About The Departure Board
We want to increase the number of students taking part in life-changing work and volunteer experience overseas.
By building the go-to platform for students at UK universities we aim to:
- Directly support students to find opportunities to work or volunteer overseas.
- Generate anonymised data and insights to guide universities towards supporting the kinds of opportunities their students really want and reduce the barriers they face in taking part.
- Help to create ways for students to finance the up-front costs involved in taking part in opportunities overseas.
We aim to reinvest around half of our profits into scholarships and mentorship initiatives that help reduce barriers to students taking part in opportunities that are proven to improve their academic performance and graduate earning potential.
“Employers need resilient, work-ready graduates. Spending time working overseas is highly effective in developing those attributes, but barriers exist to gaining such an experience. Students from less privileged backgrounds often see education abroad as an expensive activity for the privileged few. Existing social mobility programmes focus on helping students ‘get in’ to university but once there, students from less privileged backgrounds gather fewer experiences in the workplace and overseas. The searchable market for these opportunities is messy and common imagery focusses on self-discovery over skills. We created the Departure Board to contribute towards solving these problems.”
A Lasting Impact
The Departure Board’s founders Jamie and Jan first bonded over the lack of progress when it comes to underrepresented students taking part in experiences overseas. We believe that as long as these experiences are predominantly the reserve of more privileged students, we’ll never be able to prove the power of spending time abroad when it comes to reducing inequality and improving attainment gaps. To maximise the Departure Board’s potential to reduce inequality, we’re partnering with a number of organisations to help shape our platform and create lasting impact.
Jamie Bettles
Founder and advisor for high-impact education and community startups. Previously founded Pagoda Projects, and served on the BUTEX committee (2024/25) as representative of associate members.
Jamie brings with him 15 years experience of working with more than 50 universities and 500+ companies to give more than 3,000 students life-changing global opportunities.
Dr Jan Vandeburie
Jan has an academic background in cross-cultural and interfaith relations, with over 15 years of experience working at universities in the UK, Italy, and the US. His own journey of moving countries to study and work inspired a passion for widening student participation in global mobility opportunities. Through his previous roles as Study Abroad Coordinator for History, Politics, and International Relations at the University of Leicester, and as project lead for widening participation in global mobility at the University of Manchester, Jan is recognised as a leading expert in overcoming the barriers faced by underrepresented students.