Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, for what reasons her Department decided to remove the Scottish Qualifications Authority's English for speakers of other languages examinations from her Department's list of recognised qualifications.

Following significant abuse in the English Language sector that was uncovered in 2014, a procurement exercise was undertaken to strengthen the arrangements for English language testing for immigration purposes. As part of the procurement, any test provider could have made a bid to be included on the list of Secure English language tests.

In order to ensure that all English tests are administered to the same security standards, the procurement exercise included tests suitable for settlement and naturalisation purposes, the decision was taken to apply the SELT arrangements to settlement and naturalisation applications from November 2015.

Trinity and the IELTS Consortium were the only test providers to meet these requirements.