BRUSSELS — The U.K. decided to leave the EU’s Erasmus+ student exchange scheme because Brits’ poor foreign language skills made membership too expensive to justify, a senior British official has revealed.
Lower take-up of the scheme by British students compared to other nationalities — put down to a weak aptitude for language learning — meant London expected to pay in nearly €300 million more a year than it received back, Nick Leake, a veteran senior diplomat at the U.K. Mission said this week.
Leake was representing the British government at a meeting of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), an EU advisory body drawn from civil society organizations across the bloc.
At the session of the body’s external relations section on Wednesday, delegates approved a recommendation calling for the European Commission to “strengthen negotiations with the U.K. government for the full reintegration of the U.K. into Erasmus+.”
María Rodríguez Alcázar, president of the European Youth Forum, said: “We trust that all the recommendations in the EESC’s opinion, including the U.K.'s reassociation to Erasmus+, will be discussed and implemented by decision makers from both sides of the channel.”
Jan Hendrik Dopheide, a senior EU official working on relations with the U.K., told the same meeting that the Commission was talking to member states about how to proceed on the issue of youth mobility in general.
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