UK bid farewell to Erasmus as “young people don’t speak foreign languages well enough”

17 comments

1. In 2016/ 17 : 13,500 UK students went to Europe for one full Erasmus year.

   In 2020 / 21 : 20,000 UK students went abroad under the replacement Turing scheme.

   Under some “measures” UK students have benefitted from leaving the Erasmus scheme.

2. The UK realised it could run a replacement scheme with double the number of places Erasmus offered for the same cost.

   That scheme also wouldn’t limit students to studying inside the EU, they could go to any country.

   Given that why would you sign up with Erasmus?

3. “A recent government commissioned analysis found the replacement scheme had failed to meet its targets, and counted only 20,000 participants instead of the expected 35,000 in the academic year 2021/22.”  

   So we’re just going to ignore the fact that’s more than a 50% increase on ERASMUS numbers then.

4. That’s about as logical as Brexit…

5. Wasnt that a band?

6. I wish they would have used “good enough” in the title. That would have been great.

7. I was one of the few people to go to a langauage specializes high school but it was very disorganised

   The school year was split. Half learnt spanish and half learned french at random with no choice

   We also learned german for 2 years but bizarrely couldn’t drop the previous language if we wanted to focus on german once we could choose subjects for our 14-16 exams (GCSE)

   So naturally we all bunked off and messed around in language lessons thinking we didn’t need it much to my regret today!

8. They really don’t understand what Europe is.

9. In lisbon, I had a british customer in a cafe I worked with, complaining that the waiter didn’t speak English. The waiter spoke French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese of course…we explained that we were sorry that the costumer didn’t speak or understand anything else in a non English speaking country…

10. Someone posted where UK students actually go for exchange.

    Guess what – 5 countries out of top 10 are not part of Erasmus+ so why would they join it?

11. The conservatives to be assholes.

12. Lmao can they at least speak english?

    Anyways, its not like spanish or italian students know anything besides “my name is xxx” and “give beer” haha

13. We’ll close our school sports programs because people are too fat to partake in them…. Or some logic like that 🙂

14. I voted Remain.

    However, arguably Brit students would become more global by visiting the US or Asia- say Singapore or San Francisco or Shenzhen.

    Meanwhile. In 2021-22 there were 679,970 international students studying in the UK. 120,140 of these were from the EU and 559,825 were non-EU. In the year ending September 2023, there were 486,107 sponsored study visas and 104,501 Graduate route visas granted to main applicants. Higher than France or Germany. Many of their ‘foreign’ students are from neighbouring countries.

    The world comes to the UK to study.

    One big draw is English. One reason so much tech has gone to tax haven Ireland.

    English is so globally dominant it is really hard to motivate UK students to prioritise foreign languages. My grandsons are Finnish/ British. Only 5.5m speakers makes it very motivating to learn English.

15. I did Erasmus in France a decade ago, I was the only British exchange student in the uni that year and my French wasn’t great when I arrived but neither was the French of the other Erasmus exchange students from other countries. They all spoke English when they got together or their native language with students from their country. We all improved our French over the year because that’s the point, we were living in a French-speaking environment for the first time.

    Doing that year abroad was really great for my confidence, independence and language skills. It’s a shame it won’t be available anymore.

16. Erasmus programme is amazing I almost wish every student had to take one. What a shame.

17. Lol, most British people don’t even speak English that well compared to most Northern Europeans