TNE, or not TNE, is not the question

Let’s consider perhaps the three biggest higher education stories to have hit the British news headlines over the past twelve months.

There’s been the crisis in university finances, with fears of the possible collapse of an entire institution even making it to fourth place the Labour Chief of Staff’s list of potential catastrophes a new government might imminently face.

There have also been concerns about the integrity of domestic partnership provision raised by National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee warnings over “suspicious patterns of activity and a “lack of transparency” – as well as investigations into standards and quality launched by the Office for Students.

And, of course, there have been various controversies around the recruitment of international students, with the media asking questions about the parity of entry tariffs and politicians seeing in restrictions upon the numbers of students and their dependants coming to the UK one way of addressing perennial debates over net migration.

Value

In this environment – one in which HEIs are looking to grow and diversify their income streams without deepening their reliance on incoming international student fees – the value of transnational education (TNE) as one of a range of solutions to some of these sectoral challenges has become increasingly clear.

According to data on revenue from education-related exports published by the Department for Education in March 2024, UK higher education TNE revenue for 2021 has been estimated as standing at £0.89 billion. This represents a 145 per cent increase on the £0.35 billion generated by such activity in 2010.

In 2022-23, HESA recorded 576,705 TNE students in total for 186 UK providers studying across 233 territories. This represents an 8 per cent rise from the previous year in terms of student numbers and a 7 per cent rise in providers involved in this market. This ongoing growth clearly demonstrates the increasing value of this area of provision.

These datasets show more than 40,000 students based at the overseas campuses of 27 UK providers. Spread across 155 UK providers, nearly 142,000 overseas students were engaged in distance, flexible or distributed learning leading to a UK award. Nearly 395,000 were studying for awards from 125 UK providers delivered in partnership with overseas providers.

Risk?

The relevant question is therefore not, after all, “TNE or not TNE?” – so much as how to mitigate both the financial and reputational risks that have sometimes been associated with transnational enterprises, as with all kinds of partnership activities, enterprises in which mechanisms of central oversight and authority tend necessarily to operate at arms’ length.

Although financial pressures may make it increasingly difficult for all but the most affluent UK universities to build their own campuses overseas, other forms of transnational activity remain attractive in the current environment in order to promote internationalisation, mutual learning, growth and greater access to high quality education.

These include such cost-effective approaches as the creation of joint awards, or the development of distance learning provision, whose intensive staff resource needs are mitigated by expertise and infrastructure developed, out of necessity, during the height of the pandemic crisis, and are offset by relatively modest capital costs.

Meanwhile, as the HESA data shows, one of the more popular and enduring approaches has been through partnerships with overseas institutions, through franchising, validation or co-delivery models.

The success of such transnational initiatives is inevitably dependent on the recognition of the quality of UK higher education in the eyes of overseas governments, media organisations, employers, institutions, academics, students and prospective applicants. Mutual trust is crucial to institutional partnerships; global reputation is key to the sustainability of student recruitment. The quality and integrity of provision offered by one transnational provider may impact upon the reputation of any provider from the same country.

This is why we believe that it’s so essential to promote methods for the evaluation and enhancement of that educational quality. We believe that such methods should be consistent, transparent and draw upon a shared sectoral understanding of good practice.

Report

Commissioned by Universities UK and GuildHE, QAA’s Quality Evaluation and Enhancement of UK Transnational Higher Education Scheme (QE-TNE) was launched in 2021 and has so far published detailed reports on UK provision operating in Germany, Egypt, UAE, China, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka, and preliminary reports on Greece, Cyprus and Vietnam. It involves 77 institutions, representing over 420,000 TNE students in 2022-23 – or approximately 70 per cent of the total UK TNE student population. By agreement with the Higher Education Funding Council Wales (now Medr – The Commission for Tertiary Education and Research), it already includes all Welsh TNE providers. The Scottish Funding Council has indicated that participation in the scheme will be a requirement for all Scottish degree awarding bodies engaging in TNE from the 2024-25 academic year.

Meanwhile, the opportunity to join the scheme was, at the end of last month, reopened for any English HEIs which didn’t do so three years ago but which now wish to participate – and the scheme’s mid-point report has been published today.

One of the most valuable aspects of the scheme is that it publishes independent reports which evaluate the quality of its participants’ provision in those countries surveyed. Like all of QAA’s evaluative activities, these reporting processes involve engagement with students and staff, and draw upon recognised good practice to identify areas for thematic analysis and enhancement.

Of course, it’s not for us at QAA to say whether our own model should provide the template for future work in this area. But if, as seems likely, TNE continues to prove an increasingly vital source of resource for UK universities, it appears essential for the health of much of the sector that we understand that its long-term sustainability will depend on its ongoing reputation for quality.

We believe that this sustainability will necessitate – by whatever method is chosen – a consistent, coherent, UK-wide, context-sensitive, constructively critical and visibly robust approach to quality assurance and enhancement, one which, by working in partnership with providers, students and stakeholders, underpins confidence in the value and integrity of UK HE by applying global expectations of quality and standards for all the world to see.