Immigration: Overseas Students

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester, who mingled wit and wisdom in his wise comments to us.

The Motion that my noble friend Lord Lucas has enabled us to debate today, with our manifest gratitude, covers both universities and colleges. I shall comment from the perspective of colleges, and indeed schools, in the independent sector, where large numbers of overseas students have been educated with skill and success for many years.

I declare my interest as president of the Independent Schools Association, the ISA, one of a number of bodies that comprise the Independent Schools Council, of which I am a former general secretary. The ISA works on behalf of some 400 schools, generally small in size, committed to keeping their fees as low as possible and to increasing means-tested bursaries, and fully integrated with their local communities. They feature hardly at all in the interminable stock controversies about independent education, which revolve chiefly around a small number of so-called public schools.

I am also president of the Council for Independent Education, CIFE, which brings together a group of 20 leading private sixth-form colleges. They focus on A-levels, exam success and excellent pastoral care. At least 15,000 international students have passed successfully through CIFE colleges on their way to UK universities in the last 10 years. The colleges mingle great talents and different cultures, enriching our own country and other nations.

It will perhaps come as little surprise to your Lordships that in these schools and colleges there is unanimous opposition to the inclusion of overseas students in the official immigration figures. On this central issue, the voice of our universities has been heard loudly and clearly but the voice of independent schools and colleges is no less emphatic. The arguments are well-known in your Lordships’ House—indeed, they are being restated in this debate—and I will not take up time by repeating them. Suffice it to say that the current arrangements impede recruitment and damage the reputation of our country as a place that is both open and welcoming to overseas students.

It ought surely to be a fundamental objective of any Government to assist the continuing success of our country’s private education sector in recruiting overseas. Its schools and colleges are world leaders, earning significant foreign exchange and promoting British cultural and democratic values worldwide. But with the reverberations of Brexit stirring concern about our country’s future across the globe, Britain’s independent schools and colleges are increasingly conscious of the difficulties that they face because of our current stringent immigration study requirements. Our English-speaking competitors in the international market are not slow to seek progress at our expense, stressing their greater openness and easier entry requirements. This was brought home to a CIFE college principal on a recent visit to Nigeria: Canada, he was told, was now seen as more attractive than the UK.

Serious concern has arisen in particular because the processes through which overseas students have to pass have become increasingly onerous and, in their application, a source of increasing anxiety to schools and colleges because stiff penalties are now being imposed, often in a seemingly arbitrary fashion, for minor paperwork errors. Britain’s schools and colleges today are subject to stringent regulatory oversight. There is no complaint to be made about that, but very minor infractions of regulations are now being reported by the inspectorate to UKVI, which in turn is liable to impose heavy sanctions on schools and colleges sponsoring students under the tier 4 route. Sanctions include the reduction of what are known as “confirmation of acceptance for studies” numbers to zero. That can threaten the very existence of schools and colleges with a significant proportion of overseas students.

A litany of complaints from schools and colleges about decisions by UKVI, many of them apparently arbitrary in character, has reached the ISA’s chief executive, my colleague Mr Neil Roskilly. When information is sought from UKVI it is often slow in coming—a point made by my noble friend Lord Lucas. The introduction of yet more regulations, particularly those which require students to apply for visas more frequently, is compounding the problem. I will, if I may, let the Minister have a dossier of the difficulties experienced by independent schools and colleges to bring home to the Government the reality of what is happening.

At the heart of so many of the problems faced by independent colleges and schools lies the tier 4 entry route. It needs to be reviewed with the simple aim of ensuring that the requirements it imposes are not more onerous than those that exist in other countries that are in competition with us. Having done that, the Government should monitor carefully the way they are applied to secure consistency, common sense and fairness.