80,000 UK students to visit China to boost trade links
27 May 2014 02:19 PM
Vince Cable urges
business leaders to support a drive to double the number of UK exchange
students who travel to China.
Business Secretary Vince Cable
will today (27 May 2014) urge business leaders to support a drive to double the
number of UK exchange students who travel to China as part of plans to boost
trade links.
In a letter to FTSE 100
UK CEOs, the Secretary of State will call upon businesses to support
Generation UK, the British Council’s flagship programme, which aims to
see 80,000 UK students participate in academic study or work experience
programmes in China by 2020.
Currently over 100,000 mainland
Chinese students come to the UK every year while only 5,400 UK students studied
in China last year (2013).
An independent study for the
government has found that the annual cost of language skills deficit to the UK
economy is £48 billion.
Vince Cable made the
announcement on a visit to Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou where he also
announced that the Chinese University has signed an Memorandum of Understanding
(MoU) between Warwick and Glasgow Universities to offer student
exchanges.
Glasgow University will be
welcoming medical student exchanges and Warwick’s student exchanges will
be in the areas of systems biology, nursing, digital pathology, and integrated
healthcare systems.
Business Secretary Vince Cable
said:
The global centre of gravity is
shifting eastwards to major economic powerhouses like China. But while China
sends around 100,000 students each year to the UK, we send little more than
5,000 in the opposite direction – and that’s 2 thirds more than we
sent in 2010.
By contrast, France sends over
8,000 students to China annually.
We must raise our game. New
independent research shows that a lack of language skills in the UK is costing
our economy about £48 billion. The shortage of Mandarin speakers is part
of the problem. I don’t want young British people to get left
behind.
So today, I’ve written to
a range of leading UK businesses urging them to get behind the British
Council’s Generation UK campaign, which aims to increase the number of UK
people studying or undertaking internships in China to 80,000 by
2020.
Participants in this programme
will not only boost their own career prospects, but become ambassadors for
UK-China relations on their return home.
Carma Elliot, Director of the
British Council in China said:
Generation UK creates incredible
opportunities and access for young people in the UK to experience life in
China’s rapidly growing economy. By coming to China to work or study, UK
students develop a global mind-set and gain international experience and skills
that will enable them to thrive in a globally competitive labour
market.
John Cridland, CBI
Director-General said:
I was delighted to have been
involved in the British Council’s ‘Generation UK’ programme
during the Prime Minister’s China visit last December (2013) and the CBI
is pleased to support the British Council’s exciting new
‘CEO Initiative’ which is aimed at building the next
generation of British talent through UK-China business partnerships. I hope
that our member companies will also get involved in this worthy
initiative.
A second MoU was also
signed today which will allow The Hartree Technology Facilities Council to use
the Guangzhou Super Computer, Tainhe-2.
The Hartree Centre is the
UK’s premier supercomputing environment and carries
out R&D service to help UK industry and academia develop better
products, services, processes and software.
The Tainhe-2 is larger than
systems that the Hartree centre has currently and will save them the £100
million cost of building their own system.
Notes to
editors
1.The government
launched International Education:
Global Growth and Prosperity on 29 July 2013 as a strand of its
Industrial Strategy programme. Education is the second largest sector globally
after healthcare and education exports were worth an estimated £17.5
billion to the UK economy in 2011.
British universities, colleges,
awarding organisations, schools and education businesses are recognised
globally for their excellence.
2.Our expertise – from
governance models and curricular design to professional development and
management – is renowned. But other countries also recognise the
opportunities of the education sector and are competing for a larger share of
the market.
3.The strategy aims to set out
for the first time how government and the whole education sector will work
together to build on our broad strengths to grow the economy and our wider
links with partners around the world. It focuses on both:
- the direct contribution that
exports make to growth through income from education provision and the sale of
educational products and services
- the indirect contribution that
comes from the relationships and trust that educational partnerships create,
which form the foundation for our political and trading relationships across
the world
4.The Generation UK website can
be accessed at ‘Generation UK
5.The government’s
long-term plan is to build a strong, more competitive economy and a fairer
society. Industrial
Strategy gives impetus to the plan for growth by providing businesses,
investors and the public with clarity about the long-term direction in which
the government wants the economy to travel.
The first achievements and future priorities of the industrial strategy have
been published and can be found herehttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/industrial-strategy-early-succ
esses-and-future-priorities.