Jim’s gone through the new Home Office data on visa grants pretty exhaustively already.

But one other thing that’s tucked away in the quarterly release is application stats (rather than issuances) broken down by whether the Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies was from a Russell Group or a non-Russell Group university.

In Q3 2024 – the key summer months of July, August and September – there were 113,777 at Russell Group universities, slightly down from 115,905 in Q3 2023. In non-Russell Group universities the corresponding fall was from 159,177 to 126,398. That’s quite the difference.

Now that the Department for Education has stopped publishing school progression to Russell Group universities as a school accountability measure, this leaves the Home Office somewhat out on a limb in continuing to divide up the sector in this way. Perhaps they should turn to tariff groups instead (this won’t please everyone). Or just publish the data by sponsoring institution rather than manually going through it to make it less useful.

But having the time series does allow for some insight into how policy changes are distributed, in very crude terms, between provider types. Now that we have Q3 data, we can chart the changes over the last four years, somewhat arbitrarily looking at October to September data – the reason for doing this is largely about including the most up to date figures. But given that the impact of the dependant ban began to be seen in Q4 2023 this is also a useful way in to the effects of that policy change.

	2020–21 (Q4 to Q3)	2021–22 (Q4 to Q3)	2022–23 (Q4 to Q3)	2023–24 (Q4 to Q3)
Russell Group universities	145,947	146,473	145,405	137,897
Non-Russell Group universities	179,176	272,357	305,854	227,702

There’s a clear picture here of two absolutely bumper years outside the Russell Group, while the Russell Group’s figures haven’t really changed that much when taken as a crude aggregate, as we’ve done here. The impact of the dependants ban – and the other external changes affecting students in India, Nigeria and other “newer” sending locations – is also absolutely plain to see over the last year.

There are big institutional variations that are not visible in the data here. And there are additional wrinkles around the extent to which more “prestigious” names changed their offer-making behaviour at PGT, alongside the widely intuited changes in this summer’s UCAS figures. But taken as a whole, it’s probably worth remembering that there will be few institutions that have in fact seen a 19 per cent fall in international recruitment this last year, as in the sector-wide figures. It will in many cases be less than that – and in many others, much more.