Visas: Student Visa Policy

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth]

My Lords, a particularly worrying aspect of the figures that have recently become available is the fall in the numbers of overseas postgraduate students that they record.

A reality of UK universities is that postgraduate courses in all subjects are largely sustained by overseas students. There are very few native British postgraduate students. There is virtually no provision for the support of postgraduate students via grants or bursaries. In order to sustain themselves on their courses, students must vie for posts as teaching assistants. It must be acknowledged that the widespread use of postgraduate students to assist in the teaching of undergraduate courses is having a deleterious effect on the quality of the education. An inevitable consequence of the dearth of native postgraduate students will be evident to anyone who visits a university department. There are declining numbers of native British academics within the departments, and they tend to be the older members who are passing into retirement.

Within many departments, the junior staff, who are predominantly recruited from abroad, are staying for periods of only two or three years before moving on, either to their countries of origin or to other English-speaking nations. Nowadays, many European universities are open to English-speaking academics, whatever their countries of origin may be. In the departments in which I have served, the annual rate of staff turnover has rarely fallen below 20% in recent years, and on occasion a full 30% have left at the end of the year.

What I am asserting is that British universities are in peril. My own perceptions, which have been derived from first-hand experience, contrast markedly with the self-congratulatory tenor of some of the accounts of the university system that I have been listening to. Now, we see a Government who are wilfully kicking away some of the props that support the university system, of which the flow of overseas students is a vital one. To me, at least, the motives of the Government are unfathomable.