The student paid. The system still said no

Their fate is often dependent on a complex mix of university rules, third party payment processing and pressure on universities to act on behalf of the state re students’ immigration status.

All over Ghanaian news for the past 24 hours, for example, is a story about PhD students who’ve petitioned Keir Starmer directly about their desperate situation.

110 students are said to be facing deportation, eviction, and destitution due to unpaid government scholarships – some waiting 48 months for stipends, 15 already withdrawn from their courses, even students dying after prolonged illness while unable to access support – their petition reveals the catastrophic human cost of payment failures.

Beyond stories like these, and the heartbreaking individual cases that I learn about from SUs, there are no datasets, national statistics or proper analyses of their treatment, and what (if anything) needs to change about it.

R (Khan) v Coventry University is therefore a highly unusual case – vanishingly few cases go to court, and fewer still result in a win for the student.

Time to re-enrol

Zuhaib Khan was a Pakistani national studying for a BA in Business Management and Leadership at Coventry University. He’d completed his first year successfully and, in June 2025, received notification that he needed to re-enrol for year two.

Teaching started on 23 June, the enrolment deadline was 7 July, and the payment deadline was 15 July.

As is the case at plenty of universities, international students at Coventry don’t pay the university directly – they pay via a third-party company called Convera, which then forwards the money on. Khan needed to pay £8,000 to enrol. On 3 and 4 July, he made two payments of £4,000 each from two different bank accounts.

The first payment, from his Lloyds account, arrived at the university on 4 July with the correct reference. The second, from his Barclays account, had an incorrect reference and promptly disappeared down what the judge described as “an administrative black hole at Convera.” Khan then spent the next couple of weeks frantically corresponding with Convera trying to track it down.

In the meantime, there was “considerable muddle” at the university too. On 7 July, the university told Khan he’d successfully enrolled. That same afternoon, he was emailing to say he couldn’t access his course materials. On 9 July, he was told the payment deadline had been extended to 15 July. On 11 July, university staff were emailing each other about his request to defer an assignment, seemingly thinking he was enrolled when he wasn’t. As the judge put it:

So, there was considerable muddle until that point, even within the university let alone with the Claimant, as to whether or not he had enrolled.

On 18 July, the university finally told Khan he hadn’t enrolled because he’d missed the deadline. It had already withdrawn his visa sponsorship and notified the Home Office.

On 21 July – the following Monday – the outstanding £4,000 arrived in the university’s bank account. Khan immediately explained the situation and offered to show receipts proving he’d paid Convera on 4 July. The university said no – he’d missed the deadline, sponsorship had been withdrawn, and that was the end of it.

The law

The legal framework will be familiar territory for anyone who’s immersed in the sponsor compliance regime. Educational sponsors are granted what the courts have repeatedly called a “fragile gift” – a licence that carries enormous responsibilities.

The Student Sponsor Guidance requires sponsors to maintain constant vigilance, and to play an active role in the support of immigration control. In this case, Judge Tindal quoted extensively from the Court of Appeal’s summary in R(London St Andrews College) v SSHD:

The authority to grant a certificate (CoS or CAS) is a privilege which carries great responsibility: the sponsor is expected to carry out its responsibilities ‘with all the rigour and vigilance of the immigration control authorities’.

That guidance requires sponsors to report non-enrolment within 10 working days. There’s also guidance on withdrawing sponsorship – though as the judge noted, there’s an important distinction between reporting and withdrawing.

Case Study 2 in the Home Office guidance contemplates withdrawing sponsorship where a student “hasn’t arrived for enrolment and we don’t know whether their application was successful.” Case Study 8, meanwhile, addresses what happens when a sponsor has made an administrative error, and needs to correct a previous notification.

Rational but harsh

The judge dismissed three of Khan’s five grounds of challenge. He found it was not irrational for the university to report Khan’s non-enrolment on 18 July, given the obligation to report within 10 working days of the enrolment period ending.

He also found it was not irrational – and not a breach of Article 8 ECHR – for the university to withdraw sponsorship at that point, given the risk of the Home Office finding it non-compliant. The key passage on that point deserves quoting at length:

Whilst the Claimant’s treatment was hard, the Defendant was rationally entitled to avoid risking the Home Office finding it had not been compliant with its sponsorship obligations. It was required under the Home Office Guidance to report the Claimant’s apparent non-enrolment, but I accept also rationally entitled to withdraw his sponsorship. Neither was irrational.

So far, so predictable. Universities err on the side of caution when dealing with sponsor compliance. The “fragile gift” case law points firmly in that direction. But then the judge said something much more interesting:

It can be rational and consistent with Art.8 ECHR for a sponsor to ‘err on the side of cautious compliance’ and withdraw sponsorship from a student if in doubt whether obliged to do so. But not only Art.8 but common law rationality may sometimes require a readiness to rescind that decision if the original grounds turn out to be misplaced or the position materially changes.

That’s where Coventry came unstuck. Ground 4 of Khan’s claim challenged the university’s failure to reverse its decision after receiving his payment on 21 July. And the judge found this complaint was made out – ie the judge agreed it was valid and proven.

The university’s own Director of Sponsorship Compliance and Quality Assurance had accepted in evidence that the university could retract a notification of withdrawal of sponsorship via the Home Office’s Sponsorship Management System.

She’d also accepted that paragraph 7.5(f) of the guidance permits continued sponsorship of students who defer for up to 60 days, and that the university could have sought clarification from UKVI about whether such an arrangement was permissible – if Khan had made a “clear and timely written request.”

The problem was that Khan had made exactly such a request. On 30 July, he wrote:

I kindly request the university to reconsider my case and allow me to continue my studies either through a reinstatement or by confirming my eligibility for the next available intake. I remain committed to fulfilling all my academic and compliance obligations.

His solicitors’ pre-action letter on 16 August was even more explicit, asking the university to:

…restore the sponsorship and notify the Home Office that his sponsorship has been restored to prevent visa curtailment and that Mr Khan can continue his classes in September 2025.

The September teaching block started on 8 September, enrolment was open until 29 September, and the Home Office didn’t curtail Khan’s visa until 15 September. There was, in other words, plenty of time to do something.

But the university refused. Its response on 14 August said it was “too late” for Khan to return to study in September – even though the university later admitted enrolment was still open. And its pre-action response on 2 September confirmed it wouldn’t withdraw its notification to UKVI, without engaging with whether it could or should.

Three bases for unlawfulness

The judge found the university’s conduct unlawful on three alternative bases.

First, “fettering of discretion.” The principle from R(AB) v SSHD requires decision-makers not to “shut their ears” to applications falling outside their policies. The university was found to have never properly considered whether to exercise its discretion to rescind – despite being asked to do so repeatedly:

Despite those earlier requests and what [the university] said in [its] first statement, there is no evidence the Defendant ever considered deferral and/or rescinding withdrawal of sponsorship before the pre-action protocol response.

Second, irrationality in failing to rescind. By the time the university received Khan’s full payment on 21 July, all the factors pointed towards restoration – he was a genuine student, posed no risk to immigration control, had completed his first year successfully, had missed at most three weeks’ teaching, and could still have enrolled for September and finished his degree on time. As the judge put it:

Whilst the Defendant was rationally justified in erring on the side of caution and withdrawing sponsorship on 18 July when he had not fully-paid or enrolled, it was not rationally justified in stubbornly refusing to reverse that decision days later when the problem was cured and when there was plenty of time for the Claimant to resume his studies and catch up the very limited time he had lost.

Third, irrationality in failing even to enquire. Even if the university was entitled not to rescind, it was irrational not to ask the Home Office whether it could:

Surely there was no realistic risk in simply asking the Home Office whether it was permissible and appropriate to rescind withdrawal of sponsorship, e.g. by analogy to Case Study 8.

The judge was notably unimpressed by the university’s attempts to justify its position retrospectively. Its evidence was internally contradictory – a witness statement (in September) said Khan had missed too much teaching time to re-enrol, and its second statement (in October) said that wasn’t actually a factor in the university’s decision-making at the time – and anyway, if Khan had made a clear request to defer, the university could have sought clarification from UKVI.

But as I say, Khan had made exactly that request. As the judge observed:

Those are not alternatives, they are contradictions and for the reasons I have given, they cannot possibly satisfy me it was highly likely the outcome would have been the same had the conduct complained of not occurred.

The limits of relief

Despite finding the university’s conduct unlawful, the judge declined to grant mandatory relief requiring Coventry to issue Khan a new CAS. Too much time has now passed, and whether Khan can meet the Immigration Rules’ academic progression requirements is now ultimately a question for the Home Office. The judge granted a declaration that the university’s failure to rescind was unlawful – but acknowledged that it may not make much practical difference.

The judgment ends with lessons for the sector:

Nevertheless, I hope that the Defendant and other sponsor universities faced with similar issues in the future behave more rationally and flexibly – and perhaps simply with more pastoral understanding. At the end of the day, whilst they are also immigration sponsors under strict duties, our universities remain centres of learning which will continue to educate the best and brightest students from this country and around the world.

The implications are significant. The caselaw is full of references to the “fragile gift” of a sponsor licence and the heavy consequences of being seen as non-compliant, and the judgment doesn’t dispute any of that.

What it establishes is that there’s a limit to how far that logic can be taken. You can err on the side of caution when making the initial decision to withdraw sponsorship. But you can’t then refuse to consider reversing that decision when circumstances change – especially when the student is asking you to, when there’s plenty of time to do so, and when refusing serves no immigration control purpose whatsoever.

The “fettering of discretion” point is particularly important. Universities have policies, and policies exist for good reasons. But a policy can’t be applied so rigidly that the decision-maker refuses even to consider whether the individual case might warrant a different approach.

A question of compliance

The judgment also highlights questions of risk.

Khan made a minor error with a payment reference – the money was always there, and he was always trying to pay. He attended classes, submitted assignments, and desperately wanted to continue his studies.

But the university’s response was to withdraw his sponsorship, refuse to reconsider, tell him it was too late to enrol when it wasn’t, and ultimately force him to leave the country and reapply from Pakistan.

Its defence rested heavily on the risk posed by non-compliance. What if the Home Office decided Coventry had been too lenient? What if reversing the withdrawal was seen as a failure to play an “active role in immigration control”? What if the sponsor licence itself was at risk?

These are real concerns. But asking the Home Office whether you can reverse a sponsorship withdrawal isn’t non-compliance – it’s the opposite. It’s seeking clarification about what compliance requires.

The Case Studies in the guidance explicitly contemplate situations where notifications need to be corrected. An administrative error by a student or a payment processor isn’t the same as a student who’s disappeared or was never genuine in the first place.

If we assume that the university genuinely considered the risk of license loss in this set of circumstances to be existential (the “we had no choice” argument) and other universities would have done the same, international applicants need to be warned that when Bridget Phillipson said last summer that:

This new government values their contribution – to our universities, to our communities, to our country… Be in no doubt – international students are welcome in the UK…

…there’s clearly some way to go to make that assertion a reality.