The UK and the EU have agreed the outline of a November summit that includes a youth experience scheme.
According to the Financial Times, the question of what fees EU students pay has been long-grassed for later talks.
For some that will feel like a reprieve. Brussels wants EU participants to pay home fees, the UK wants a cap and no movement on fee status, and kicking can down the road has been the government’s preferred tactic since the spring.
Fees aren’t the only European file that ought to be on desks, though.
While the summit grabs the headlines, the machinery of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has been busy assembling the package ministers will sign in Iași and Chișinău next May – and some of it hits harder on the UK than a fee settlement would.
The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is the 49-country club created by the Bologna Process in 1999. It’s intergovernmental rather than an EU thing, which is why the UK stayed in after Brexit.
Every three years education ministers meet and sign a communiqué of commitments – in between, the Bologna Follow-Up Group (BFUG) of officials and stakeholders like the European Students’ Union and the European University Association does the work.
Westminster ministers sign for the UK, while Scotland sends its own delegation. Progress is tracked in a Bologna Process Implementation Report, complete with traffic-light scorecards. We didn’t do well last time.
Ahead of the 100th meeting of the BFUG’s board in late September, the EHEA site filled up with near-final versions of everything ministers will be asked to adopt.
Draft 0.1 of the Iași–Chișinău Communiqué has ministers committing to:
It also declares automatic recognition of qualifications “a right of every learner”, and contains a line clearly aimed at countries that sign and don’t deliver – uneven implementation:
“…diminishes confidence in the European Higher Education Area as a whole, including in those systems that have implemented them fully.
The European Standards and Guidelines (ESG) are the agreed rulebook for internal quality assurance in institutions, external review, and the agencies that do it – compliance is what gets an agency onto the European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR).
Draft 3 of ESG 2027 makes students “equal partners” in programme design and review, requires complaints and appeals procedures with “regular publication of anonymised outcomes and actions taken”, expects a sufficient share of core staff “under long-term employment”, keeps the in-person site visit, and applies the whole lot to transnational provision.
As I’ve argued before, this is mainly an England problem.
In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, QAA still runs cyclical peer review against the ESG – with student reviewers, site visits and published reports – and is EQAR-registered until June 2028. In England, the 2023 de-designation of QAA handed quality to OfS, which isn’t registered and doesn’t work that way – so the last implementation report’s scorecard records English providers as no longer subject to regular external review by a registered agency.
Westminster knows it. The UK’s own national action plan concedes that “OfS is exploring compliance with the ESG”, with a “plan for compliance with ESG” promised for 2027. But in the room, the UK delegation has been arguing the other way. At the BFUG meeting in Copenhagen last December, the minutes record that “the United Kingdom favoured not requiring site visits at all and allowing for a risk-based approach where site visits are facultative” (by which it means England), and argued for “a risk-based, outcome-focused approach rather than standards regulating processes”.
It didn’t get its way – draft 3 still expects external review to “normally” include an in-person site visit – by March the UK was still flogging a dead horse with wording like “a more proportionate approach that balances in-person site visits when needed with evidence derived from institutional data analysis”. It makes the second stage TEF consultation, due any day now, the moment England either designs its way back into compliance or carries on as an outlier.
Not all of this bit is England’s problem alone. When the BFUG went through draft 2 in March, the Scottish delegation asked who, and in which way, the share of core staff under permanent employment would be determined “sufficient” in the context of decreasing staff sizes due to financial pressures.
The draft communiqué also commits members to accrediting joint programmes using the European Approach alone – a problem for English providers about to plug back into European Universities alliances via Erasmus+, given that the European degree label leans on EQAR-registered agencies.
The revised ECTS Users’ Guide – ECTS being the European credit system that lets a semester in Bologna count in Bergen – restates that one credit is 25 to 30 hours, so a full-time year runs to 1,500 to 1,800 hours.
UK frameworks assume 10 notional hours per credit and 120 credits a year, which is 1,200 hours under the conventional two-for-one conversion. That’s a UK-wide problem, not an English one.
The guide also says learner representatives “must participate” in programme design and quality discussions “with full voting powers”, requires institutions to have systems for recognising prior learning, and expresses micro-credentials in ECTS backed by verifiable digital credentials – all of which bears on how the Lifelong Learning Entitlement’s modules will be read abroad.
The draft Action Plan on Internationalisation and Mobility wants national internationalisation strategies by 2028 and portable grants and loans, and says ministers “favour openness and the removal of barriers over restrictive measures that close systems.”
That sits oddly next to England’s international fee levy.
Erasmus+ association from January 2027 helps, but it also revives the imbalance at the heart of the fees row – the UK used to receive up to two participants for every one it sent. The plan’s push for “balanced credit and degree mobility” is the EU’s fee argument hiding inside Bologna.
The first EHEA-wide monitoring of fundamental values – academic freedom, institutional autonomy, student and staff participation in governance, integrity and public responsibility – reports alongside the communiqué, which already flags concern about “limits on the participation of students and staff in governance”.
The last implementation report found the UK was one of the few countries with no legal requirement for student or staff seats on governing bodies – Scotland, with its 2016 governance act, being the exception – and bracketed the UK with Kazakhstan for skipping social dialogue before adopting a social dimension strategy.
A commissioned study on Bologna’s future finds SUs and academics feel “poorly consulted”, and proposes a minimum national consultation standard and a “national BFUG” in every member state.
Finally, the EHEA is getting a permanent secretariat in Romania from July 2027, a sign of a process institutionalising.
If the government wants the European reset to mean something for universities, the cheapest win isn’t on fees at all – it’s fixing English quality assurance so the sector can actually plug into the things it’s paying to rejoin.