For over 35 years, many thousands of young people have experienced outward mobility as part of their UK university undergraduate degree programmes. Since 1987, UK-based students have had the opportunity to take part in an educational mobility initiative known as the Erasmus programme. The UK was involved in this programme from its inception, along with 10 other countries; it has subsequently enabled students’ short term international educational mobility, providing students with a grant and waiving tuition fees for study in another member country. In addition, the UK has accepted thousands of students to study, annually, as part of the exchange agreements built into this programme. Erasmus+ has become a central feature of UK universities’ increasingly popular ‘study abroad’ initiatives.

From 2022, however, UK students are no longer to participate in this scheme, just as students in other European countries are unable to attend UK universities under Erasmus+. Replacing this programme, as part of the development of what the government has called ‘Global Britain’, is the Turing Scheme. To date, there has been virtually no academic analysis of the implications of this change. This paper constitutes an early examination of these implications by focussing on the messages conveyed about the scheme – to current and prospective students – by higher education institutions.

The Turing Scheme clearly sits within a broader landscape of short-term international mobility. Moving abroad to undertake so-called ‘credit mobility’ has become increasingly popular, and encouraged by HEIs, governments and even, in the case of Europe, by regional bodies. Although such mobility has typically been arranged through study exchanges, where students move to another country for an entire semester or year and follow degree-level courses in the host institution, over the past decade it has broadened to include international work placements (Cranston et al., 2020); faculty-led programmes (Tran et al., 2021); and the emergence of ‘gap year’-like programmes, where there is little attempt to ‘match’ academic content of courses between institutions (Courtois, 2018). As a consequence of this diversification of opportunities, the time spent abroad has also, often, been reduced.

Analyses of the purposes and impact of short-term student mobility have focussed heavily on employment and perceived employability, potentially appealing to less privileged students (Deakin, 2014). Indeed, in their study of international work placements offered to students in UK higher education, Cranston et al. (2020) show how, despite an emphasis on fun and personal development, their participants understood their experience primarily in terms of securing an experience that would allow them to ‘stand out’ from others within a congested graduate labour market. Such placements were seen as an effective means of demonstrating ‘an individual’s employability, but also their “global mindset” and ability to work in different national contexts’ (p.141). Research on the perspectives of universities has also, in some cases, evidenced a strong focus on employability (Tran et al., 2021), sometimes to the near exclusion of academic learning (Sidhu and Dell’Alba, 2017). However, Miller-Idriss and colleagues (2019) demonstrate how, in the US at least, messages about the purpose of study abroad propagated by HEIs tend to focus not on employability, but on having fun, maturing, and developing and transforming personally. In this way, they contend, these messages closely align with expectations of elite US higher education more generally – and may serve to exclude historically marginalised students who often view higher education in more instrumental terms. Such messages also tend to also position host countries in very limited ways – and primarily as places for US students’ ‘consumption, entertainment, and personal edification’ (p.1104). These images may serve to discourage less privileged students from considering short term study abroad opportunities.

We draw on a content analysis of the websites of UK HEIs to examine what messages are being conveyed externally about the Turing Scheme – because webpages constitute a key means of communication between HEIs and their student communities (as well as with the public more generally). In total, we analysed for content the relevant pages of 100 HEIs . The institutions were chosen randomly, out of a list of all 165 UK HEIs produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. Our sample was sufficiently large to include institutions of differing ages and statuses; it was also diverse geographically, including institutions in all four home nations of the UK. For each HEI, we analysed the webpages devoted to ‘international opportunities’/study abroad for outgoing students (i.e. individuals who were already students at the HEI). The number and length of such pages differed considerably between institutions – with some having only one page devoted to this topic, while others had a large number of pages, providing a very significant amount of information. We completed a grid for each institution, recording what was said, if anything, about the following: • How international opportunities are presented to students; • The geographical spread of opportunities; • The type of opportunities available; • The Turing Scheme, specifically; • The availability of opportunities to students who are traditionally under-represented in higher education and/or within international student mobility. Our analysis focussed primarily on text rather than the layout or visual representation as we were interested in what universities communicated via words, although we sometimes noted the visual representation of text when it was particularly striking. We also searched each HEI’s website for any mention of the Turing Scheme that was outside of the international opportunities pages, noting, for example, where HEIs had provided in a news item information about the amount of funding they had been awarded under the scheme. (This was evident in only 11 of the 100 cases.) Finally, where various third parties were mentioned (see discussion below), we examined their websites, too. We now turn to consider our findings in the light of the discussion above, focussing on geopolitical positioning through ‘Global Britain’, the perceived importance of socio-economic diversification through ‘widening participation’, and the underexplored role played by third parties in the provision and administration of the Turing Scheme (and study abroad more broadly).

Our website analysis provides an early indication of how HEIs are responding to the Turing Scheme and how their activities map on to the scheme’s key objectives. First, with respect to the objective of promoting ‘Global Britain’, we show how the language used by HEIs reflects this discourse. However, we also argue that opportunities for mobility remain significantly geographically circumscribed – with a strong focus on the US and other Anglophone nations of the Global North as well as, interestingly, ‘older’ relationships within mainland Europe. ‘Global’ is also understood in largely individualistic terms, with an emphasis on the benefits to individuals rather than wider communities, nations or ‘global society’. Second, despite the clear governmental emphasis on increasing the participation of disadvantaged groups, this objective was reflected much less obviously in the HEI websites. While practice within institutions may be different, the targeting of disadvantaged groups was not presented as a key aspect of the scheme on websites, while the enhanced Turing grants available to disadvantaged groups were mentioned only rarely. This may constitute a lost opportunity to market the scheme to traditionally non-internationally mobile groups. Third, we also contend that the Turing Scheme appears to be extending ‘migration infrastructures’ (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014) by increasing the number of ‘third parties’ involved in short-term mobility programmes (e.g. non-profit organisations providing volunteering and study abroad opportunities). While they may increase opportunities for students who are able to spend only a short time abroad (such as those with caring or work commitments), the lack of academic content and oversight from the host HEI suggests that these experiences may be of a lesser quality. Moreover, the shorter duration of many trips may prove insufficient to develop the skills central to the Turing Scheme’s objectives – let alone a broader understanding of other cultures.

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