British universities will establish global networks and recruit the world's "best and brightest" students outside of the European Union, Oxford University's head of Brexit strategy claimed yesterday.

Speaking publicly for the first time since his appointment in December, Professor Alastair Buchan told the Education Select Committee that membership of the EU had "sidelined" Canadian and American researchers who used to come to work at British universities, as freedom of movement made it easier to recruit Europeans.

"One of the things that we did lose was that nice and easy flow of clinicians and clinician science from Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa," he told the Committee in the first public hearing since the vote to leave in June last year.

"We had really good collaborations, which hopefully in this Brexit climate might be reinvented, because that movement of English-speaking medicine was actually a casualty of joining Europe."