Student Visas

Rob Wilson Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Rob Wilson (Reading East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on his detailed opening account, which set out the issues that we are discussing. I intend to be as brief as possible, because the House has now adjourned and I am sure that Members, particularly those Opposition Members present in the Chamber, have long journeys back to their constituencies.

I support the need for strict controls to exclude bogus students, and welcome the Government’s proposals targeted at the least trustworthy institutions. As has been said, not least by my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), the previous Government did nowhere near enough to get control of the issue of bogus students and colleges. Many people in the country will welcome the change of emphasis by this Government—through the leadership, indeed, of the Minister.

Sixteen tier 4 sponsor licence-holding institutions operate in my constituency of Reading East. During the consultation period of December 2010 to January 2011, my office surveyed all those institutions, including face-to-face interviews with representatives of four of them, the university of Reading and three private colleges. Sharing some of those findings with colleagues might be helpful, although I will try not to repeat anything said in the debate. I promised the institutions involved that I would share some of their main concerns.

Both the university and the independent sector in my constituency stressed the crucial importance of achieving and retaining highly trusted status. The independent sector in particular felt that its future literally depended on such status. While the private colleges accepted the need to tackle bogus students, they expressed great concern about the UK Border Agency’s inspection process. The perceived problems largely emanated from the lack of formal criteria from the UKBA of what was necessary to achieve and retain that trusted or highly trusted status. Additionally, some expressed concern about the understanding, even the ignorance, of some inspectors about how the independent sector operated. For example, in the experience of one college, the UKBA inspector expected a desk and a seat for every single student enrolled, despite a student normally being expected to be in attendance for no more than 15 hours per week.

The most frequent call I heard from colleges was for a level playing field. The universities are granted highly trusted status as a default position but, in the view of the colleges, if the same rigorous expectations as are imposed on the private college sector were imposed on the universities, many of them would lose the cherished highly trusted status. For instance, to obtain such status, a private college is expected to achieve a drop-out rate of no more than 2% to 3%, but universities can expect to achieve a drop-out rate for non-European economic area students of approximately 6% to 10%. Therefore, the Government target of 3% was considered by the private college sector to be wholly unrealistic.

Transparency is essential for a fair and effective inspection regime, but a real concern is that colleges get no debriefing following inspection, as schools do with Ofsted. Inspection reports may be obtained through freedom of information requests, but that procedure is not really quick enough. Targeting efforts on the least trustworthy colleges in the unregulated private sector is right, but we should also remember that only a tiny minority of colleges are bogus. I hope that the new proposals will not put private colleges at a disadvantage by failing to set out clear criteria for highly trusted sponsors or with the somewhat arbitrary and opaque inspection and even evaluation process. Tackling the transparency issues will help good colleges get on with the job of educating students and will increase public confidence in the student visa regime.

In conclusion, does the Minister share my concerns? If so, what can he do to ensure the transparency in the sector that we all wish to see?