The UK government has been very clear about what it wants to see in international recruitment over the period of the International Education Strategy – a focus on quality.
We will work closely with the sector to ensure that our institutions recruit international higher education students in a way that maintains quality and student experience. This includes considering factors such as skills and entry requirements, adequate infrastructure, local housing, and support systems, whilst respecting institutional autonomy.
Quality is already quite a complex notion in education. When you apply it to international education it becomes more complicated still. It has a lot to do with students themselves – their route to an offer, what their learning experience looks like and the outcomes they achieve. But it’s also about the factors that contribute to making the UK a world-leading destination for international education: how the immigration system treats students; the global reputation of UK universities for academic quality; and people’s impressionistic sense of which institutions “count” as offering quality, whether or not that bears any relation to the specifics of the offer.
Wonkhe and IDP are working together on a high-level “pre-mortem” of the government’s International Education Strategy against a backdrop of a political and economic environment that has made international education such a highly charged issue. The idea of a “pre-mortem” does not assume failure, but seeks at the outset to identify and neutralise the factors that might cause a strategy to fail in the future – with a view to maximising the chance of success. Our working assumption is that the strategy represents an offer to the sector, to find ways to take some of the heat out of the student immigration debate and align around a positive and optimistic narrative framing and position international education as part of a larger global education ecosystem in which the UK plays a leading role.
The success of the strategy depends on all parts of the education sector – but particularly the HE sector – to tacitly accept the terms of that offer, notwithstanding ongoing disquiet about the international levy, and the prospective impact of the tightening of student visa rules. The probable alternative, especially given pressures from the populist right, would be a pulling back from international education, with permanent impact on the UK’s capacity to realise the value of its education system and benefit from the international exchange and connections that it makes possible.
If, then, in two, three or five years, the HE sector was asked by policymakers to show what had changed as a result of the strategy, what might institutional leaders point to – and what needs to be put in place now to ensure that they have something to say? To help answer that question we conducted a private round table on the theme of quality with sector experts, with a further two planned on local and regional impact of international education, and on international student outcomes.
Capturing quality
The UK’s reputation for quality education is longstanding, while simultaneously rather nebulous. Powerful global rankings serve as a shorthand for quality for students, families, governments, and employers, while often telling us little about the specifics of students’ educational experiences or prospects. In some key markets, including China, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, rankings directly influence government scholarship allocation, housing access, and career prospects. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle that is difficult to disrupt and mitigates against building a more coherent shared sector narrative of quality, as institutions compete to maximise their rankings performance.
There are significant sector-wide evidence gaps, most obviously on international student destinations, but also on the quality of postgraduate Masters-level education specifically, which is the largest qualification market for international education. While indicators of international student experience may be extracted from wider datasets such as the NSS or PTES, the sector does not routinely systematically ask international students for their views of their experience as international students; such data is typically held only at institutional level.
While tearing up the rankings or introducing major new quality assessment instruments isn’t realistically on the cards, it could be worth exploring how existing data sources could be more readily combined and rendered more accessible and student-facing. Ireland’s TrustEd quality mark is tied directly to immigration licensing and offers quality assurance designed explicitly for the international market.
The experts we spoke to pointed out that existing international benchmarking tends to focus on (Western) competitor countries rather than exploring the aspects of quality that have particular salience in target student markets. Competitor countries are not standing still – destinations across ASEAN, the Middle East and elsewhere are actively improving their international student offer, including more flexible post-study work arrangements and culturally attuned support.
There could be an opportunity as part of a sector-level piece of work to explore international education quality to design a framework in partnership with international students and graduates, not solely through sector delivery or regulatory lens. A framework that reflects what international students actually value – tested with them, not assumed – would carry far more weight both domestically and in global markets.
The role of agents
The sector narrative around rogue agents is overly simplistic – the vast majority of agents operate ethically and provide a valuable service to students and institutions. However, a critical gap is the absence of a meaningful feedback loop between institutions and agents. Under current arrangements, agents typically support students to the point of enrolment but have limited visibility of what happens afterwards. Without data on completion rates, satisfaction and outcomes, agents cannot identify or address problems in their pipeline, and institutions miss an opportunity to strengthen recruitment quality at source.
A more constructive model is beginning to emerge at some institutions, where agents are treated as compliance partners. This involves sharing performance dashboards that track BCA metrics and student outcomes by agent, offering a benchmark to aim for, and evaluating the success of agent relationships not just in terms of enrolment numbers but in terms of graduate outcomes. This kind of genuine partnership – built on data and shared accountability – would be far more productive than the current transactional model that largely ends at the point of enrolment.
There are international examples of a more systematic focus on agent quality as well. In New Zealand, Immigration New Zealand has published data on the best performing agents based on application volume and visa approval rates. The incoming Agent Quality Framework (AQF) is a step in the right direction to ensure agent accountability and partnership, but would be even stronger if it integrated with wider measures on assuring and promoting the quality of international education.
Compliance and care
An area of concern is the tension between the increasingly regulated compliance environment and the quality of support offered to international students. Compliance monitoring – particularly in relation to visa conditions, attendance, and engagement – can easily tip from a supportive function into a punitive one. A counter-perspective is that of engagement-data informed efforts to support student retention, which is routinely practised in many institutions in the sector, and proposes monitoring as the basis for effective support and demonstration of care rather than surveillance.
The notion of “compassionate compliance” can help to resolve this tension – systems designed with the student interest in mind, that seeks to understand why a student might be disengaging and offer support, rather than simply flagging non-attendance for immigration action. This requires joining up immigration compliance teams with wider academic support and student wellbeing provision. The challenge is that regulatory burden is already absorbing significant institutional capacity, and where institutions have grown international student numbers rapidly, the support infrastructure may have failed to keep pace. Addressing this gap was seen as one of the most immediate and practical steps the sector could take.
While much of the narrative on quality is either outside the sector’s control or subject to regulatory diktat, scope remains for action on demonstrating a greater degree of coherence in thinking about how the various elements of quality work together. Data pooling, international comparisons, reframing of practice and exploring student perceptions of quality are all well within the sector’s scope for action, would demonstrate engagement with the challenge – and might even uncover some novel ways of thinking about what the next iteration of the international education strategy might do to assure the UK’s reputation for quality for the long term.
This article is published as part of a partnership with IDP Education. The authors would like to thank those who attended the round table for their contributions.
