Capita: Turing Scheme Contract

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his question. As I mentioned, 48% of applications have come from students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We have made it a great focus of the scheme and its promotion geographically has tried to reach communities that have not previously participated as strongly in these kinds of international exchanges. We are making sure that the nature of the placements and the financial model to support them particularly encourage disadvantaged students.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, does the noble Baroness not recognise that this issue of a lack of reciprocity and places for overseas—not just European —students in British universities is a serious failing of the Turing scheme? The figures she gives are not very convincing because we have always taken in more students to our excellent higher education sector than we have sent to others, so that is nothing new.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I can only repeat for the noble Lord that funding has been made available this year for over 41,000 placements. I appreciate that they are not all comparable in scale to the previous ones but 41,000 young people will access this scheme, compared to 16,596 under Erasmus. I leave the House to judge.