homemade electronic equipment. He leans into a car engine with a wrench, spreads a world map across the bonnet. He sings about planes and euros and counting in German. He comes back to life through making things, fixing things, understanding how things work.
It is a three-minute argument for two ideas that British education policy has long struggled to take seriously – that work with the hands can be a source of deep satisfaction and meaning, and that going elsewhere, encountering another language and another way of doing things, changes how you see the world you came from.
The consolation prize myth
For several years, my colleagues and I conducted research with WorldSkills UK competitors, young people who had reached the international pinnacle of skill in their vocational fields.
We interviewed bricklayers, chefs, mechatronics engineers, florists, cabinetmakers, and stonemasonry specialists. We asked them about their work, their training, their careers.
What they told us confounded what the deficit model of vocational education would predict. They rarely described their work as a consolation prize for those who’d failed academically. They described it as absorbing and deeply satisfying – work tied to precision, concentration, and what one competitor called becoming “a perfectionist… [where] that bar raises to a higher standard.”
They also spoke about how this kind of work disrupted routine ways of thinking, forcing them to approach problems differently and, at times, finding the process itself “quite invigorating.”
For some, the aim extended beyond completing a task to creating something that would make others pause – work that would prompt people to say “wow,” and in doing so take pride in the distinctiveness and quality of what they’d made.
And yet, only 16 per cent of 25–34-year-olds in the United Kingdom hold a vocational qualification as their highest level of educational attainment, compared to 23 per cent across OECD countries. Britain continues to treat the vocational route as the path for those who didn’t quite make it academically.
The song’s narrator, stuck in the cubicle, is the product of a system that never asked what he was actually good at, or what kind of work might make him feel most alive.
My research published in the British Educational Research Journal showed that WorldSkills competitions have real potential to showcase vocational excellence in ways that inspire young people and change public perception. But the potential goes largely unrealised, because the publicity is negligible and the policy infrastructure around it thin.
What crossing borders does
The second thing the song understands is subtler and, in the month of the Erasmus+ announcement, more urgent.
The shift into German counting is played for laughs. But it carries a charge. There is something that happens when you start to move through the world in a different language, or simply in a different place where the ordinary assumptions of your own context no longer hold automatically. Things that seemed fixed become contingent, and the familiar looks different from outside.
I have spent the past several years studying this phenomenon, through interviews with more than 700 individuals across 70 countries who went abroad for study or professional development and returned home. What I found is that crossing borders to learn does more than expand skills or add lines to a CV – it reshapes how people see, judge, and act, making the taken-for-granted newly visible and widening the frame of what seems possible.
The Eurovision narrator seems to sense this. Counting differently feels like thinking differently, as routine loosens and the world expands.
Who does this reach?
Which brings me to the announcement, and to the question it raises that nobody seems to be asking clearly enough.
The return to Erasmus+ is good news. Over 100,000 people are expected to benefit in the first year. The press release mentions students, apprentices, school groups, and organisations. The skills minister speaks of “transformative opportunities.” The EU relations minister promises that “thousands of students and apprentices” will get “a fresh perspective on the world.”
Apprentices are named in the text, which matters – but naming them isn’t enough.
The history of international mobility programmes in this country, and across OECD countries more broadly, is a history of university students benefiting enormously while vocational learners receive, at best, a marginal share.
The Erasmus student gets a year in Berlin or Vienna; the apprentice bricklayer, trainee chef, or floristry student largely does not. When UK competitors go to WorldSkills, the transformation is real and documented – they return with skills, confidence, networks, and a changed sense of what is possible – but that programme reaches only a small number of young people, and barely registers in the public imagination.
Whether Erasmus+ should return isn’t really in question – it should, and it has. What matters is whether its return will reach the young people who’ve been most consistently locked out of international experience – the vocational learners, the apprentices, the young people in further education colleges rather than, once again, just those in universities.
If it does, last month’s announcement becomes something more than good news – a real turning point.
A song, a signing, and a Ramsgate clock
Look Mum No Computer didn’t intend to write a policy document – he intended to write a Eurovision song, and succeeded. It’s catchy and comic.
But the clocks on the wall – Berlin, Ramsgate, Vienna – are doing subtle work. They place a small English town alongside Europe rather than opposite it – always adjacent, already connected, if not yet by policy. The video imagines Britain already there, tinkering, curious, hands in the engine.
That is the Britain the Erasmus+ agreement now promises. The question is whether it will be the Britain that brings its apprentices with it.
