A "hard Brexit" would be the "biggest disaster" to have hit the UK's universities for many years, a university head told MPs, according to a report in the BBC.

Alistair Fitt, vice chancellor of Oxford Brookes, was giving evidence to the Education Select Committee, holding a special away-day session at the University of Oxford.

With the elegant panorama of Pembroke College behind them, the MPs wanted to find out what would be the impact of Brexit on the UK's university sector.

You would be hard-pressed to find any sector in the country more opposed to Brexit than higher education, the BBC reports.

So it was probably no surprise that the MPs heard an unrelenting message that leaving the EU was a grim prospect for higher education and research.

The full BBC report can be found here