Lujam Okello: What My Semester Abroad Taught Me About Britain’s Broken Promise To Young People

Four months ago, I packed my life into two suitcases and moved to Austria for a semester abroad. This was one of the best decisions I have made at university. I met people from different parts of the world and made new friends, learned a new language and whilst studying I saw my degree, Politics and International Relations, in a completely different way from outside a British lecture hall. But getting there was not so easy as it would have been for a student doing the same thing in 2018. I went through the Turing Scheme, the UK’s post-Brexit replacement for Erasmus+, and the experience left me with a genuine concern: my generation was never asked whether we wanted this trade-off to happen, and for six years we have been living with the worst version of something those before us took for granted. 

That grievance is the main reason and sits at the centre of one of the more overlooked elements of the UK-EU ‘reset’. Whilst newspaper headlines have been focusing on digging rights, defence cooperation and electricity markets, two decisions have taken over the past year massively to anyone my age: the UK’s return to Erasmus+, and the negotiations over a UK-EU youth mobility scheme. 

In April 2026, the EU and UK came to an agreement that would allow the UK to rejoin Erasmus+ from the 1st of January 2027, as an associated third country. This is the same status that Norway, Iceland and Switzerland hold. A discount of 30% was secured by the government on its financial contribution compared with the standard third-country rate, and the British Council has been lined up to become the UK’s national agency for the programme, the same role it held between 2014 and 2020. In its first year alone, over 100,000 people in the UK could benefit from this scheme. 

This is definitely good news, and something that always felt like a self-inflicted wound that was now corrected. The Turing Scheme was introduced after Britain left Erasmus+ and funds were given out to UK students to study abroad but has never offered anything in return. What the scheme failed to do was provide reciprocity, meaning European students cannot access equivalent funding to come and study here. This was important practically and symbolically with fewer exchange partnerships, fewer EU students choosing any UK universities, and smaller cultural exchange in both directions. Having been through the Turing Scheme process myself, this is a clear gap with no guaranteed grant structure that is comparable to what the previous generation had and none of the institutional scaffolding that comes from being a full programme member rather than a funding scheme added on afterwards. 

The most important and the one that is still stuck is a UK-EU youth mobility scheme, sometimes called a ‘Youth Experience Scheme’ to make it seem less like a free movement Britain voted to leave. Under current proposal discussed, 18- to 30-year-olds could stay for up to four years in other countries for work, study or travel, all without the right to settle permanently. In Parliament, analysis found that a reciprocal scheme could potentially add from 0.4 and 0.45% to UK GDP over a decade, however progress has been slow. 

Why? This is because the UK continues to treat the scheme primarily as a migration question that is to be tightly controlled, while the EU sees it as a time-limited exchange to be supported with two starting positions that are hard to reconcile in a political climate where immigration polls is one of the country’s most sensitive issues. The UK government has insisted that any scheme must align with current arrangements, including no access to benefits and no right to bring dependants, while costs for participants in current youth mobility schemes can already exceed £3,000 in any direction. This is a genuine prohibitive sum for most students or new graduates. If the eventual deal replicates that fee structure, ‘mobility’ will remain something only comfortably-off young people will be able to actually use, which instead undercuts the point. 

What really struck me the most was reading through the negotiating history and how one-sided the frustration has been. In 2016, none of us who are now 21, 22 and 23 got to vote. A survey from YouGov February 2026 found that 80% of Britain’s aged 18 to 24 saw Brexit as more of a failure than a success, compared with only 47% of those aged 65 and over, and support for re-joining the EU sits at 80% among 18- to 24-year-olds, against 40% among the over-65s. This is honestly a clear generational divide as British politics produces on any issue. 

Erasmus+ returning is evidence that reversing some of the damage is politically possible when both sides want it to happen. However, the slower moving youth mobility talks are the real test of whether Parliament takes seriously the idea that young people’s life chances of being able to work, study and simply live across a continent that is a two-hour flight away deserves the same priority as quotas and energy markets. My time and semester abroad in Austria happened despite the system, not because of it. The next cohort of students that go abroad to study deserves a system that is built for them, and not just one where they have to work around it. 

References

1. House of Commons Library, ‘UK-EU reset: Agreement on UK participation in the EU Erasmus+ programme’ (2025) https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10449/
2. GOV.UK, ‘UK and EU finalise agreement to bring UK into Erasmus+ in 2027’ (2026) https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-eu-finalise-agreement-to-bring-uk-into-erasmus-in-2027
3. Youth for Europe, ‘The United Kingdom Returns to Erasmus+ from 2027’ (2026) https://youthforeurope.eu/the-united-kingdom-returns-to-erasmus-from-2027-what-changes-for-students-and-institutions/
4. UK in a Changing Europe, Youth mobility is not freedom of movement’ (2025) https://ukandeu.ac.uk/youth-mobility-is-not-freedom-of-movement/
5. UK Parliament, Early Day Motion, UK-EU Youth Mobility Scheme’ (2026) https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/65905/ukeu-youth-mobility-scheme
6. Fragomen, ‘UK EU Youth Mobility Scheme Talks: Progress, Trade Offs and What Employers Should Expect’ (2026) https://www.fragomen.com/insights/uk-eu-youth-mobility-scheme-talks.html
7. UK Trade and Business Commission, ‘On the Youth Experience Scheme’ (2025) https://www.tradeandbusiness.uk/evidence/on-the-youth-experience-scheme
8. Inter Alia, ‘The UK’s Return to Erasmus+: A Step Toward Renewed EU-UK Cooperation Starting in 2027’ (2026) https://interaliaproject.com/the-uks-return-to-erasmus-a-step-toward-renewed-eu-uk-cooperation-starting-in-2027/