Over 40,000 British students will receive funding from the government to study abroad over the next year, but institutions say problems persist with the UK’s Turing scheme.
The Turing Scheme was introduced in 2021 in the wake of Brexit. Now on its third funding round, student mobility staff say the program is failing to live up to the EU’s Erasmus+ exchange program as they navigate challenges with payouts, funding timelines and a lack of transparency.
“The way that funding is allocated doesn’t really take into context the way mobility works at the ground level,” said Rohan McCarthy-Gill, head of global mobility at the University of Sussex and chair of the British Universities Transnational Exchange group.
Under Erasmus+, universities received a pot of funding upfront to allocate as they saw fit over several years. Now, institutions must bid for funding for the upcoming academic year and Turing decides which programs will receive money.
