Wales’ Education Minister working with Scotland and Northern Ireland on rejoining Erasmus
Wales’ Education Minister has said that she is working with the Scottish and Northern Ireland governments to see if it’s possible for them to rejoin the Erasmus scheme.
Kirsty Williams said that after Boris Johnson’s decision to withdraw from it as part of the EU trade deal was “deeply, deeply disappointing”.
“We are working with colleagues in Scotland and Northern Ireland to see whether we can retain membership of Erasmus+,” she said.
A petition on the matter has already been signed by over 1,000 people.
Participation
The Erasmus scheme gives financial support to students within the programme to study abroad for a set amount of time – either a semester or a year – in a participating country.
Students from the UK who wanted to study within Europe were given financial support from the EU, funded by participating states paying in.
Welshman Dr. Hywel Ceri Jones was one of the main driving forces within the EU executive when Erasmus first began to take shape in the 1970s and 1980s and is considered one of the architects of the scheme.
In 2017, 16,561 UK students participated in the scheme, while 31,727 EU nationals from other countries came to study in Britain under it.
A number of non-EU countries are members of the Erasmus scheme, including Iceland, Turkey, Norway, and Serbia.
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