Funding from the Turing Scheme is improving inclusivity for students from less advantaged backgrounds and low-income households at Queen Mary University of London. In the 2021 to 2022 academic year over 100 students will travel abroad to study or work as part of their degree.
Strategic alignment
The vision of Queen Mary’s strategy 2030 is ‘To open the doors of opportunity’, with Queen Mary becoming the most inclusive university of its kind, anywhere. To contribute to this, Queen Mary’s Global Opportunities team is working to improve the participation rate of disadvantaged students through targeted financial support.
Queen Mary was recently named best university in the country for social mobility, and in comparison to other Russel Group universities has a larger population of ethnically and culturally diverse students. It also has a large cohort of students from less advantaged backgrounds who are the main recipients of Turing Scheme funding, which allows them to benefit from life-changing and career-enhancing international educational experiences.
Professor Colin Grant, Vice Principal (International) at Queen Mary University of London, said: “Supporting our students to succeed is at the heart of everything we stand for at Queen Mary. 24 per cent of our undergraduate students are from households with an annual income below £10,000. Turing Scheme funding provides much needed financial support to students from less advantaged backgrounds. It helps them experience a period abroad, boosting their employability skills and international outlook.”
Widening access and social mobility
The Turing Scheme breaks down the barriers to social mobility by funding a career-enhancing international educational experience that also immerses the student in the culture of another country.
Kate Ellis, studying Politics at Queen Mary, is studying abroad at Columbia University in the USA: “Turing funding allowed me to actually make the most of my time in New York and do things like eating out, seeing a Broadway show, travelling within the state and nearby states, and even across the border into Canada.”
Through a period abroad, Queen Mary students are enhancing their employability skills and will be prepared to enter the graduate job market and help reduce this skills gap, thanks to having developed technical skills such as language learning, and critical interpersonal skills such as self-management, networking, problem-solving and intercultural awareness and communication.
