So dreams do come true just in time for Christmas 2025 as the UK Government and European Commission finally reached an agreement to let Britain back into Erasmus+, the world’s most successful student mobility programme.
The sighs of relief were audible on both sides of the North Sea when the deal was announced on 17 December that the UK will rejoin Erasmus+ from 2027 as part of the UK-EU reset.
The move also fulfils one of my three wishes for 2025 in a blog I wrote with Cheryl Yu at the start of the year, when we both hoped more young Brits would be encouraged to gain short or longer-term experiences of studying and working abroad to broaden their minds – and help ensure that the next generation don’t fall for something as damaging as the self-harm Brexit.
Last January, Cheryl and I were talking about what we’d like to see to improve the UK’s international strategy for higher education – and we’re still waiting, although the signs are that something is going to be announced any day now!
My first wish for 2025 was that we’d have an actual strategy to replace the rather rushed post-Brexit International Education Strategy, or IES, cobbled together before Covid-19 struck, with its export-driven targets including attracting 600,000 foreign studies to study in the UK and making £35 billion from “education exports” by 2030.
That strategy was slightly updated in 2021, but it still had a ‘back of a cigarette packet’ feel despite the UK busting through the international student numbers’ target while the rest of the world closed the doors to students from abroad during the pandemic.
Over-reliant on foreign fees
Sadly, the IES had a long-term damaging impact on UK universities as their leaders became addicted to the lucrative income to be gained from international tuition fees and went on a spending spree instead of saving at least some of the money for the rainy days to come when the rest of the world’s universities started to recruit from abroad again after Covid.
The flood of foreign students coming to the UK during the Boris Johnson ‘open doors’ policies to the non-EU world set off alarm bells in the Conservative government after Johnson fell from grace for partying through the pandemic, especially when foreign student numbers reached 758,855 in 2022-23.
Then Home Secretary Suella Braverman won an internal Tory cabinet battle and shut-down the right for foreign masters’ students to bring their dependants while studying in the UK and immigration controls moved up the political agenda.
The collapse in overseas (masters) students that followed led to scenes of panic in many UK universities as vice-chancellors and their finance directors had to rein-in spending and redundancies and course closures followed.
Somehow, vice-chancellors still managed to collect their bonuses – despite their very generous pay packets. But that’s another story damaging the good work that undoubtedly goes on inside UK higher education.
Bring Home Office onside
Getting back to the next international higher education strategy, my other wishes a year ago were that we’d replace setting number targets with stable and sustainable (and well-managed) growth and that the Home Office would be brought inside the tent and co-own the next IES by the Labour government.
What we need is a new IES that supports other government objectives, such as growing the economy while managing sensible levels of migration, which we are starting to see (despite on-going concerns about arrivals on small boats crossing the English Channel)
Cheryl also wanted a policy that was less transactional and export-driven and something that Chinese and other international students could clearly see would support them while they studied in the UK, rather than something that foreign students felt was a “tool for revenue generation” for UK universities.
International student levy
That may be over-optimistic, as even before the new IES is unveiled we have the Labour government announcing a new levy (student tax) on international students studying in the UK.
Despite, early indications that this might be 6% charged on higher education institutions to partly fund the return of modest maintenance grants for poorer UK students, the government’s Autumn Budget fixed the sum at a flat rate of £925 per foreign student. Smaller institutions are to be allowed off the levy if they recruit 220 or fewer foreign students.
The Labour government has also announced that the Graduate Route, which lets international students stay in the UK to find work to help pay-off their tuition fees, is to be cut from two years to 18-months to appease the anti-immigration lobby.
IHEC recommendations
Those two moves go almost completely against the grain of recommendations from an independent International Higher Education Commission, or IHEC, set up by former (Tory) Higher Education Minister Chris Skidmore and David Pilsbury, chief development officer at Oxford International.
Among the IHEC final recommendations, apart from protecting the Graduate Route, was that immigration policy should take up ideas from the Migration Advisory Commission (MAC) and treat overseas students as temporary visitors and concentrate on those who seek to remain in the UK permanently.
It also wanted overseas students to contribute to the UK’s industrial and skills needs, instead of being seen as a drain on resources, and that they should be encouraged to set-up businesses in the UK.
IHEC also wanted government policy to be based on real data, and not just prejudices, and to see international alumni treated better and seen as a source of soft-power for the UK.
Concerns over immigration
So, there are lots of good ideas knocking around – but it often feels like the Labour government, just like its predecessor, is more concerned with overcoming immigration concerns than seeing the benefits that international education can bring to the UK.
The Basic Compliance Assessment (BAC) framework designed to crackdown on students coming from countries where more students have been using study abroad to get into Britain to claim asylum after completing their degree courses is a case in point, with universities threatened with having their ability to recruit overseas students removed if they break stricter visa-acceptance and completion targets.
So, some of the mood music has not been great as we await publication of the new IES.
But, at least the hostility shown towards UK universities and foreign students by the last (Tory) government has been replaced by a more welcoming tone.
Let’s hope it continues and we can mix stability and something more sustainable and that the value of foreign students coming to the UK can be better understood by the public at large (and the media).
+ Feature image from the European Union – Consilium.europa
