European waiver plea

University European officers have urged peers to back fee waivers and grants for students on short visits to the Continent.

Members of the Association of Higher Education European Officers have called on a House of Lords committee probing student mobility to back better support for a growing number of students spending only a few months or weeks in another European country.

They want the government to extend new fee waivers for students spending a year on a European exchange programme to those on shorter visits.

And they are pressing for Britain to argue that the successor to the Socrates-Erasmus scheme being introduced by the European Commission should lower the minimum study period abroad for which grants can be awarded to less than three months.