Defacto regulation of international agents is coming – but student voices are missing as usual

Then universities minister Robert Halfon also announced that the Department for Education (DfE) was launching an “urgent” investigation into bad practice by agents where it occurs.

No news on whether that came to anything, but at the time Universities UK also announced that its Board had agreed two actions – to work to ensure adoption of the Agent Quality Framework across the sector, and make recommendations on how the AQF and wider UK data infrastructure could be enhanced to identify and address bad practice and improve resilience.

The first of those is now looking like a mandate rather than gentle encouragement. UUK International says that providers sponsoring students to study in the UK will be required to sign up to the AQF from the spring.

UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) will check for evidence of non-compliance with it during audits, and the details of agents are to be added to Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies (CAS) issued to international students to enhance transparency.

That doesn’t quite get us to students knowing how much of their tuition fee has been trousered by the agent – but the gentle drift towards tightening this area up is pretty good news if you’re concerned about the antics of agents that sell UK HE.

(Most) universities are charities, and over in the charity sector there’s a healthy debate about transparency over the costs of fundraising. So as well as students being made aware of which universities work with which education agent, what services the education agent is contracted to deliver, the commercial nature of the relationship and the fee handed over, there really ought to be easy to access data on the total spend on agents published by each university, ideally via a revised accounts direction from OfS, Medr and SFC.

More broadly, notwithstanding the vague threat of UKVI officials inspecting against the framework, the problem is a bit like the three-line whip on the University Mental Health Charter – it’s a process commitment rather than an outcome one.

That’s partly because the second UUK commitment on “enhancing” the framework seems to have disappeared – or at least that it has decided that no recommendations are required.

It’s also the case that regulatory levers that tend to be reached for in the UK have a depressingly familiar approach – they attempt to tackle egregiously bad behaviour without tackling the underpinning incentives that lead to it. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper at least should understand why you need to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of it.

What we don’t have – but really do need – is a proper piece of work that triangulates feedback from providers, agents, aggregators, UKVI officials, and actual students – because I don’t think I’ve met an international elected student officer in the past five years that doesn’t have endless tales of problems with agents.

Back in April, we ran a couple of focus groups with those officers and a number of the staff that work in students’ union advice centres.

The outputs don’t represent a nationally representative sample any more than a set of court cases tell us about general crime in society – but they do suggest a whole host of holes in the framework at present, particularly as pretty much everyone involved worked at a university supposedly signed up to the scheme.

• We heard of widespread disappointment when the reality of studying and living costs in the UK did not match the rosy picture painted by agents and influencers. Sometimes that was about positive spin – but sometimes it was about downright falsehoods.
• We heard stories of agents directly lying to students about accommodation availability, cost of living, post-study job prospects and the availability of public funds (for, for example, pregnant students).
• A particular concern was students being pressured into choosing particular universities where agents had financial relationships with those providers. Even the transparency that’s coming won’t reveal which other universities an agent is and isn’t engaged with.
• We heard about a lack of proactive welfare checks on students who had been recruited by agents that were later “sacked” or cut ties with by universities.
• There were several stories of pregnant students arriving alone in the UK expecting social housing support, but facing homelessness with newborns after being misinformed.
• We heard about a lack of hardship funding or emergency support for international students facing unexpected financial difficulties or crises once enrolled in their programs – despite such support being promised by their agent.
• There were a number of stories about unethical conditional or unconditional offers, and misnamed “scholarships” (sticker price discounts), being dangled to international applicants in a classic “pressure selling” kind of way.

I could go on – but there is a fairly simple way to fix all of that. In the AQF, mystery shopping is posited merely as a “tip” that providers “may” carry out to determine areas for training and other incremental improvements.

That should be beefed up considerably – with students themselves invited via the students union to lead on asking the questions, reporting the results and causing action as a result. Otherwise, the incentives to not be aware of a problem overwhelm.

If nothing else, a little like the national Student Suicides review, providers should be asked to provide detail on what they’ve done in that area already – because there may be a need for wider policy change resulting from that intel too.

But even more importantly, as it stands the AQF suggests gathering feedback from students on arrival on the accuracy of information about the university/course provided. Not only is that too early, it’s too narrow – New Zealand’s equivalent code covers lots of other lies that can be told, and information that students need – including accurate and up to date info on housing, cost of living and their legal rights.

The feedback should be gathered later, use a set of standard questions, be fed in nationally, and be transparently and publicly acted on. We do this now with other types of student feedback – why on earth wouldn’t we do it on this issue? It’s a much better way of spotting issues than waiting for another scandal to pop up in the press.