Oral Answers to Questions

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

Academy trusts can pool their general annual grant to deliver key improvements and efficiencies across the academies in the trust. The academy trust handbook requires consideration of each school’s needs and an appeals mechanism, which can be escalated to the ESFA.

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

In my constituency of Edinburgh West this week, students are graduating, some of them with unclassified results, because of a dispute involving marking. This is making it difficult for those wishing to do masters or PhDs, particularly foreign students who have been told that they will have to reapply for visas. Are the Department for Education and the Home Office looking at ways of facilitating those students taking up the places that they have been offered without the classification and avoiding that problem with the visas?

[Robert Halfon]

UK Visas and Immigration will consider exercising discretion, and will hold graduate route applications made before the applicant results have been received, provided that the results are received within eight weeks of the application being made. Students who do not know when they will receive their results due to the boycott will be able to extend their permission while they wait for their results. They will be exceptionally exempt from meeting academic progression requirements. I will write to the hon. Lady with fuller details.