British Council Women in STEM Scholarships:
Eligibility, Cover and How to Apply

The British Council Scholarships for Women in STEM fund a one-year STEM master's degree in the UK in full. Tuition, twelve months of living costs, flights, visa and health costs, stated to be worth at least GBP 40,000. Ten countries apply under one regional cohort for fifteen places.

Candidates from Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Türkiye and Uzbekistan apply under the same cohort, Wider Europe. What follows is what the scholarship covers, who is eligible, which universities host it and how the application actually runs.

What the scholarship covers

• Full tuition
• A monthly living stipend for twelve months
• Return economy flights
• Visa fee, insurance and the NHS immigration health surcharge
• Study costs: course materials, compulsory field trips, thesis binding and similar items
• IELTS fee: covered for scholars who do not already hold a valid English language test result

Durham's page additionally lists accommodation at Hatfield, Trevelyan or Ustinov College. Bath and Bradford do not list accommodation as a separate item on their pages.

One detail on the IELTS item. It is a reimbursement: you pay for the test first and recover the cost if you are awarded the scholarship. It is not support with test costs at application stage.

Who can apply

Gender. The scholarship is open to women as defined in UK legislation. Where the institution asks for it, legal gender has to be confirmed by passport or official document, and that confirmation is a condition of the award.

Country and residence. Two conditions apply together: a valid passport, or recognised international travel document, of one of the eligible countries, and permanent residence in one of them. Applicants with refugee or stateless status may apply, provided they can meet UK visa requirements.

Field. STEM only: engineering, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, energy, computer science, data science, environmental science and comparable fields. Each university publishes its own list of eligible programmes; Durham listed sixteen master's programmes in the last round. You are also expected to be active in STEM, through work experience or demonstrated interest.

Academic. All components of your undergraduate degree must be complete at the point you submit the scholarship application. If you are in your final year, you can be considered provided you will finish before enrolment on the master's.

Who cannot apply

Two situations are outright exclusions. They appear both in the programme-wide eligibility criteria and on the Bath and Bradford pages:

• Dual British nationals.
• Employees and former employees of the UK government or of the British Council in eligible countries, and the defined relatives of employees of those organisations. The official definition of relatives: parents or step-parents, siblings or step-siblings, children or step-children, spouse, civil partner, and a partner in a relationship akin to marriage or civil partnership of at least two years' standing.

Conditions and preferences

Some criteria are mandatory and some are used to prioritise between eligible candidates. All of them are set out in the British Council eligibility criteria document, which states in its opening lines that the criteria have been approved by the British Council and all participating universities. A condition that does not appear on one university's page is not a condition that university has waived.

Condition: financial need. You must not be able to privately fund your UK studies. That is the test. If you are in receipt of financial support from another source that duplicates the core benefits of the scholarship, you are not eligible either. Having personal savings is not in itself a bar: the document expressly permits private savings that top up the scholarship. Additional awards aimed at academic or professional development are also possible, provided they do not replicate what the scholarship already provides.

Condition: return commitment. You undertake to return to your country of citizenship or residence for at least two years after the scholarship ends. Exemption is only considered in exceptional cases where return is impossible or unsafe. If your plan is to stay and work in the UK after the master's, this condition does not fit that plan.

Condition: contribution and representation. You are asked to be willing to contribute to capacity building and socioeconomic development in your own country after graduation, to stay in contact with the British Council, to act as an ambassador for the UK and to take part in Alumni UK activities. You are also asked to set out a plan for bringing other women and girls in your country into STEM. That last item is part of the assessment, not a formality.

Preference: limited international exposure and no previous UK study. This is not a condition. Preference is given to candidates who have not had significant international exposure or who have not previously studied in the UK.

The definitions matter. "Significant exposure" is defined in the document itself as a period of study longer than one month, or enrolling in or completing an international degree programme. Distance learning from UK universities and UK branch campuses abroad count within that definition. Short visits such as study trips and conferences do not, and will not place you outside the preferred profile.

One caution. The status of this item changes between rounds. For 2026-27 it is a preference. In the 2025-26 round, not having previously studied in the UK was an outright condition. Read the eligibility document published for the round you intend to apply to.

Which universities, and how many places

In the last round three universities opened places for the Wider Europe cohort: University of Bath, University of Bradford and Durham University. Five scholarships each.

Candidates from the ten Wider Europe countries apply for fifteen scholarships in total. No per-country allocation is published.

You do not apply to the British Council. You apply to each university separately. Applying to more than one institution is allowed, but you are then asked to state your programme and institution preference order.

The application sequence

The scholarship application is not part of the university application. They are two separate processes, and the second depends on the first. The three universities structure that dependency in three different ways.

Bath requires you to hold an offer before you can apply for the scholarship. The admissions process therefore has to be complete before the scholarship deadline.

Durham requires a completed academic application rather than an offer. In the last round the academic application deadline was 1 April and the scholarship form deadline 30 April. Indicating that you have applied for the scholarship defers your deposit deadline.

Bradford does not mention an offer requirement on its page.

The consequence is the same in all three cases: work has to be finished before the scholarship deadline. Choosing a programme, submitting the academic application, obtaining the required English language score and writing the scholarship application are consecutive tasks. If the English test has to be sat a second time, the timeline stretches by itself.

If you are finding it difficult to decide which programme to apply to and how to build the timeline, that planning is part of scholarship and funding advisory.

Application timeline and current status

The 2026-27 round is closed. Deadlines were 23 April 2026 at Bath and 30 April 2026 at Bradford and Durham. Durham also set 1 April 2026 for the academic application. Bradford stated that outcomes would be notified by 12 June 2026. Scholars started in September 2026.

The 2027-28 round has not been announced at the time of writing. The universities do not publish an opening date for the round, only the deadlines. In the last round those fell in April. To avoid missing the new round, the pages are worth watching from the first months of the year. This section will be updated when dates are published.

The programme is announced through the British Council website of each eligible country and through the three universities' own scholarship pages.

Who this scholarship is not for

The award is substantial, but it is designed around a particular candidate profile. If one of the following describes you, a different funding route is likely to be more productive.

• If you hold dual British nationality. This is an outright exclusion.
• If you are planning to stay and work in the UK after the master's. The two-year return commitment stands in the way.
• If you are able to fund your UK studies from private resources, or you hold other financial support that covers the core items of this scholarship. Having personal savings is not in itself a bar. The test is whether you could fund the whole degree yourself.
• If your field sits outside STEM.

None of this leaves you without funding. Other routes work on different logic: merit-based scholarships, government scholarships, universities' own awards and fee discounts, and subject-specific funds. For the broader picture of how funding eligibility actually works, see There Is No Scholarship List I Can Send You. For individual programmes, the Chevening, Erasmus Mundus and Jean Monnet guides stand on their own. If you are preparing the application itself, The Five Most Common Scholarship Application Mistakes goes through the process.

If you are not sure whether this scholarship fits you

If you are considering the Women in STEM scholarship, the first step is to establish whether your academic background, the master's programme you are targeting and the conditions above line up with the scholarship's criteria.

There may also be other scholarship and funding options that suit your profile better.

If you want to work out which scholarships you are eligible for, assess your options and build an application timeline, that is what scholarship advisory covers.

Learn About Scholarship Advisory →