Learning Abroad: A History of the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan

Learning Abroad: A History of the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan, by Hilary Perraton. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Pubhshing, 2009. vi + 232pp. ISBN 1-4438-0600-5. £39.99. The Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan (CSFP), has enabled around 27,000 mostly young people to attend universities in other Commonwealth countries since it was launched in 1959. Its origins Ue in a late flowering of the Commonwealth idea, in Canada and the United Kingdom, before the multilateral Commonwealth Secretariat was born in 1965. It has survived, with hiccups, from an era when only a tiny handful had any higher education, into a time of mass higher education, in India as much as in Britain, when learning is often seen as a commercial commodity in a competitive market. Hilary Perraton, who has been close to educational action in the Commonwealth for many years, has done a careful job in tracing the CSFP's history, its ups and downs, and what it has meant for scholars who got awards and the institutions they went to. From its outset the UK has been much the biggest player, with its contribution managed by a Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, but countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Ghana and Malaysia have also been steady, small-scale supporters. The CSFP was born of the enthusiasm for the Commonwealth of John Diefenbaker - Dief the Chief - the unexpected Conservative winner of a Canadian election in 1957, most of whose more expensive ideas were shot down by the British Treasury after a Montreal conference in 1958. But the Scholarship Plan, endorsed by an Oxford educational conference the following year, did get established. It is interesting to recall that it was in 1958 that the Commonwealth Institute Act was passed in London, converting the old Imperial Institute into an educational institution. On both sides of the Atlantic, as decolonisation reached Ghana and the Common Market had yet to remake Europe, there was optimism about the But as Perraton points out, the CSFP was never a properly multilateral project, but a series of donor awards labelled Commonwealth. Over the years the idea that it would promote Commonwealth cohesion lost ground to other purposes - to promote the development of poorer states, to attract good students to the universities of richer countries ( though they were aU supposed to go home after graduation ), or to achieve soft power or specific manpower objectives. Introduction of full-cost fees in richer countries in the 1980s, and the enormous growth in transnational study in the 21st century, have left the Plan as a prestigious oddity. What has the CSFP meant for Africa? By 2006, for instance, Nigeria had had 1256 scholarships, compared to Australia's 1295, or Ghana's 673. Kenya had had 679, to Uganda's 460 and Tanzania's 496. Relatively speaking, smaUer countries in Africa and elsewhere in the Commonwealth had done weU; Botswana had had 85 scholarships by the same date, Gambia 141 and Lesotho 80. …

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