Student Visas

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Paul Blomfield]

That is a helpful observation from my hon. Friend. Will the Minister cover that point in his later remarks?

May I raise another transitional problem that was mentioned to me by the academic director of Sheffield international college regarding its preparatory programmes for the university? Sheffield international college provides pathways programmes. About 600 of its students each year go on to one of our universities in Sheffield. These students came to the UK with a conditional offer to proceed to the university of Sheffield if they succeeded with their language course at Sheffield international college.

They arrived in good faith but now face a change that has required a small number of them to sit additional English exams in their final term so that they can renew their visa. The new regulations require minimum levels of achievement in elements of the English language test that were not required on the students’ entry to the UK. Consequently, they find themselves in the final term of their programme working hard to try to stay in the UK to complete it rather than working hard to achieve their conditional requirements.

In addition, the new requirements came into force on 21 April, during the Easter break, and that has reduced the amount of time that some students have had to fulfil them. Earlier this week, I was contacted by Sheffield international college about four Chinese students in my constituency whose visas expired yesterday. For the past seven weeks, the college has been trying frantically to arrange for the students to sit the new tests, in different places across the country, before their visas expired. The students understand that they have to pass these new tests so that they can apply to extend their visas, but it has not been possible for them to sit the tests because the UKBA testing system has been unable to offer a sufficient number of tests. The system simply cannot match the demand that has been created by the chaos caused by the revisions of the visa requirements. In turn, that has led to three of the students at the college deciding to return to China this weekend. They have been unable to complete their course, their year of study has been wasted and potentially they will be unable to progress on to their degree programmes. How many other students are there across the country in a similar situation and what reputational damage does all that do to UK education internationally?

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

If those particular students have been asked to return to China, can my hon. Friend confirm whether they have been told that they cannot re-enter the UK for a further five years, on the basis of a failed immigration application, or will they be allowed to return to the UK when they have completed the test?

[Paul Blomfield]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I should clarify that the students have not been asked to return to China. They decided to return to China because they have been unable to secure the tests that they now need to sit in order to proceed to university on the basis of their original offer.

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[Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton. Like other hon. Members, I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on securing the debate, and on the excellent and measured speech with which he introduced it. I pay tribute to my hon. Friends who have spoken today, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) who explained the background and the wider issues at stake. We have had some excellent contributions from both sides of the Chamber.

I want to follow up some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson). In Woking, I have several private colleges with a good reputation—I do not have a publicly funded university—which make a real contribution to the life of the constituency and to their students. The Tante Marie cookery school is the largest independent cordon bleu cookery school in the UK. It was founded in 1954 by Iris Syrett, the distinguished cookery writer, and is now part-owned by Gordon Ramsay. It is an internationally renowned establishment and wants to be competitive with the world’s best cookery schools.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East, I have received feedback from legitimate private sector colleges, which believe that things are stacked against them. The rules are constantly changing, and that costs each college a lot of time and money. As my hon. Friend said, they must meet an extremely high bar to gain highly trusted sponsor status, and that includes proving that less than 2% of their overseas students drop out in the first third of the course. Most publicly funded colleges or universities would not meet that test, but they are not asked to fulfil any such criteria.

The bar is high, but my understanding and that of colleges is that, if they gain highly trusted sponsor status, their overseas students will not now be allowed to work while they are at the college, although a student studying almost exactly the same course at a publicly funded university or college would be allowed to work. That will make it very difficult for private colleges to compete with publicly funded universities, both internationally and in the UK, and to attract foreign students. A student’s ability to work during their studies has no effect on net migration, but removal of the right to work will have an impact on the number of genuine students who are interested in coming to the UK to study. If they cannot work while they are here, the UK will be a much less attractive and much more unaffordable place for them to come to study, especially as most other countries will allow them to work as well as study.

The Government’s intention is to reduce net migration and, as we have heard from my hon. Friends today, that is a laudable objective, which most people want their MPs to support and get a grip on. The best way to do that in the context of education, as we have heard from throughout the Chamber, is to crack down on the bogus colleges and to ensure that students leave when their course has finished. There is a clear difference between a student coming to the UK for the duration of a course, and someone migrating to the UK to live here. The former is undoubtedly beneficial to the UK, the student and our economy.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) said, what better way of spreading British values and the values of democracy, the rule of law and our cultural heritage with the rest of the world than through having genuine students come here to learn and live alongside British students in this wonderful country of ours.

I have long been an admirer of the Minister, whom, I believe, has one of the most difficult briefs in government. He approaches his task with customary tact, intelligence and verve. However, I must say that the potential unfairness of the new rules, and the way they discriminate against private colleges, even after they have achieved every level of quality assessment, will make life difficult for them. In my view, private colleges that meet all the quality criteria should have equal treatment with educational establishments in the public sector, and more equal treatment with similar colleges in other western democracies.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. However, in reality, students who are attracted to cookery schools such as the one he mentioned, and to most language schools, are not in competition with publicly funded universities. They are different courses and different groups of students, although I agree with him about the treatment that such colleges receive.

[Jonathan Lord]

I am grateful for that intervention. As I said earlier, there are many different private colleges in my constituency—I gave one interesting example of a college of which I am particularly proud. I believe that both publicly funded colleges and universities, and private colleges, have a great deal to contribute, and genuine students should be encouraged to come to the UK to study.

I tried to delineate the difference in the way that private colleges have to perform against different and difficult rules. Even when they receive the status of highly trusted sponsor, they find that other rules have been introduced and that, because of the lack of a level playing field, it is difficult for them to attract genuine foreign students to come to this country.

I have heard representations from some good private colleges that genuinely feel that they are going to be bankrupted. A lot of colleges will be bankrupted, but it will be the good and bad together. That cannot be fair to the colleges, to potential students, or to UK plc. I urge the Minister to look carefully at that issue and ensure that our private colleges—in particular the good ones that have highly trusted sponsor status—are treated properly and allowed to continue with the excellent work that they have done over many years for those foreign students who gain so much from coming to study in this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I shall be brief so that the Minister has sufficient time to reply to the debate. I apologise to the House for missing part of the debate. It was the Government’s fault. I was forced to go to the Ministry of Justice to hand in a petition about legal aid; if the Government had not cut legal aid, I would have been here for the entire debate. The Minister may care to mention that to his colleagues.

I welcome the debate. I also welcome the introduction by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), and the spirit in which the debate has been conducted. All of us represent private sector institutions, which have now fulfilled the requirements put upon them by the previous Government, and that is welcome, or publicly funded universities—in my case, London Metropolitan university. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Tony Lloyd) that none of us is in favour of bogus colleges.

I was often deeply concerned about the way in which overseas students would come to this country and be hoodwinked into going to crummy colleges that did nothing for them, but which certainly exploited them. That did this country more damage than anything else, because those students felt that they had been brought here under false pretences—as indeed they had. They did not succeed in learning much and were often relieved of a great deal of money, only to be disappointed with the performance of the educational institutions. I do not have a problem with the fact that we have a tough regime for the private sector and language schools; we should be clear that they are genuinely offering an education for overseas students. However, what is proposed seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to what is being said about immigration, and it conflates immigration issues with issues about people’s right and need to study. It is damaging the reputation of this country and it is damaging the aspirations of students from other countries.

At some point, most MPs have been on delegations abroad on behalf of Parliament or other organisations. Everywhere we go, we come across people saying, “I studied in Newcastle”—or in Manchester, Birmingham or London—and that they benefited from it and enjoyed it. They are well disposed towards many things about our country—literature, science, engineering, transport systems or whatever it happens to be—and good will is built up as a result. We cannot calculate that good will, but we all know that it exists.

Now, when I go to other countries and talk to younger people about the possibility of studying in Britain, they say, “It’s expensive”—it is expensive—“it’s difficult to get a visa, and the immigration service and the entry system to this country have a very bad reputation.” People do not enjoy the experience, as non-EU nationals, of trying to come through Heathrow, Gatwick, or anywhere else, particularly if they come from Bangladesh, Africa or Latin American countries. They do not like the way in which they are interviewed, or the intrusive questioning that goes with it. A balance has to be drawn, and I am not convinced that we have it correct. I know that this is not related to education, but many tourists that visit Europe leave out Britain. They do not wish to go through the visa business of coming here, so they restrict their tour to France, Germany and the Netherlands.

I represent a constituency that includes London Metropolitan university. It has a huge diversity of students and a great diversity of courses, which I hope it will be able to maintain, but that is for another day. It needs overseas students. The student body needs overseas students. The university has built commendably close relationships with higher education institutions in Russia and Ukraine, as well as in other parts of the world, and it has many overseas students. The overseas students benefit from the quality of the education that they receive and from the experience of being in London, but our students at London Met—mainly local adult students—benefit enormously from their interaction with students from entirely different backgrounds. It is not a one-way street; it is very much a two-way street that is of enormous benefit to our students and to our economy.

I hope that in his response to the debate the Minister will recognise the economic value, the social value and the educational value of overseas students, and not stick with the arbitrary date of 21 April for the application of any new requirements. I hope, too, that he will recognise that there is a huge body of united opinion among private sector institutions as well as the publicly funded universities, and among Members across the House, that this country should be a centre for higher education. We all want our universities to benefit from overseas students. Our country has benefited greatly from them—in research, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) pointed out, and also in their good will towards this country when they return home. That is something that we can change quickly and I hope that we will.