While the UK is the second most popular destination for foreign students, UK institutions take more than double the number of students they send elsewhere.

The proportion of UK students on years abroad rose by just two percentage points in the two years after 2014. A third of students working or studying abroad were on a languages course.

UUK hopes to double the proportion on years abroad by 2020, with a target of 13 per cent of all domestic students.

Steve Gwenin, Chief Executive of GVI, a company that works with UK universities to send students on year abroad programmes, said that British students are stuck in a “gap year mentality”.

Students have lavish holiday ‘gap years’ abroad, but do not recognise the value of learning languages and soft skills, such as teamwork, leadership and problem-solving, he said.

“For the European students we get, part of their key objective is cultural immersion and exploration. In the UK I’m not sure that as a society we place a high emphasis on cultural exploration. It’s not phrased as a key objective or a key skill.”

“Universities are struggling to supply soft skills. They’re teaching a lot of technical skills, but they’re understanding the need to get outside of the classroom environment,” he said.

Mr Gwenin also said that the rise of overbearing “helicopter parenting” and too much “screen time” in the UK meant that students no longer wanted to explore the world as they once did.

“Real life experience is not quite there as it used to be,” he said.

In July, UUK revealed that there are more international students studying for a UK degree outside the UK than in the country, by learning online or through partner institutions abroad.

So-called ‘transnational education’, where UK degrees are administered elsewhere in the world, has increased by more than 75 per cent in the last ten years to more than 700,000, while the number of international students the UK is less than half a million.