A new international education strategy awaits

A press release today confirms a review is on the cards, while also welcoming Steve Smith back for a further year as the government’s international education champion. It says:

With the change in government, officials will conduct a review of the International Education Strategy, which will ensure that it continues to be an effective tool in increasing the value of education exports, promote policy dialogue and reflect the priorities of education stakeholders, businesses and Ministers.

At a King’s Policy Institute fringe event at the Labour conference earlier this week, skills minister Jacqui Smith put it like this:

Given the international significance I’ve talked about, we do need a new international education strategy to help to promote the country’s international influence and soft power, and position HE properly in that area and with that responsibility.

This framing is likely to be well-received in the sector. The headline ambitions of the original version were driving international student numbers up (yes, up) to 600,000 a year by 2030, and an increase in education exports to £35bn in the same time frame.

Whether a student numbers target will persist in a new version is one question. But the mention of education exports in the press release and in a later section thanking Steve Smith for his impact in getting the figure up to “more than £28bn” suggests that this will still be a focus.

The latest data – for 2021 – had exports at £27.9bn so it’s a safe bet that the 2022 figures, out later this autumn, will indeed reflect this. And given student number growth (remember, the lion’s share of “exports” here is international student fees and spending, put at £20.65bn for that 2021 total) it probably will be even higher for 2023. The ongoing dip in recruitment this year and perhaps beyond may complicate the figure.

One issue is that the methodology for calculating the non-international student parts of this target is very suspect. And another weakness with the original plan was that, for other areas such as transnational education or research income, it was never very clear what the aspiration was for these parts – growing international student recruitment income was always the main part of the previous strategy’s progress to meeting the 2030 commitments. And now that this has become politically unpalatable, a new version might need some deeper thought about how all the pieces of international activity fit together.