UNITED KINGDOM
As university chiefs in the United Kingdom wait in anticipation for the Labour government to unveil a new international education strategy (IES), one of the key architects of the last government’s master plan to attract more overseas students to the country admitted major deficiencies in the 2019 strategy that he introduced.
Chris Skidmore, the Conservative administration’s minister of state for universities, science, research, and innovation when the original cross-government plan to expand the UK’s ‘global education footprint’ was launched, acknowledged that there was confusion in government and higher education circles when the target of recruiting 600,000 international students by 2030 was surpassed nearly a decade ahead of schedule.
This left “a policy vacuum” and encouraged “complacency”, which should never happen again, said the former minister in a reflective foreword to the final report from the International Higher Education Commission (IHEC) published on 16 April 2025.
The commission was set up as “a coalition of the willing” in 2023 to “fill the strategic gap where an updated government strategy should have been”, said Skidmore. Members were drawn from higher education stakeholders, including three former universities’ ministers and international graduates who studied in the UK.
In the foreword, Skidmore welcomed the more positive messaging towards international students by the Labour government elected last year and called for this to be backed up with a “transition from ad-hoc responses to a truly strategic approach….which aligns international higher education with Britain’s broader economic, diplomatic, and education objectives”.
The IHEC final report, Towards a Future UK International Higher Education Strategy: Resilience, Purpose and Precision, has been nearly a year in the making and comes after the number of international students in the UK soared from 485,000 in 2018-19 to 758,855 in 2022 to 2023 after university leaders pressed the accelerator button on overseas recruitment to make up for what they claimed were shortfalls in home student tuition fees and inadequate funding of research activities.
International student numbers have now started to fall, leading to a financial crisis in many universities, especially where vice-chancellors forecast ever-increasing growth in lucrative overseas tuition fees (which are often two or three times higher than what home students pay), despite the last government clearly applying the brakes to further expansion by banning foreign masters’ students from bringing dependants and hiking visas and NHS health charges.
Need for a more sustainable strategy
In a bid to help the newish Labour administration come up with a more sustainable strategy for the future of UK international higher education, the IHEC’s final report offers a roadmap to help the government, which is facing 101 other priorities, plot a more sustainable way forward.
Dr David Pilsbury, chief development officer at Oxford International Education Group, who acted as secretary to the IHEC and oversaw its activities for the past two years, told University World News: “What we want above everything else in any refresh of the international education strategy is policy stability by ensuring the integrity of the study visa and the post-study work Graduate Route and directly addressing perceptions that students use them for migration.
“We recommend that the Graduate Route become the responsibility of an identified body – accountable for its management and monitoring – which can help employers, especially small and medium enterprises, access the scheme which enables overseas students to work in the UK for two years after graduation.”
Pilsbury said higher education needs its own strategy, or at least a separate stream in the next international education strategy, recognising its importance to the UK economy.
“Its economic contribution is bigger than pharmaceuticals and car production – and while we see regular government engagement with those industries in the news, there is not similar recognition that the university sector needs more support from government,” said Pilsbury.
Quarterly updates
IHEC wants quarterly updates on overseas student numbers to avoid the year-or-longer backlog in official data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
It suggests that the government uses the new e-Visa to effectively record student movement in and out of the country in real time. This will enable decisions to be taken using real-time data and improve monitoring of policy making.
It also calls on Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government to take up a suggestion from the Migration Advisory Committee and focus immigration policy on those overseas students who seek to remain in the UK permanently and not “temporary visitors who come, contribute and catch a plane home” after their study period in the UK.
IHEC suggests widening representation on a reconstituted Education Sector Advisory Group, which advises government on international HE policy and includes vice chancellors through Universities UK.
Currently, it is co-chaired by the Department for Education and the Department for Business and Trade but excludes the Home Office and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Give overseas students a voice
The IHEC report further recommends that international students should be given a voice in any future strategy by inviting the UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA) to have a seat at the top table.
Anne Marie Graham, chief executive of UKCISA, welcomed the proposal and told University World News: “One of the unique things about UK higher education is that we have a membership organisation to support and advocate on behalf of international students and the educators and institutions that work with them.
“We should make use of this independent voice representing the entire sector, including overseas students in the colleges and the private higher education institutions as well as public universities.
“UKCISA can provide government and other stakeholders with insights directly from international students on changes to immigration policy and the value of the Graduate Route so that policymakers can hear from those accessing higher education in this country and not just the education providers.”
Graham said what international students want more than anything else is “stability after policy volatility” under the Conservative government.
“We’ve said for some time that students need to be heard when it comes to decisions about international higher education policy, as what’s good for vice-chancellors is not always good for students.”
Graham pointed to the sharp rises in international tuition fees by universities as well as inflation of visa charges and the cost of NHS health charges, adding: “It is also important that salaries are set at a realistic level for jobs outside London for those using the Graduate Route.”
Going beyond a numerical target
The IHEC recommendations go far beyond the focus in the 2019 international education strategy, which was more of an export strategy and had a specific numerical target for enrolling overseas students.
The next strategy shouldn’t try to guess what the ideal number should be within any specific time frame, says the IHEC report.
Instead, the coalition of higher education stakeholders led by Skidmore and Pilsbury on the IHEC’s review suggests that progress is regularly reviewed and updated in what they call “a living strategy rather than a five-year plan”.
They want the emphasis to be on increasing diversity and the number of countries and types of courses to target recruiting international students, including identifying emerging markets in tier 2 locations, especially those in Africa, South America and Asia.
The IHEC also wants British higher education to engage more with the countries in the European Union as part of the UK’s post-Brexit reset that Labour talks about.
The IHEC recommendations include encouraging more British students to study abroad through initiatives such as the Turing scheme and developing more partnerships abroad, especially through transnational education.
TNE Academy
IHEC recommends establishing a TNE Academy, modelled on Advance HE, and building on earlier work by the Quality Assurance Agency supported by the Department of Business and Trade to share best practice between universities and increase engagement with foreign governments to reduce regulatory barriers to UK TNE.
Dr Janet Ilieva, founder and director of Education Insight, told University World News: “The flexibility offered by transnational education and broader university partnerships is critical in the current climate of uncertainty.
“Such partnerships enable higher education institutions to strategically deploy programme mobility as complementary to student mobility, providing agility when volatility impacts either in the university’s home country or the respective host country for directly recruiting international students to the UK.”
Ilieva said TNE and university partnerships also recognise the role of higher education diplomacy, and she welcomed the “ongoing and significant transition from transactional agreements to long-term collaborations” in UK TNE activities abroad.
“TNE offers a much-needed mechanism for mitigating operational risks and building resilience against economic instabilities, such as currency volatility and the impact of shifting policy landscapes.”
It also moves away from the recent concentration on enrolling international students on master’s programmes with a typical one-year duration, which she said “exposed a considerable level of volatility within the higher education sector, as a majority of the international student population in the UK needs to be recruited annually.
“This is highly vulnerable to both policy changes and economic fluctuations. In this context, developing strategic alliances with international partners is critical for enhancing institutional agility and mitigating the impact of growing global uncertainty,” said Ilieva.
Nic Mitchell is a UK-based freelance journalist and PR consultant specialising in European and international higher education. He blogs at www.delacourcommunications.com.
