Home Office Q2 data and the scale of the BCA challenge

We already know the broad strokes of application volume up to July, and though this latest release gives us details about visa grants and breaks them down by study level and nationality, in big picture terms there’s not much to say here beyond what was already known after Q1.

Though study visas remain down on the 2022 and 2023 boom years, we do get the usual increase in Graduate route extensions that have ensued from higher numbers and changing student behaviour: in the latest figures up 24 per cent year-on-year at 182,796 grants. We no longer get the quarterly breakdown between Russell Group and non-Russell Group extensions, which has been discontinued – possibly, though I can’t prove it, as a result of me complaining about it.

Given the silly season Times front page splash earlier this month, which re-announced changes to UKVI rules that had already appeared in May’s immigration white paper, it’s perhaps worth taking a look at one of the underappreciated – and previously less consequential – aspects of the data release, which is figures around visa refusals.

The one thing we did learn from The Times’ story was that the changes are “expected to be announced next month” – this refers to strengthened compliance measures including a requirement for no more than five per cent of visa applications to be rejected, down from the current ten per cent. This originally got a mention in the Conservatives’ response to the graduate route review, and so is something that UKVI has been slowly manoeuvring into place for a while.

While the sector response to the white paper ostensibly focused ire on the mooted fee levy, purporting to welcome the tightening of visa standards, there’s no doubt that the various UKVI measures are causing concern and discouraging universities from recruiting from “risky” markets, where students may fail to pass the visa application process. Requiring 95 per cent of visa applications to be accepted is potentially a tough ask, in particular for smaller providers and those recruiting from certain countries with generally poorer students.

(Also, out of the three new BCA measures the Home Office is bringing in – the others are stricter course enrolment rates and completion rates – visa refusal rate is the one least in institutions’ gift to change. There’s an argument that if Home Office checks find that an applicant should not be granted a study visa, for example due to having insufficient funds, then this is the system “working” as it should.)

The quarterly release allows us to produce an updated table of refusal rates by nationality for study visas. This includes both main applicants and dependants in the year to June, and I’ve included the top nationalities for applications in 2025, with the exclusion of countries where the grant rate has generally been 99+% over the period, such as China, USA, Malaysia, and Kuwait.

What we can immediately see is that there are several nationalities which are below, or on the very edge of, the new 95 per cent threshold (in the broad terms here – this is not how it will be tracked by UKVI, and we’ll have to wait until September for the exact details).

Including a couple of historical comparisons also shows that UKVI has become much stricter since 2022 (as we’ve previously flagged), though for many nationalities there has been a slight improvement over the last year, likely as a result of the dependants ban and stricter checks by institutions. Markets which previously would have seen almost all students get awarded visas will now, given the incoming policy shift, be risky to recruit from.

Update: there’s also one another new element to the release which is worth keeping an eye on given the government’s recent focus on it – asylum claims by visa route (tab D01a on this spreadsheet). We get data going back to 2018 by quarter, when previously there had only been an ad hoc release for the whole of 2024. 

Total claims by those who entered the UK on study visas are as follows: 2018 = 4,900, 2019 = 4,100, 2020 = 2,900, 2021 = 2,800, 2022 = 8,700, 2023 = 14,100, 2024 = 16,200.

The first two quarters of 2025 show a decrease, with the Home Office noting “claims have decreased in the latest year by 10%” but that “the number of asylum claimants who previously held a study visa (or were dependants of students) was equivalent to 3% of all study visas granted (including extensions) in that period.” Hence we still get headlines like the one in The Times above.