Examination of Witness (Questions 333-366)
Q333 Chair: Could I refer
to the Register of Members' Interests, where the interests of
all Members of this Committee are noted, and could I welcome the
Minister of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
Thank you very much for giving evidence. We know that you have
a very busy schedule, as does the Secretary of State. He recommended
that you should come before us rather than himself, so I am sure
you would be pleased with that recommendation. Minister, I am
sure you have been following the inquiry that the Committee has
been conducting into student visas. How important are international
students to the UK economy?
Mr Willetts: First
of all, thank you very much for the opportunity to be questioned
by your Committee. There are a range of estimates of the significance
of foreign students. We calculate that international non-EU student
tuition fees themselves are £2.2 billion a year. UUK have
done an estimate of the wider economic value in terms of the spending
by those students that came in at £2.3 billion a year, so
we are clearly talking about significant extra resources being
brought into the British economy.
Q334 Chair: So your department
welcomes international students to come and study in this country
and feels they make a significant contribution to our economy?
Mr Willetts: We
believe that legitimate students coming to British universities
and FE colleges are indeed a valuable contribution, yes.
Q335 Chair: How would
you define illegitimate students then?
Mr Willetts: There
is always the challenge of abuse and this is something that, quite
rightly, the UK Border Agency has been focused on. So I wanted
it to be clear that our welcome was for people who can genuinely
benefit from education here, and it isn't extended to people who
don't have the qualifications that would enable them to benefit
from the kind of educational provision we have. But, yes, we have
an internationally respected education system. People from around
the world wish to come and participate in it and will pay for
that and it is an excellent British export industry.
Q336 Chair: So you would
not want to see any Government policy that stopped international
students choosing Britain rather than going to America and Canada
or Australia, you want them to come here?
Mr Willetts: Yes,
I do want them to come here, but within a framework, which we
fully understand the coalition is committed to bringing down net
migration, and we do believe that there are abuses—loopholes
in the system—that means that, sadly, there are people getting
in who aren't in a position to benefit from an education here
and who shouldn't be coming here.
Chair: As far as bogus
colleges are concerned—and indeed bogus students—I
think that everyone is against them coming into this country and
abusing the system. There is general agreement across the House
on this.
Mr Willetts: Correct.
Q337 Chair: The Committee,
in its last report, recommended that we look at the term "college"
and one way of stopping people setting up a college above a fish
and chip shop in, say, Brighton and calling themselves a college
was to limit that term. Your junior Minister has written and said
that your department is still against the limiting of the word
"college". Could you just explain why?
Mr Willetts: Yes,
and of course the letter that John Hayes sent you on 8 February
does set it out, I think. The biggest single problem is that the
word "college" is used in so many different contexts
for such a wide range of institutions that trying to regulate
it would, we think, be very hard to do in practice and would place
unfair burdens on legitimate institutions. It is such a generic
term in the English language, it would be very hard to control
it in that way. That is our main concern. I think the second point
I would make is that you quite rightly, Chairman, moved from bogus
colleges to bogus students. Although this is more for the Home
Office than for us in BIS, I think that picture of a kind of PO
Box with absolutely no education activity going on, or a single
room above a fish and chip shop as the bogus college, I think
the effective action by the UKBA has made great progress in eliminating
those. The attention is shifting more to people who maybe do not
have the education or qualifications they claim to have, perhaps
colleges that have rather lax procedures for checking qualifications.
So it is the under-qualified or inappropriate student, which I
detect from my conversations with the Home Office is increasingly
the focus, rather than those absolutely unacceptable and absurd
abuses where I believe, and the UKBA say are probably diminishing
now.
Q338 Chair: That is very
helpful. On the point of the international reputation, when Ministers
go abroad, as you have been abroad recently, do you go abroad
and you say to governments, "We want you to come and do business
with Britain and we would like your international students to
come and study here"? Is that one of the messages of the
Government, that Britain is open for business as far as international
students are concerned?
Mr Willetts: The
Prime Minister has said Britain is open for business, and one
of the businesses where we excel is education. Indeed, therefore,
when I was with him on his visit to India in July, we were very
keen to strengthen links between our education arrangements in
India. But I would say that the kind of very direct marketing,
"Come here and get an education in Britain" does not
go down as well as saying, "There are benefits from exchange
in education between our two countries". I personally urge
British students to do more to go and study abroad and I find
that a very good way of having a conversation with, for example,
the Indian Education Minister is to discuss how we can also increase—I
think from memory it is—the 500 British students currently
studying in India, because there are some excellent institutions
in India and it is a great way of broadening people's minds. So
when I do attend international events, we think of it as a two-way
exchange.
Q339 Mr Winnick: Minister,
I noticed a slight hesitation on your part when you were replying
to the Chair about whether or not we need more students. I note
that the Home Secretary said in a speech on 23 November 2010,
"However, the majority of non-EU migrants are in fact students.
They represent almost two-thirds of non-EU migrants entering the
UK each year" and then she spoke about reforming visas. I
can understand obviously the need to clamp down very firmly, as
the previous Government started to do, on bogus colleges, bogus
students; we could do without them. But as far as genuine students
are concerned in genuine colleges, is it firmly the Government's
view that it is the desire of the United Kingdom authorities to
encourage, as previously, students to come here?
Mr Willetts: You
are quite right, Mr Winnick, about my hesitation, and the reason
why I hesitated was that I was considering some of the other aspects
of that question, for example, students who come here and do have
a qualification, but they stay here and study for so long that
they build up a strong claim for settlement, so in reality it
has become a route into this country, even if it was not necessarily
their intention when they started, or students who come here with
dependants. There is a blurred division between simply coming
here to study and then going back home, and on the other side,
the bogus student. There are some areas in the middle where you
could argue—and it is in the consultation paper—that
the education route has become a route to settlement and has become
a route for bringing other people who are not themselves studying.
That was the reason for my hesitation.
Q340 Mr Winnick: We have
taken evidence about some students who stayed on and they have
been much welcomed by the academic community and have become very
distinguished, but that is not an argument of ever-increasing
numbers of students, once they finish, to stay on in the United
Kingdom. I accept that entirely. So the division line as far as
the Government is concerned is the difference between students
coming here for genuine reasons to genuine colleges and then there
is another factor: the desire to make sure that most of them do
not find some excuse—genuine as it may be—to stay
on permanently in employment in Britain.
Mr Willetts: That
is certainly one of our concerns, correct.
Q341 Steve McCabe:
How damaging do you think the impression
that you want to clamp down on students has been in terms of our
reputation abroad and the likelihood that you will succeed in
the future in attracting the types of students that you are interested
in coming to the UK?
Mr Willetts: We
tracked the statistics, and the current application process is
not completed, but the evidence so far is that applications to
study here from abroad remain buoyant, so we are not seeing a
tailing off of applications. I do get asked sometimes when I am
at conferences on this subject. I was in Russia last week and
students at the Moscow University were asking me, "Can we
come and study in Britain?" and I was able to say, "If
you have excellent qualifications and are coming to a mainstream
British university, yes, you can come". So you do get asked
about it but, as I say, if you look at the application figures,
they appear to be holding up.
Q342 Steve McCabe: So
no one has given you the impression that, in fact, Canada, the
United States and increasingly Australia are developing much more
favourable regimes for attracting high-quality foreign students
and that we are in danger of losing out? You have not heard that?
Mr Willetts: You
are right. Those are our leading competitors. We always keep an
eye on the competition and some of them are growing market share.
Our reading at the moment is that New Zealand and Canada are the
ones that are making the biggest effort to grow their share of
this market and we keep an eye of their offerings. But so far
I would say there is still strong international interest in coming
to study at our education institutions.
Q343 Dr Huppert: How
much has your department been involved in the consultation?
Mr Willetts: We
have been in close touch with the Home Office and of course especially
now that the consultation process is over, we are, between us,
sifting through the responses that have come in.
Q344 Dr Huppert: Roughly
how many meetings would there have been between BIS officials
and Home Office officials?
Mr Willetts: I
think there have been several meetings and we are in close touch.
I think there have been seven meetings of officials since the
outcome of the consultation. I have had three meetings with the
Minister at the Home Office, Damian Green.
Q345 Dr Huppert: I am
struck that you described that the test for students being valid
is whether they could benefit from study. That is not what the
Home Office has been saying and is not what the Immigration Minister
said when we questioned him. They clearly have a very different
concept of what the test would be. Are you still trying to persuade
them of the voracity of your position?
Mr Willetts: We
are working together to reach an agreed position in the light
of the consultation. I am not in a position, sadly, to bring to
this Committee the final outcome. We are still considering all
this. The Government has a shared belief and a commitment in the
coalition agreement on bringing down net migration and the Government
also recognises the strength of education—not just as a
good thing in its own right, but a successful British export business—and
we are working together to reach a satisfactory outcome to the
consultation.
Q346 Mark Reckless: Regarding
your answer to Mr Winnick's first question, I think you accepted
that it was more than just about clamping down on bogus students
at bogus colleges. We asked a similar question to the Minister
for Immigration and I am still not entirely clear where we are
on this. If you look at the consultation, there were various restrictions
that make it less attractive perhaps to become a student here
in terms of dependants, working, post-study work, what language
you had to have and so on. Do you expect these changes to lead
to some sort of genuine but marginal students or marginal colleges
perhaps not carrying on under the new regime in the way they are
now, or do you see it restricted to bogus students at bogus colleges?
Mr Willetts: As
I said, Mr Reckless, this is where there is a fuzzy boundary.
This is precisely what we are exploring with the Home Office at
the moment. Take one of your examples, the language requirement:
you can argue that if a college or university takes on someone
with rather rudimentary English, are they able to participate
in the educational process in the way they should? That is a legitimate
concern. Universities say that they are the custodians of their
admissions procedures and are best able to judge whether someone
has the English to be able to properly study. Dependants: again,
where we look at what other countries do, bringing in dependants,
that can increase the migration figures and they are not coming
here to study. To what extent does people's ability to bring in
dependants affect their own willingness to come and study here?
These are the grey areas that we identified in the consultation
document and we now are considering with the Home Office.
Q347 Michael Ellis: I
would like to move on slightly, if I may, to look at economic
impact. Hitherto in recent years, absence of proper scrutiny has
undoubtedly led to discussing bogus students and bogus colleges
and examples of colleges without students and students without
lecturers and the like. Have you or your department a plan to
undertake some type of internal economic assessment of the impact
of this policy and of the reduction in student numbers that may
well occur as to the impact on the BIS department and its policy
areas?
Mr Willetts: The
impact assessment that is being prepared as part of the Government's
review of this policy will cover these economic impacts—it
is intended to do so—and of course we will then release
our overall impact assessment as part of the process when the
decision is taken. So yes, the regulatory impact assessment is
intended to capture those sorts of effects and it is being prepared
as a shared analysis, agreed starting point for the discussions,
that should be agreed between BIS and the Home Office.
Michael Ellis: When are
you expecting that?
Mr Willetts: The
impact assessment has been sent to the Regulatory Policy Committee
for its consideration as part of this policy process.
Q348 Chair: In terms
of the timetable, the Committee has written to the Minister suggesting
that they might like to see the Select Committee's report before
announcing their proposals. Do you know if there is any date for
the announcement of the final proposals?
Mr Willetts: I
do not believe there is such a date and agree with you, Mr Chairman,
I think it would be very helpful if we had sight of this Committee's
report before any final decisions were taken.
Q349 Nicola Blackwood:
Just to follow up on that point briefly: do you think that it
would cause a problem for universities or language colleges if
the announcement were to come later in May? Would it cause problems
with admissions, do you think?
Mr Willetts: The
uncertainties about exactly what the visa regime will be are raised
with me by universities. The sooner universities know where they
are the better. But equally, the process of Government has to
work. The consultation period has only just ended so we are working
flat out. That is why I have already had meetings with the Home
Office Minister, so we are trying to get this resolved as quickly
as we can.
Q350 Nicola Blackwood:
Could we talk about the post-study work route? You have mentioned
that you think that British education has a cache regardless of
the visa system perhaps and regardless of the right to work, but
we have received quite a lot of evidence from students saying
that it is one of the major reasons why they do come to study
in the UK: because they are going to have this two years' post-study
work opportunity, in particular for MBAs, lawyers and those whose
study courses require some kind of work experience attached. How
do you respond as Minister of Education to the recommendation
to entirely abolish that route?
Mr Willetts: You
rightly identify a strand of argument that has come in in the
responses to the consultation document. Going back to Mr McCabe's
question, as we look around our competitors, they vary. The US
does not quite have an offer as generous as our post-study work
offer. New Zealand and Canada—who I said are growing market
share—they seem to be using post-study work as part of the
appeal. So it is a feature, but there may be ways we can tighten
it up or make sure it is not abused and becoming a route to settlement.
It is part of that fuzzy boundary that we are investigating.
Q351 Nicola Blackwood:
Yes, but you think something short of abolition would probably
be more useful from the higher education rather than the immigration
standpoint?
Mr Willetts: I
am trying to avoid the model. There are two standpoints and because
we are working as a team in the Government, coming from two different
departments, trying to solve it.
Q352 Chair: We do understand
that, Minister, but of course we have called you here because
we have heard such powerful evidence from the universities and
the colleges of higher education. We want to know about the impact
on your department. So we do understand that you are part of a
Government, but I think Nicola Blackwood's question is quite pertinent.
Will it have an effect? There must be an opinion or a paper on
this.
Mr Willetts: I
think it would depend on exactly what was proposed, and there
are a whole range of options between complete closure of the route
and the status quo. Obviously one thing we are discussing with
the Home Office is what those options might be.
Chair: But complete closure
would not be something you would favour?
Mr Willetts: There
are certainly universities that tell us very clearly that if they
were to completely lose the post-study work option that would
put them at a disadvantage compared with the competition.
Chair: Are you still a
visiting professor at John Cass?
Mr Willetts: I
believe I have lapsed. I am not aware of having any communication
with them for two or three years now, but I certainly was a visiting
professor several years ago.
Q353 Chair: The MBAs
have sent us a table that was published in the Financial Times
and I was astonished to note that the London Business School was
the top business school in the world. I always thought it was
one of the American universities, but it is UK first above Wharton,
Harvard, Stanford and Colombia, and the MBAs in their evidence
are unanimous that any abolition of the post-study work route
would devastate their position in the lead table. Of the top 100,
I think ten to 15 are UK universities, including Imperial, Cambridge,
Oxford, Cranfield School of Management, which surprises me.
Mr Willetts: Oh,
no, it is an excellent institution, if I may say so.
Chair: These are world-beaters.
Are you satisfied that we might lose our status if—
Mr Willetts: That
is a classic example of where we can be so proud of excellent
institutions that also are a very sensible export business, and
I think the Home Office has worked to not doing things that would
damage their international performance.
Q354 Mark Reckless: I
recall the Foreign Secretary, who is an INSEAD graduate, telling
students at London Business School in his speech that they should
not believe everything that they read in the Financial Times
in respect to these rankings. I did though want to ask you
about this post-study work, their argument, "It gives us
a leg-up on the competition and if you take this away we will
be less attractive". Is that a proper argument? Should they
not be attracting students on the basis of their educational offer?
Mr Willetts: Yes,
I understand that argument. In reality, there may be benefits.
It does go, strictly speaking, beyond the education offer, but
you could argue that as there are other countries that have something
like it, and I accept the US is not quite so flexible, but Canada
and New Zealand I think have similar offers. When you are looking
at the competition, you have to assess what we offer compared
with other countries. But you are certainly right: there are purists
who would say that if the argument is they are coming here for
education, they are coming here for education; they cannot get
a kind of free pass into work. But we are working with the Home
Office for ways in which we can reach a sensible way forward.
Q355 Bridget Phillipson:
Much of this so far was focused on university students, but we
have had a lot of evidence from the further education sector on
this area, firstly for those standalone courses, but also evidence
that many students would not be able to go on and study at British
universities if they were not able to come and study some degree-level
courses in the UK in order to get their language skills up to
scratch, but also because some of them study for a year less in
their home countries than we would do in the UK. What discussions
have you had with the Home Office on the area of further education
and the impact any changes could have?
Mr Willetts: Yes,
I very much agree with that point, and I think the Home Office
recognises that there are several countries from which we recruit
where you finish your school education at what we regard essentially
as AS-level, and so part of the British market is doing a course
where you move on from AS-level to A-level and improve your English
at the same time and might have a kind of conditional offer from
a university that depends on your getting up to the A-level standard
and improving your English. So, yes, I think there is a very legitimate
activity and I hope as we work through the proposal in the consultation
that that continues to remain possible as a route into universities
in Britain.
Bridget Phillipson: We
visited a language school in Brighton, and what struck me was
the number of students that had come over to study English, often
coming with very little English, who now had offers from the top
universities in Britain and were very keen to stress that. I think
that is an important part of this we need to not overlook, and
I think the figure was something like 40% or 50% of those international
students of British universities had come and studied some degree-level
course. While obviously we want to crack down on bogus students
and bogus colleges, some of the language schools I think feel
that their good work is perhaps being undermined by the constant
talk of that, whereas much of the work cracking down on those
bogus colleges has already been very successful.
Mr Willetts: Yes,
I accept that the worst-case bogus college problem is less acute
than it was. We are fortunate, people want to come and study to
learn English and they want to come and study in its home country,
so to speak, and that is something that is a great business for
us to be in, and of course it is one route into university. Again,
it has to be policed and there are issues about exactly what people's
language competence is, but yes, I agree with your broad point.
Q356 Chair: You would
agree with the point that if people want to learn English very,
very well they would want to come and live in England. Similarly,
if I wanted to learn Spanish, of course I could go to Linguarama
or whatever it is called, but at the end of the day, the pathway
from language school to university is an important one for the
British economy?
Mr Willetts: Otherwise
they might be speaking it with an American accent.
Chair: Or even worse,
an Australian accent.
Mr Willetts: I
think it is great that people want to come here. Of course we
have to accept—and this is another interesting strand that
we are very interested in at BIS and I am working on at the moment—that
education, as it becomes more international, there is going to
be distance learning. There are campuses at British universities
and other institutions set up abroad. There are ways in that people
can benefit from a British education without physically coming
here and there must be capacity limit to what we can do. So in
parallel with trying to get a sensible way forward on student
visas I am very proud that the Open University is something that
people around the world use and that there are British universities
that want to operate abroad directly.
Chair: The Committee has
just come back from Turkey, where we have been looking at the
implications of enlargement and what was interesting was the desire
of a lot of middle-ranking officials in the Turkish authorities
to come and study here. If they were going to learn English, of
course they could learn it in the English school in Istanbul or
Ankara, but they prefer to come to a college like Brighton.
Mr Willetts: Yes,
I understand that argument.
Chair: What has also been
interesting in the evidence is that the universities faced with
these proposals are not trying to throw the language schools overboard
by saying, "Government, look at them and limit their numbers".
They were quite supportive of the pathway from language school
to universities.
Mr Willetts: Yes,
we understand that, and that is a legitimate route into university
and I accept that, and I think the Home Office does as well.
Q357 Mark Reckless: You
told us about £2.2 billion of fees and I think a study showing
about £2.3 billion of other economic benefits, but what about
the soft power element? How important do you think that is and
is that something you have been pushing forward in any discussions
you have had with the Home Office on the subject?
Mr Willetts: Yes,
that is the case, and you do come across ministers in other countries,
business people, who have very fond memories of studying at university
here and it is very hard to measure precisely, but I think it
is a source of enormous good will.
Mr Winnick: Muammar Gaddafi's
son currently.
Q358 Mark Reckless: The
issue with overseas campuses, could universities not be encouraged
to put a sort of greater emphasis on expanding there and developing
the reach to the United Kingdom in that way?
Mr Willetts: I
think we are at the early stages of globalisation in our education
and it is going to play out over the next decade. At the moment
they do have to commit a significant amount of management resource
and financial resource to setting up a campus abroad. You can
imagine university partnerships, a bit like what happened in the
airline industry, networks of universities linking together. I
think a lot of this is going to develop in the years ahead.
Q359 Mark Reckless: Finally,
the Prime Minister, when he was in China, spoke to some Chinese
students and said one of the issues was about them having to pay
such high fees when our fees here were so low. Is there a prospect
that studying in Britain may be more attractive to international
students because international fees may become less high than
they otherwise would because of the fee reforms here?
Mr Willetts: We
do keep them separate. There is control over student numbers and
regulation of fees for British and EU students and no such regime
for non-EU students, so they are separate issues. But I think
anything that gets our universities to focus on high-quality teaching
should improve, which is one of the crucial reasons for our reforms,
and should also be something that overseas students appreciate
as well.
Q360 Steve McCabe: In
order to clear up a bit of the fuzziness you have referred to,
in your discussions with your Home Office colleagues, of the two-thirds
of non-EU migrants who are students, have you argued that the
reduction should be only in bogus students or is there a part
of that two-thirds figure that you think can safely come down
without doing any damage to our universities and other institutions?
What advice have you given to your colleagues on that?
Mr Willetts: When
I say it is fuzzy, it is because it is fuzzy. The question is
on issues like the terms on which dependants come or the terms
on which people are going to do post-study work, you are talking
about something that is different than an individual student coming
to study here. It is that penumbra around the edge where the universities
say, quite understandably—
Q361 Steve McCabe: So
if a student has dependants with maybe somebody you would want
to discourage, is that a message that you would want us to understand?
Mr Willetts: The
universities and colleges say, and I quite understand this, "It
is part of the offer. If you come here and you are a post-graduate
aged 35 saying you are going to come here for more than a year
and yet you cannot bring your partner, your husband or wife, that
makes the offer less attractive". On the other hand, the
partner is not coming here themselves for education, so we are
trying to find a sensible way forward that does enable us to deliver
the coalition agreement without damaging the core offer from our
excellent education institutions, and I think we are making great
progress on that.
Q362 Steve McCabe: When
the British Government second staff overseas, we do not say that
their families and dependents cannot go with them. We think it
is quite reasonable as part of the package that when we send someone
overseas for four years their family go with them. What is the
big distinction? If someone is coming here to a high-quality university
and is a high-quality student who will make a contribution, is
it numbers? You are prepared to see a reduction in those numbers
in order to get your overall migration numbers down. Is that what
you are saying?
Mr Willetts: The
question is at what point is a perfect legitimate desire to carry
on with one's family life while studying—or in your example,
working for one's country abroad—does that slip into an
attempt to come to this country, where the real aim is to get
your partner working and the student bit is the junior element
in the deal, so to speak? But you are using the student route
to get your partner in and in employment. It is very hard to draw
that line, but those are the kinds of issues that we quite rightly
have to consider as part of this exercise.
Q363 Chair: But you are
not a marriage guidance counsellor, you are the Business Minister,
are you not, and therefore what concerns me is that there should
be fuzziness at this stage. Surely the fuzziness should have been
sorted out in the coalition before the proposals were put to the
public? It seems that these discussions are ongoing because of
the coalition, which if it was not a coalition Government perhaps
we would have had one clear policy that all departments would
have signed up to. Should the business department be part of the
consultation? Should it not be part of the proposal?
Mr Willetts: These
are all the issues that were brought out, quite rightly, in the
consultation document and the final—
Chair: Minister, one second,
should the Government not have had a firm set of proposals first
and then put them out to consultation, rather than the poor old
business department putting its views forward as part of the consultation?
Mr Willetts: No,
I do not think that is how it has been conducted. It is absolutely
right that this is put out for consultation so that all the outside
bodies affected—and my understanding is that there has been
30,000 responses to the consultation—it is absolutely right
to do a proper consultation, and now what is happening is there
is a shared exercise by the Home Office and BIS working together
now developing precise proposals in the light of that consultation.
What I have been trying to do is to share with this Committee
the area that our discussions are focusing on and how we are trying
to draw the boundary in some of these genuinely rather tricky
areas.
Chair: You have been very
helpful. I did say the words "final question". It is
an elastic final, because other colleagues just want to ask very
brief final questions.
Q364 Dr Huppert: My apologies
for my brief absence; I had to be in the Chamber for a question.
You made it relatively clear, I think, that there is this tension
between what you would most like to see happening with students
coming in and the Government's drive to reduce net migration.
Do you think that students ought to count as part of net migration,
because presumably roughly as many arrive as leave, which ought
to suggest that it is zero? Secondly, most of the public, including
organisations such as Migration Watch, would say that students
coming in, studying then leaving, is a completely different category
from people coming to settle. Would you agree with those suggestions
that we should reclassify what we are looking at?
Mr Willetts: Setting
aside your rather tendentious introduction, I am assured that
the international measures of migration—the statistics that
are used across the world—do count essentially as people
coming to one country for more than a year as migrants, and therefore
the fact that students are enclosed is not some eccentric British
policy. It is, I am told, how the international statistics are
compiled.
Q365 Dr Huppert: Australia
analyses it differently, but one can certainly categorise them
differently. What message would you like to be sending to international
students considering applying to study in Britain?
Mr Willetts: That
we have a clear, fair, robust visa regime and a legitimate student
coming to a legitimate British education institution of high quality
will be welcome to come and study.
Q366 Nicola Blackwood:
I wanted to take you back to your comments on globalisation and
the Open University and the fact that we are delivering British
education in all sorts of places in the world. There is also a
need—I hope you agree—for immersion, especially in
cases of English language education especially for students coming
from abroad. Is that something that you are factoring into discussions?
Mr Willetts: Yes,
and of course people want to come and study here and improve their
language in that way. The only point I was trying to make, and
I think it is very topical at the moment—and forgive me,
this is from memory and I apologise in advance if I have this
wrong—but I believe reading somewhere that more women in
the Arab world have access to higher education through the Open
University than from any other education institution. It is when
you come across points like that, you realise that there are various
ways in which people can have that opportunity. I think we can
be very proud of institutions like the Open University, so I just
did not want those kinds of routes to be overlooked.
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