News

Schools to get £10m Turing Scheme cash for 5,000 placements

Turing Scheme
Exclusive

Schools will receive £10 million in funding from the government’s Turing Scheme, Schools Week can reveal.

£105 million in total has been promised to pay for 35,000 placements for the UK’s new international student exchange programme, which is set to get underway in September.

In an interview with Schools Week’s sister paper FE Week, Ecorys, the co-delivery partner with the British Council for the Turing Scheme, revealed that £10 million will go to schools, £35 million to further education and £60 million will go to universities.

This roughly equates to about 5,000 school placements, 10,000 further education placements and 20,000 higher education placements.

The scheme, named after scientist Alan Turing, was unveiled in December as the replacement to the UK’s participation in Erasmus+ following Brexit.

It will allow school pupils to study abroad on placements ranging from between three days to six months.

From later this month, schools will be able to bid for funding to run short-term placements for pupils of any age and accompanying staff lasting for between three days and two months.

Or they can bid for funding for long-term placements for pupils aged 14 and over, which could last from two to six months, with funding for chaperone staff “where necessary as part of safeguarding or duty of care”.

The Department for Education plans to issue funding decisions in July.

A new Turing Scheme programme guide was published on Wednesday and provides detail of how the funding will work.

For schools, they will get £315 per participant in “organisational support” for the first 100 participants, and £180 for groups bigger than that.

For travel costs, they will receive a fixed amount depending how far away the destination is. For sending learners anywhere between 100 to 499 km away it’s £165 – while visiting Tanzania, for instance, at 11,000 km, would qualify for £905. Travel distances of 12 km or more will warrant funding of £1,360.

There will also be cost of living funding, providing pupils and the staff accompanying them with £53 per day for the first 14 days and £37 a day thereafter.

School participants from “defined disadvantaged backgrounds” will receive “actual costs for additional travel expenses, including costs of visas, passports, and health insurance.”

And for pupils with SEND, the scheme will fund up to 100 per cent of actual costs for support “directly related to their additional needs”.

Your thoughts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *