UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 773-i

HOUSE OF COMMONS

ORAL EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

Home Affairs Committee

Student Visas

Tuesday 1 February 2011

Tony Millns and Elizabeth McLaren

Professor Steve Smith and Professor Edward Acton

Professor David Wark and Mr Simeon Underwood

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 126

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 1 February 2011

Members present:

Keith Vaz (Chair)

Nicola Blackwood

Mr Aidan Burley

Mr James Clappison

Lorraine Fullbrook

Dr Julian Huppert

Steve McCabe

Alun Michael

Bridget Phillipson

Mark Reckless

Mr David Winnick

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Tony Millns, Chief Executive, English UK, and Elizabeth McLaren, British Council, gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: Could I ask Mr Millns and Ms McLaren to come to the dais, please? Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is the first session of the Select Committee’s inquiry into student visas, in particular the impact of the proposed restrictions on Tier 4 migration. I welcome to the dais our witnesses: Tony Millns, the Chief Executive of English UK, and Elizabeth McLaren from the British Council. Could I ask all Members to declare any special interest that they have in any of these sectors? The rest of the Members’ interests are declared in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Dr Huppert: If I could just declare for the record that I am a member of the University of Cambridge.

Chair: Mr Millns, will you describe briefly your role in English UK and what your organisation seeks to do?

Tony Millns: I am Chief Executive of English UK, responsible for the general management of the association. I have been in post for 11 years. English UK is a professional and trade association of 450 accredited English language centres, which range from centres in universities like Edinburgh through to private colleges and independent schools like Millfield. The 450 members are all accredited under the accreditation scheme that we run in partnership with the British Council, which currently accredits 535.

Q2 Chair: Basically, you deal with the English language sector?

Tony Millns: We do, yes.

Q3 Chair: Ms McLaren?

Elizabeth McLaren: Hello, I am Elizabeth McLaren. I am the Manager of Accreditation UK at the British Council. The British Council, as you know, is the UK’s international cultural relations organisation, and our role in the Accreditation UK Scheme is the quality assurance of English language teaching organisations here in the UK for the benefit of international students.

Q4 Chair: Do you agree with the Home Secretary and the Government’s views that the number of students who come to this country ought to be reduced?

Tony Millns: Only as an incidental consequence of tackling any abuse that there is in the system, not as a policy objective in itself. The reason for that is that we feel that the objective of reducing net migration in respect of students is pretty meaningless. Whether a student comes into the country for 11 months and departs or stays for 14 months on a Masters course or three years on a PhD course and then departs seems to us to be immaterial in the context of overall immigration statistics.

Elizabeth McLaren: The British Council supports the Government’s commitment to an effective immigration policy that avoids abuse of the student visa system, but we do not support the wholesale reduction of student migration for the purpose of numerical context.

Q5 Chair: I am sure you have both seen the Select Committee’s report published last year into bogus colleges. Is there agreement between the two of you that tackling the abuse of bogus colleges is very important, and do you both believe that if this was done it would only be an issue of genuine students coming into this country?

Tony Millns: Well, broadly, yes, Chairman. If you recall, I did give evidence to your Committee in that inquiry. It is important to point out just how much has been done and was already in train on tackling bogus colleges. The previous Register of Education and Training Providers then maintained by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills had nearly 4,500 colleges on it. The new Border Agency Register of Sponsors has currently, I believe, some 2,292 colleges on the register for Tier 4 purposes. Therefore, the number of colleges able to bring in students has been halved in two to three years. We entirely support that, partly from the point of view of improving the UK’s reputation for quality in education and partly for tackling abuse in the system.

Q6 Chair: One of the criticisms of the last Committee was that the previous Government had not done enough to tackle bogus colleges.

Tony Millns: Yes, and indeed-how shall I put this politely-it left it rather late in the day to do so. David Blunkett, as Home Secretary, announced new measures in July 2004. It took at least three years for anything substantive to happen.

Q7 Chair: But it seems that in the last few months the number of bogus colleges has actually increased.

Tony Millns: I doubt that, Chairman. However, there are signs that there is still some abuse in the system and that accreditation procedures should certainly be tightened up. As I put in my note to the Committee, there are signs that a centre can get accreditation withdrawn by one accrediting body and simply trot across the street, metaphorically, and get accreditation from another body. That indicates that standards are not consistent.

Q8 Chair: We will be coming on to the problems of the current system in a moment with Ms Blackwood. Can you just give me some figures? The number of students that you cover, roughly?

Tony Millns: English UK member centres bring in roughly 400,000 students a year out of the roughly 600,000 who come to study English each year.

Q9 Chair: Benefit to the economy: do we have any figures on that?

Tony Millns: Very roughly, £1.5 billion a year.

Q10 Chair: Jobs?

Tony Millns: Around 30,000 at least.

Q11 Nicola Blackwood: English language schools in my constituency have expressed a number of concerns about the accreditation system: that it is allowing bogus colleges through in the first place. Could you explain the problems that you have observed with the accreditation system as it stands?

Tony Millns: The main one is the one that I alluded to a moment ago, which is that the Border Agency has approved a number of accrediting bodies for the purposes of the register and Tier 4. We do not believe that the standards of some of the other bodies are as high and as established as our scheme, which has been running for nearly 30 years. We have observed that colleges that have had accreditation withdrawn, i.e. they have failed the quality test under, say, the British Accreditation Council Scheme, have subsequently got accreditation from another body and, thereby, have remained on the register. That is clearly a loophole, in our view.

Q12 Nicola Blackwood: How would you recommend closing those loopholes?

Tony Millns: Either to reform the accreditation system and have one or at most two accrediting bodies or the Border Agency is certainly considering whether it could make some interim move so that as soon as a college loses accreditation from any accrediting body it is withdrawn from the register.

Q13 Chair: If that system was tightened up and it cost more money in order to tighten up the system, do you think your members would be prepared to make a contribution if the inspection regime was better?

Tony Millns: I do not think that it would cost more money to tighten up the inspection and accreditation regime. However, it would certainly become high stakes and any college that had accreditation withdrawn would probably reach for the lawyers and go for judicial review against the accrediting body. So there is likely to be a legal cost of tightening up the system. That does not mean that I oppose it. I would welcome it.

Chair: Ms McLaren, please feel free to chip in whenever appropriate.

Q14 Lorraine Fullbrook: Can you tell the Committee what representations you have made to the Government to make the accreditation bodies, as you say, better or of a higher quality?

Elizabeth McLaren: We have been working with the Border Agency since before the inception of the current Tier 4 system, with other accrediting bodies, to look at standardisation and so on, and the British Council has been answering the consultation documents that have been put forward recently.

Q15 Lorraine Fullbrook: Have these representations been fruitful?

Tony Millns: The Border Agency is now conscious that there is a problem with accreditation and that is why there is the proposal in the current accreditation, rather vaguely, to do something about it. Quite what is not clear. They have previously considered trying to give the whole business of accreditation to Ofsted, but our understanding is that Ofsted has resisted that, does not see it as a priority or a job for Ofsted. There is, I suppose, also the possibility that it could be given to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, which is increasingly looking at franchised degree courses in private colleges.

Q16 Mark Reckless: Is there any danger that a smaller number of accrediting bodies could act to exclude new models of delivering courses or competition?

Tony Millns: I do not think so. We have generally been quite flexible with accreditation. The scheme has developed markedly over the 30 years or so and I think we are well cognisant of the fact that many colleges now do blended learning with an online component before the course and online reinforcement and practice after the course. So, I do not think we are closed to new models of delivery.

Q17 Nicola Blackwood: Ms McLaren, what guidance do you currently get on acceptable levels of standardisation for accreditation?

Elizabeth McLaren: The standards and consistency meetings that were held in the early days of Tier 4 have lapsed relatively recently with the pulling out of Ofsted from the monitoring process. So there is not a lot of guidance at the moment for the accrediting bodies, although, of course, we all had to go through an assessment process before we were approved and our systems have only continued to develop since then. We regularly report on the number of accreditation inspections that we conduct and the pass and fail rates for those and we have no indication that there is concern about those rates.

Q18 Nicola Blackwood: Are you required to report? Are all bodies required to report?

Elizabeth McLaren: We are currently voluntarily reporting. This is my understanding.

Q19 Nicola Blackwood: You have written guidance, I assume, that you interpret?

Elizabeth McLaren: We have our own inspection criteria, which were overseen by Ofsted in the early stages and have, therefore, been approved by the Border Agency.

Tony Millns: The accrediting bodies were approved for an initial term, I believe, of two years. That approval has lapsed and, technically, none of the accrediting bodies, I believe, is currently actually approved by the Border Agency.

Chair: When did that happen?

Elizabeth McLaren: Part way through 2010.

Q20 Chair: Are you telling this Committee that those who are now doing accreditation are doing so without proper authority?

Tony Millns: Yes.

Q21 Chair: Does the Government know this?

Tony Millns: Yes.

Q22 Chair: What have they done about this?

Tony Millns: Nothing, in fact.

Chair: Excellent.

Q23 Dr Huppert: Just before we move on from accreditation and that rather interesting piece of news, I have heard stories about checks by accreditation bodies occasionally being at very unusual times-just before Christmas-and asking for what seems a rather surprising piece of information like title deeds to prove land ownership. Are you comfortable that the process of accreditation, previous comments aside, would actually stand up if there was more legal involvement in checking the process?

Elizabeth McLaren: Yes. We are very confident in our accreditation scheme. We check not for deeds of land but that the organisation has appropriate planning permission to be operating an educational institution in the buildings that they are in and, of course, our inspectors are checking on health and safety matters as well. That is one of the ways that we can tell the difference between whether it is a quality organisation or a bogus institution. We are reporting on those regularly in our reports, but obviously the most important thing is the quality assurance of the education provision and the welfare of the students.

Tony Millns: We do certainly check things such as whether an institution has D1 planning permission for use as educational premises, which in places like Oxford and Cambridge is a very salient factor. It is difficult to get.

Q24 Dr Huppert: Indeed. Can I move on, then, to the Government’s consultation paper, which is proposing a range of changes? Which particular areas of that consultation paper concern you either as good things or bad things?

Tony Millns: There are two. The first is a difficult area to address because the statistics are complex, but it is the objective of reducing net migration. Some very interesting work has been done by the Migration Advisory Committee, by the Institute for Public Policy Research, and by Professor Acton, who is giving evidence subsequently.

In fact, it appears that if you crunch all of the statistics, for the Government to be sure of hitting the net migration target that it has set-it is not actually in the Coalition Agreement, which talks about cutting economic migration for work and talks about limiting abuse; it does not talk about cutting net migration-it would need to cut the student route to zero. In other words, no international students would be able to come into the country at all and even that might not be quite enough.

There are several reasons but the basic measure is the International Passenger Survey, which surveys about one in 500 people entering the country and leaving the country. It asks them the purpose for which they are entering the country and the purpose for which they are leaving the country. On entry they probably say, "I am coming to study"; on exit they probably say, "I am going home for a job", or something like that. Therefore, the numbers of students entering and leaving do not correlate.

Q25 Chair: It is the use of the word "migrant", isn’t it?

Tony Millns: It is indeed. We would really wish to see students taken out of the migration statistics completely, and even Migration Watch, I believe, agrees broadly.

Chair: They are coming next week so we will find out.

Tony Millns: Oh, good.

Q26 Dr Huppert: A second issue was raised, but can I just check that what you are saying is there is a fundamental problem with the questions that are being asked, which means that while we may believe that there are many more students coming in than going out, that is not in fact true?

Tony Millns: Exactly so. But even the prior step, the fact that the questions are being asked at all: is the objective of reducing net migration the correct one in terms of immigration control? Probably not. Can it be achieved? Almost certainly not, from the statistics. Would we even know if it had been? No, from the statistics.

Q27 Dr Huppert: Your second point?

Tony Millns: My second point is that the major area that concerns us and the universities is the proposal to increase the level of English to B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference. The CEFR, just to explain, is a way of grading competence in language. It has only six bands to describe moving from absolute beginner to native speaker competence. B2 is, very broadly, a high grade A level on to, perhaps, first year of a degree course. So it is a very high degree of competence in language. Currently, of students coming in on university pathway programmes-international foundation year as they are normally called-around 70% to 80% come in with a much lower level of English than that. 97% of them go on to university courses.

Q28 Dr Huppert: "Much lower" means roughly what sort of standard?

Tony Millns: A2 to B1, roughly GCSE. You are dealing with people who broadly completed year 12 or year 11 in corresponding terms in their own education system. They tend not to have year 13, and a foundation year programme does three things. It gives them subject top-up, English language skills and the study skills to be an independent learner, because a lot of the rest of the world has much more rote learning than we tend to in sixth-form terms here. Now, if-

Q29 Chair: Just following the pathway point that was raised by Dr Huppert, how many are on the pathway who come to learn English but then will end up at a university?

Tony Millns: At least 60,000 to 70,000 a year.

Chair: Will end up in a British university?

Tony Millns: Yes, indeed. It is a major feeder route for universities including-you are hearing from LSE and Imperial later-some of the most prestigious institutions. If the language level was raised to B2, it would cut out the majority of those students.

Elizabeth McLaren: The British Council, recognised worldwide as a leading authority in English language teaching, completely supports the concern about the increased level.

Chair: Yes, we will be coming to that later on.

Q30 Mark Reckless: Mr Millns, the Government has this target of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands and we made great play of that at the election. If we are to hit that-you are saying that there is a problem with the statistics that is biasing up the estimates for net immigration of students-what is the corollary of that? Where is the higher immigration where the statistics are telling us that it is lower than it is in terms of a counterpart to the student mis-estimate?

Tony Millns: Well, that is why I say I believe that the objective is actually unattainable, because the work numbers-Tiers 1 and 2, now combined-were previously, in 2009, 33,270 and the family routes were roughly 49,000. So putting those two together is 82,000. If you took the figure for net migration, which it is generally accepted is 196,000, that would leave you still at 114,000 if you closed completely both other routes other than student migration. Now, at present the Government has agreed to limit the work routes down from 33,270 to 21,700; a cut of 11,570, roughly a third. It is reviewing the family and settlement routes. Even if it reduced those also by a third it would only bring net migration down to 168,000. That would leave the student route and you would need, as the Migration Advisory Committee estimated, to reduce the student route by 88,000, which is a third of the student route.

Q31 Chair: Our last report on the cap actually has all this information.

Tony Millns: Exactly. The problem with the statistics is that you cannot be sure when you have reached the 88,000 because of the numbers in and out problem that I referred to.

Q32 Mark Reckless: Don’t these, as you describe them, seemingly very significant reductions in net migration require much smaller reductions in gross immigration to obtain them?

Tony Millns: I doubt it because you cannot actually divorce the two. In terms of gross migration, you have figures on the student side of 468,000, roughly 200,000 of whom are on student visitor visas. The rest are on Tier 4 visas. If you were to reduce the, if you like, top line number by a third, you are still left with the problem that you will not know how many of them have actually exited the country. You have to reduce the numbers in-the Institute for Public Policy Research estimates-by more than half to get the reduction in net migration on the statistics.

Q33 Lorraine Fullbrook: I would just like to talk about your second concern on the Government consultation paper of students coming to study here having level B2 English. What exactly is wrong with this country stating that we require people to have an A-level standard of English to come here and study, particularly as you say that 30,000 go on to degree standard? What exactly is wrong with that?

Tony Millns: Because many of them will have left school in countries where the teaching of English is not particularly good. Their subject teaching may have been quite good. In other words, they may be quite good physicists or mathematicians or whatever. They require a course that brings their English language level up from around A2 to B1 to B2, IELTS 6.5 for university entrance, and they require that combined with the subject knowledge that is taught in and through English so that they attain the subject knowledge competence in English as well as what you might call a general English ability.

Q34 Lorraine Fullbrook: Are you saying they cannot do this in their own country before they come here?

Tony Millns: It would be difficult for them to do so and there are great advantages to learning English in an English language speaking country.

Chair: I think we understand. We will be coming on to that later when we look at the British Council. Thank you.

Q35 Mr Clappison: I think you are saying to us that it is a key part of this that they have the opportunity to learn English alongside their preparation for study for their higher degrees. I have to say, if GCSE is the level, as somebody with a GCSE in French, I would not be very happy about going to learn engineering, physics or law in France with my GCSE French. Would you?

Tony Millns: I took O-level. It would have been possible to make a start on an A-level equivalent course with a good O-level grasp of the language.

Q36 Lorraine Fullbrook: That is what we are asking for in the consultation paper.

Tony Millns: No, B2 is much higher and that is what-

Lorraine Fullbrook: You said it was broadly A-level standard.

Tony Millns: Yes. The proposals are jacking up the level to-

Q37 Mr Clappison: Without decrying the standards of learning of O-levels, it is international comparisons, and on the basis of what people can understand I think it would be possible to over-estimate the proficiency of somebody in a language who is attaining GCSE, particularly their facility for understanding it and speaking it.

Tony Millns: I take your point and the foundation year programme is structured so that it is front-loaded with the English language. So they learn the English first, get that up, and then they do the subject coverage.

Q38 Mr Clappison: How tight are the controls for ensuring that somebody who has come here purportedly to undertake a foundation year actually undertakes it and that when they have undertaken it they go on to study something at a higher education institution?

Tony Millns: All of the providers who do that kind of course will be Tier 4 sponsors. They will have had compliance visits from the Border Agency. They will also be accredited by one of the accrediting bodies and they will almost all have pathways into universities and validation agreements with universities. So they will be reviewed in at least three ways to make sure that they are providing a good level of education.

Q39 Mr Clappison: Members of this Committee went to Nigeria, I think it was in 2007, and we were told by the Embassy in Nigeria-they specifically drew it to our attention-that they had had a significant number, I think running into the hundreds if not thousands, of people applying from Nigeria for a visa to undertake a foundation year at a particular university in this country and that only a handful of them had actually turned up for the course, although the visas had been issued to them.

Tony Millns: That, I would think, is unlikely to be the case today because-

Mr Clappison: They told us that.

Tony Millns: Yes, and that was 2007 before the points-based system was introduced and before people on the sponsor register had a duty to record and report students who do not arrive for the course or students who depart the course early.

Q40 Bridget Phillipson: The point that you are making is that while it is important that people have a certain level of English when they arrive, actually being exposed to the language day to day while in the UK massively accelerates their language proficiency. It is being based within an English-speaking country in order to accelerate that learning?

Tony Millns: Yes, precisely.

Q41 Dr Huppert: Do you have any figures on how many students who are doing the foundation year go on to do a university degree, and of those who do not, how many of them have left the country and how many are missing?

Tony Millns: The five leading providers of foundation year programmes estimate that the numbers going on are 97% of those taking foundation year courses. That means that 3% do not go on. I am afraid I do not have any statistics nor, I believe, does the Border Agency, as to whether they return home. But if you look at the report that the Home Office published back in September, The Migrant Journey, they reckon that around 3% of students did not ultimately return home but most of those had transferred to family routes to settlement because they had married or whatever in the UK.

Q42 Chair: But you cannot do that now. You cannot switch. If you come as a student you cannot stay as a spouse, can you?

Tony Millns: You can, and you can also, or you could, move into the work route and that could also lead to settlement.

Q43 Chair: But you would have no problem with the Government introducing measures to stop switching?

Tony Millns: No, indeed. I think that what the Home Secretary has referred to as breaking the link between temporary and permanent migration is very much the way to go. That is why we questioned the policy objective of reducing net migration.

Q44 Chair: Indeed. Can I just explain: Members of the Committee have had to leave not because of anything you have said.

Tony Millns: I should certainly hope not, Chairman.

Chair: They are on another Standing Committee on the police, but they will return.

Tony Millns: I understand.

Q45 Mr Winnick: Ms McLaren, what will the proposed changes have on the reputation of this country, in your view, abroad?

Elizabeth McLaren: I think it will certainly damage our reputation as a leading education provider in the world because students will be put off by what they see as an unwelcoming approach to international education and will choose other destinations. If they are finding it difficult to begin their study journey here, as they currently would by doing English and then perhaps foundation and moving on into the university sector, and they have to go elsewhere to get their English medium education first, then they may well choose just to stay there for their university studies and further education.

Q46 Mr Winnick: Taking Mr Clappison’s point a moment ago about possible abuses-Nigeria was mentioned-do the British Council and Mr Millns accept that abuses have occurred where prospective students are far more concerned about coming to Britain to try and stay and work, earn their living and not rely on public funds but, nevertheless, use studies as a pretext for coming here?

Tony Millns: There certainly have been abuses of that kind. I think significant progress has been made in reducing them and there is certainly one proposal in the current consultation that we would broadly support, which is to rank countries by a risk assessment so that countries in the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria and one or two others, would be rated higher risk and only the most highly compliant sponsor institutions would be able to recruit students from there. There are difficult human rights issues involved in making that judgement but certainly it is one of the Border Agency’s proposals.

If I might, Chairman, just on Mr Winnick’s first point, international education is a growth sector of the economy and likely to be a very important part of the knowledge economy of the future. I have here the International Students Strategy for Australia running up to 2014. It is Australia’s third largest export sector. They have grown it from 47,000 students in 1990 to 500,000, i.e. more than 10 times, in 2009, and they are aggressively attacking us. This document points out-

Chair: The Australians?

Tony Millns: Yes, very aggressively.

Q47 Chair: Revenge over the cricket, no doubt. Are they our biggest competitors?

Tony Millns: Australia, Canada and the US are the main competitors, Chairman, yes.

Q48 Mr Winnick: Do you accept that the large majority of those over the years who have come to study in this country are genuine?

Tony Millns: Absolutely. We have no doubt about that, especially if they come to legitimate institutions.

Q49 Mr Winnick: Would you put a percentage on it? In broad terms, 70%? Less? More?

Tony Millns: That is extremely difficult, partly because it is varied and partly because, going back to what I said about the previous Register of Education and Training Providers, roughly half the colleges that were able, prior to 2007, to bring in students have had the power to do so removed from them. Now, not all of those were, shall we say, actively bogus in terms of being fronts for immigration. Some of them were simply poor quality and were ripping off the students. It is difficult to know how many were bogus, but there is no doubt that it was a significant loophole and I have said so before to this Committee.

Q50 Mr Winnick: The previous Government closed it?

Tony Millns: Moved to close it. The actual measures were not taken until 2007-08, and came into force largely in 2009, which was only barely a year before the 2010 general election.

Q51 Mr Winnick: We have the point. Ms McLaren, should we be concerned about the international reputation of this country? Ministers would say first and foremost we should be concerned about our own position: tightening controls, avoiding abuses. How far, in your view, should we be concerned about an adverse effect abroad from Britain’s reputation for receiving students?

Elizabeth McLaren: The strength of the UK’s educational offer is very important in terms of the UK’s reputation, and it has an impact on all areas of the UK’s economy in terms of people being interested in working with us, doing business with us, cultural relations and all the other aspects.

Tony Millns: I would add to that that I am sure university colleagues will point out that some very significant departments, particularly in science, technology, engineering and maths, are only kept open by international student fees.

Chair: Thank you. We have some very quick supplementaries from Members of the Committee because the next witnesses are here.

Q52 Nicola Blackwood: I just wanted to return to the language proficiency issue for a moment. If the level is increased to B2 I understand that the Government is currently proposing to allow a pre-sessional course of just three months. But if they extended that to one year to allow highly trusted sponsors to offer English language courses and foundation courses specifically for that route that you have mentioned, would that meet the requirements of the industry?

Tony Millns: That would certainly help, or leaving the level 4, NQF level 3, courses currently at B1 would be the other way of doing it. We have discussed both with the Border Agency.

Q53 Nicola Blackwood: Those are the two options that you are recommending?

Tony Millns: Well, we would regard them as a reasonable concession, given the damage that the current proposal is likely to do.

Q54 Mark Reckless: Would you at least agree that immigration could be reduced by restricting the post-study work route?

Tony Millns: It is difficult to estimate that and the consultation paper does not try. Post-study work is an important component of the offer of a degree course in the UK. Well, students say this and I think you will find in the consultation that a lot of students have responded on that point. The Australian strategy that I have referred to makes great play of the fact that that element makes their offer better than ours.

Q55 Chair: How many years do they have?

Tony Millns: Two years.

Chair: The Australians offer two years.

Q56 Lorraine Fullbrook: On your statistics, what are the top five countries requiring student entry visas?

Chair: In the world, you mean?

Lorraine Fullbrook: Yes.

Chair: I think it comes from Elizabeth McLaren’s statement that we are the best in the world. Which are the other four?

Lorraine Fullbrook: In terms of countries asking for student visa entries to the UK, what are the top five countries your statistics show?

Tony Millns: Source countries from which students come to the UK?

Lorraine Fullbrook: Yes.

Chair: Is that right, Ms Fullbrook?

Lorraine Fullbrook: Yes.

Tony Millns: Is that what you mean?

Chair: Where do they come from?

Tony Millns: China, Russia, India, probably currently still Japan and South Korea in terms of English language students.

Q57 Lorraine Fullbrook: You seem quite doubtful. Do you not have statistics that show this?

Tony Millns: Well, we have statistics that show the major source countries for English language students. I think you are asking me about education overall.

Lorraine Fullbrook: Correct.

Tony Millns: I would have to go back to the Home Office documents and look at that. I could not give you-

Chair: We have the top five. It is in the consultation document: China, 20,000; India, 18,000; Pakistan, 13,000; Russia, 9,000; United States, 9,000; Taiwan, 8,000.

Elizabeth McLaren: It is obviously different from the priority markets for English.

Chair: For yourselves, yes. It would be very helpful if we could have your list as well.

Tony Millns: Yes, of course.

Q58 Chair: Thank you very much. Thank you for giving evidence. We are most grateful. What would be very helpful: you seem to know a lot about Australia, Ms McLaren. Would you have this information about the Australian model?

Elizabeth McLaren: We can find it for you.

Chair: Would you? That would be very helpful. Thank you very much. Thank you for giving evidence today.

Tony Millns: Thank you very much.

Q59 Chair: We will be following up this point. I think it is unsatisfactory that the authority for accreditation agencies has expired.

Tony Millns: It has technically lapsed because it has not been renewed.

Chair: We will write to the Minister. Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Steve Smith, President of Universities UK, and Professor Edward Acton, Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, gave evidence.

Q60 Chair: Professor Acton and Professor Smith, thank you for giving evidence. You may have heard some of the previous evidence. How does this consultation concerning sub-degree level have an impact on UK universities? Because it appears that the Government does not have the universities in their sights as far as bogus colleges are concerned and stopping abuse.

Professor Acton: It is very important to emphasise the distinction between preuniversity, which is our concern-courses people come and take designed to prepare them for a degree-and sub-degree. The real distinction, our preoccupation, is about pre-degree because many countries in the world do not do the second year of A-level, and especially nonCommonwealth countries, and do not have adequate English to move into a degree programme. As Australia and America are finding, the year pre-degree is critical to recruiting undergraduates especially, but some English for postgraduates, from those countries. That is our concern: protect the pathways and do not impose a language barrier, B2, which would actually suffocate those.

Q61 Chair: How many of your students would come to East Anglia University via the pathway?

Professor Acton: A very significant proportion of the undergraduates.

Chair: How many is that?

Professor Acton: Well, each year we recruit about 400 overseas students. Cumulatively, because the undergrads and the postgraduate research students are there for three years, it amounts to a very large income stream and those coming via the pathway are absolutely vital and the biggest growth sector. We estimate in Britain there are now 60,000 students on pre-university pathways of one form or another. We estimate that 70% of those would never have crossed the border if the rule were B2 English and that the cost in fees alone would be £1 billion recurrent.

Q62 Chair: Professor Smith, would you agree with that?

Professor Smith: Yes. If you look at the national data it is quite compelling. We do not need to be hysterical about this in any way. 46% of undergraduates, overseas and non-EU undergraduates; 33% of postgraduate taught, 46% of postgraduate research international students have previous experience of studying in the UK. So a large percentage of the student body comes here for language top-up or whatever before. We understand the politics. We understand the pressures.

For us, it seems paradoxical at a time when we are trying to find growth in the economy. Here is an export industry, by some estimates the seventh largest export industry in the UK. The market is growing at 7% a year. The UK is the second most successful sector in the world. It would be worth, over the next 15 years, an additional £5 billion of export earnings per year to the UK on top of the £5.3 billion it earns. It seems crazy to stop that development by focusing on-using inappropriate methodology-something we think is not a problem. The key figure for me, Chair, is the UKBA say, quite rightly, that there is noncompliance, but in the university sector it is under 2%. So we think it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Q63 Chair: Well, that is pretty clear to the Committee. You talked about understanding the politics of this. How can we help the Government achieve what it is going to achieve without damaging UK universities? Is there anything that can be done? The issue of bogus colleges aside-because no one is suggesting that any UK university is a bogus university; at least I have not heard it being suggested-what can we do to help the Government?

Professor Acton: I strongly support the UKBA’s plan to restrict recruitment to highly trusted status sponsors. It is absolutely right about that, but the accreditation for that status should be even tighter, and it would be very wise for Britain to insist on significant deposits for all students entering the country.

Chair: Deposits of money?

Professor Acton: Yes. Thirdly, as soon as they can, it would be very good if the UKBA would tell each sponsor when their offer letter-CAS it is called-has been used to give a student a visa, when that student enters the country and when they leave the country. At the moment UKBA cannot tell us but it is racing towards getting the methodology for that through e-Borders.

Q64 Chair: Why do they not tell you?

Professor Acton: They are only setting up e-Borders, this wonderful system-and the Government is backing it to the hilt-which will, for the first time, check individually when people leave the country. As soon as that is completely in place, Britain will have figures for net migration so vastly superior to what it is proposed to use at the moment that we will retrospectively look back and say, "If we had been guided by the International Passenger Survey we would have done terrible national damage".

Q65 Chair: I want to ask you about the definition of the word "student" and whether that is the problem. I have always understood "student" to be someone who comes and studies and leaves. Is that your understanding?

Professor Acton: Yes, insofar as, for the purposes of this exercise, it is people with a visa that has an end point, at which point they must leave the country unless Britain has decided-it is a separate issue-to give them a different kind of visa. That is who we are talking about. In our view, they come, they study, they leave or, but it is not up to the universities, Britain decides, "You we would like to stay".

Q66 Nicola Blackwood: Do you think, then, that the route through foundation course to undergraduate to Masters to PhD or DPhil through post-work study into Tier 1 or 2 visa is too direct a route to settlement? Because once you have been through that study course you have been here 10 years and you are accruing the right to remain. Is that something that you think should be addressed in order to stop this confusion between what you call a student and what we would call an immigrant?

Professor Acton: My understanding is while you are a student you do not add to your right to settle. While you are here it is discounted. You cannot say, "Hey, I have been here for five years". No. If you are a student: zero points. My greatest concern about the debate around this is that it leads to confusion. People say, "Well, because some students stay there is a sort of doubt cast over the whole lot of them".

We, therefore, have to think of them not as rather long-term tourists pouring foreign currency on to our goods and services but as a source of people who are going to stay. In that respect, I would rather like it if we severed it but we should be very clear: Britain is dependent for its postgraduate research, especially in STEM subjects, on foreign students. It is sad and in 10 years we may get more Brits to do it but we are failing at the moment. If we denied PGRs the prospect of staying and of bringing their family, I am afraid we will see a very quick decline in STEM subject research here.

Professor Smith: Could I just add to that? The UKBA’s own data is very interesting on this. UKBA data show us that actually if you take five years after study, only 3% of the students who come in have any claim to settlement and have tried to settle. 85% have either left or have gone on to further study and, of the remainder, many of them are in work and that should not be a surprise because 39% of international students study the very subjects that the CBI and everyone tells us are in high demand, namely the STEM subjects, the science subjects. It is hardly surprising that they stay, because the UK knowledge economy needs these graduates in many cases to go into the universities. I think it would be a massive own goal for us to try and restrict those students because they are vital to the health of the UK knowledge economy, which, as I said earlier, is the second strongest in the world.

Q67 Mark Reckless: Could the post-study work route be restricted so that it was only if you were working within academia in the way you describe? Would that be one way to break the escalator mechanism where people come in at foundation and then stay on forever, at least in some cases?

Professor Smith: Two very quick points on that. Firstly, I do think we need to think about the international messaging. It is about is the UK open for business? As someone who, as President of Universities UK, travelled with the Prime Minister to both China and India, it was very interesting, in both those education summits the Indian Minister and the Chinese Minister said, "We are worried about the visa issue. Does the UK want our students?" So I think there is a lot-

Q68 Chair: What did the Prime Minister say to that?

Professor Smith: The Prime Minister was not in that meeting. This was the Education Minister.

Chair: What did he say to that?

Professor Smith: They all said, of course, "The UK is open for business". No one wants to damage the university sector. Our concern is that the effect-may be unintended-is to damage the university sector, and post-study work is exactly an image. Our competitor knowledge economies offer that. They see it as a great hint as to why you should come and study in another country; precisely because it gives you a right to do work after you graduate.

Q69 Mark Reckless: Professor Smith, I find this quite difficult because you speak with similar enthusiasm, it seems to me, on both of these issues. But I draw a distinction between not wanting to put artificial barriers in the way of university recruitment and artificially making it more attractive to come to university by saying, "Well, if you graduate here we will let you stay on afterwards for post-study work. Do you understand the distinction that I and my constituents have potentially drawn there?

Professor Smith: Yes. Although there is no evidence, is there, that students who stay on are, in large part, taking the jobs of people in the local economy? Because the jobs they are taking are related to the high-level skills they have gained.

Q70 Mr Clappison: I am with you on a lot of what you say but I am afraid not on your last point, because we hear that all the time. It is the same argument that is produced by the CBI saying, "Let us recruit the skilled workers we need overseas and bring them to this country because we cannot get the people here". The answer to that is we are not training the people we have here and if we listen to that argument all the time we never will do. Can I ask you, Professor Acton-

Alun Michael: Can we hear a response to that rather tendentious point?

Mr Clappison: Yes, please do. Yes, fine, have a debate about it.

Professor Smith: Let us look at the data. There is now an upturn at the moment but the UK simply is not producing enough people at age 16-at 16, forget university-with the skills level. 52.5% of 16-year-olds do not have five GCSEs A to C. Where are the jobs for these people? Many UK science departments would not be in existence but for international students because those students are needed to keep the science subjects healthy. So my view is there is a massive issue about skills in the UK but the way of dealing with it is not to say to people from abroad, "Do not come". It is to make sure that we do everything to support the development of training and education in our school system.

Q71 Mr Clappison: I hear what you say on that and the STEM subjects, the science subjects that you were talking about. The problem has been that we have been producing fewer and fewer people who are qualified at A-level and so on to enter the university to study those subjects, and that problem has been developing and continuing all the time that we have been admitting the students. We should be concentrating, shouldn’t we, on educating students in this country to a high level to go into science subjects? It is masking the problem.

Professor Smith: Yes, but if I may, one obvious point: no international student takes a place that is available for a home student. They are in addition.

Q72 Mr Clappison: I am not suggesting that, no.

Professor Smith: It is not that they are crowding out home students. The answer to the problem is to do everything we can to improve science education in our schools and I accept that. But that does not mean the way you deal with that is to say then, "Let us make it more difficult"-

Chair: We will be hearing from the scientists very shortly.

Q73 Nicola Blackwood: I just wanted to pick up on a point that you made about our competitors offering post-study work routes as something valuable to attract students. Could you give us an idea of what other countries offer comparable routes and how they handle it?

Professor Acton: I do not think I can give you the precision I would like to. I could easily answer by letter, but both Australia and America do. France is proposing to do so for three years. You know the French have crossed the Rubicon and are teaching degrees in English, so delicious is the world market.

Chair: Professors, we would be very grateful to have that comparison. It would be very helpful if we could have that.

Professor Smith: We can send that to you.

Chair: Thank you.

Q74 Alun Michael: I have a question to put to each of you, but before I do could I just pick up one comment that flashed past, which was a reference to increasing deposits or the requirement for deposits. I think it was Professor Acton who raised that point. Wouldn’t that favour the well off and not necessarily the talented, and isn’t it really a non-relevant test?

Professor Acton: Of course I follow that danger, but we think that there is a very strong correlation between those who put up a big deposit and those who are completely serious about coming and complete their degree. Given concerns about any apparent misuse of the Tier 4 system, I think it would be a really good way of tightening it.

Q75 Alun Michael: Not to delay us but could you give us written evidence for that assertion?

Professor Acton: Yes.

Alun Michael: It seems to me rather dubious but that is because I have not seen evidence on it.

Professor Acton: Yes.

Q76 Alun Michael: Professor Smith, in your evidence you say there is a lack of basic data about student visas and who they are issued to. Can you elaborate on that and ways in which the data could be improved?

Professor Smith: Our main concern is that the data that are driving the proposals of UKBA are very, very unreliable. Last year, 273,000 student visas were issued. Of course, we know how many come to the universities. What we are asking for, to be honest, is that the highly trusted status sponsors are the focus of the relationship between the student visa, the student arriving and then the student leaving. We can actually test that. Our problem with all the data is that there is not the linkage shown between the methodology they are using through the International Passenger Survey to estimate students leaving. That is our major concern.

Q77 Alun Michael: Are you satisfied that all universities would be capable, provided they choose to do so, of achieving that highly trusted status? The reason I ask that is obviously the economic contribution to some of the more local and newer universities is absolutely crucial. Is it possible for any university to reach that sort of status and have the correct systems in place?

Professor Smith: First, yes, it is. We think all the 133 members of Universities UK will easily be able to achieve that. Secondly, your comment about the economy is actually, for me, the key issue. It is not about universities. It is about UK PLC. If you look at the contribution of international students to local economies-forgive me if I just use one sentence on my local example-we commissioned Oxford Economics to do the analysis of what international students contributed to the Exeter region economically. We have 3,400 international students. They contribute £57 million to the Exeter economy and are creating, with knock-on multipliers, 2,100 jobs. Think of the growth if we can double our international student numbers or grow them at 7% a year as the evidence shows us. But think of the cost if we have to cut them back. This would be felt in every university city in the country and it is thousands of jobs.

Q78 Alun Michael: Thank you. Professor Acton, you comment that the Migration Advisory Committee, "is obliged to rely on the data collected by the International Passenger Survey. The MAC’s own opinion of this data is not flattering". Again, how can we improve that situation?

Professor Acton: I am very glad you have asked me that. I am really concerned in the national interest that if UKBA/Home Office policy is guided by the International Passenger Survey, guided by the target laid out in the 350-page MAC report of November, which is to reduce net immigration via the student route to 23,000, we will reduce university recruitment alone by something of the order of 60%. I have done a little exercise.

Imagine in 2005 the Government of that day had said, "The International Passenger Survey is showing an alarming growth in net migration of our students. We will peg it. We will hold it to 23,000", which is what MAC is proposing. Do you know what the cost would have been by 2011? This is demonstrable. It is not imaginary. The statistics on what the fees and recruitment actually were, they are all there. But if you imagine that we had capped the number of international students coming in, in 2008-09 instead of the £2.3 million that the Home Secretary rightly celebrates in the introduction to the consultation, fee income would have been £1.1 million. At steady state, by 2010-11 fee income to universities would be £1.8 billion lower than it is in the current year. The cumulative costs between 2005 and now would be £6 billion. Add in the off-campus expenditure: it would be £12 billion.

If a government of 2005 had pursued the very approach that MAC has adopted and is trying, believing it must use the IPS-now, the IPS was found, after the 2001 census, to be the primary source of the most appalling miscalculation. There were 800,000 missing young men and it shocked-I do not know how many of you remember it. I do not remember it at all. But what was the prime source of that? The IPS had undercounted young people leaving the country. They still are, massively. Now, though, because of this Government’s admirable support for the institution of the system called e-Borders, which counts every individual arriving and leaving, but the system is not yet covering all-

Q79 Chair: They have teething problems. We do know about that.

Professor Acton: But if we could use it, there is a way of using it not to do net migration-that we will have by 2013-but to do a test, which I urge you to ask the Government to do: look at the names and birthdays of the 100,000 non-EU students graduating in whichever year we can do, and I think 2010 is the one e-Borders could do; check who among those have a visa that expires and check which of those left. Now, that is a realism. When I said this to the Minister and the UKBA official-and they are extremely helpful, they are asking UUK to second somebody to work with them-they said, "That would be awfully expensive". I said, "The universities will pay". The stakes are terrifying. This could be done extremely quickly.

Q80 Chair: You would pay for this exercise?

Professor Acton: Yes.

Chair: We will put this to the Minister next week.

Professor Acton: Will you? Please do.

Chair: Yes, we will.

Professor Acton: But it must be done in February. There is a hurry because like Steve-

Chair: We will definitely put-

Professor Acton: -I want the message to go out, "Britain is really open. Britain is the warmest place to international HE students".

Chair: Yes, indeed.

Professor Acton: We are yearning to develop and expand. In March every part of the economy will be seeking ways of growing.

Chair: Professor, thank you.

Q81 Dr Huppert: I apologise for interrupting this flow. I think there are some very compelling things on the figures there about number of students and the process there and about the economic benefits. Would you say there are some less tangible benefits as well to domestic students from having international exposure to different ways of thinking, whether in the scientific fields, humanities fields and so forth? Have you done any work to look at those? Is there any way of surveying that or quantifying that at all?

Professor Smith: Briefly, yes, massive benefits. If you think about the things that make people employable-being aware of international cultural issues, maybe experience of studying in other countries-for the UK student it is a real marker. Tomorrow’s graduates need to be people that can move culturally and geographically. Frankly, at Exeter where we have grown international students significantly, we have found the effects enormously beneficial; also on the cultural life of the city. It is Chinese New Year this week. To see our students taking the Chinese dragon through the streets of Exeter is a great issue for the town. I think there are all sorts of benefits to our students and also to the local society.

Q82 Mr Winnick: I wonder if I could be the devil’s advocate for a second. What would you professors say to those who, hearing your evidence today, would say, "Here are two distinguished academics, no doubt very genuine, but who do not understand the very high feelings over the need for immigration controls to be more effective, to cut down on immigrants and the rest"; that in other words you are living, to use a phrase, in an ivory tower? Professor Smith?

Professor Smith: I would sit down with people and I would say, "I do understand the problem. It is in the community I live in and I am aware of that". But when you then ask people, "By the way, what do you mean by immigration?" they do not mean students who come, study, enrich the society and, do you know what, leave. The non-compliance of the student body at universities is 2%. That is not the problem. The problem: the public perception is about immigration. It is not about economic students coming in and studying in the UK and then leaving the country. I understand the problem but it is the wrong target. Students come and leave.

Professor Acton: I think there is a problem about public perception; that they do not welcome additional people, especially when there is unemployment. But exactly like Steve, Migration Watch itself says, "Students who come, study and leave are not the problem". They are very like tourists. They are spending foreign money.

Chair: We will be hearing from them next week.

Professor Acton: Well, that may not be all they have to say.

Q83 Mr Winnick: Migration Watch, which believes it has some sacred duty to save us from foreigners, is quite able to speak for itself. What would be the sort of impact abroad if the general feeling was that Britain was closing up for business as far as studies are concerned; that we would cut down drastically on the sort of students who are going to your universities and others?

Professor Acton: I think even our research alliances would be affected. There is some hurt felt by some parts of the world when it is felt Britain is not that warming and the exact reverse when they say, "But Britain is the best, the most open and warm". I cannot tell you the soft power we get from alumni abroad. They are there, Anglophile, love their contacts and, I am afraid, steer a lot of things in our direction that will not be steered if we were ever to say, "We do not want international students".

Professor Smith: Can I just add it is largely also a matter of impression. A policy that is not aimed at the universities can still have the effect of cutting back applications. Take two cases: take Australia and the US. The US after 9/11 restricted its visas. It led to a 20% reduction in international student applications. Australia, early 2010, changed its visa regulations. It led to a 16% reduction. Both of them have reversed it. So I think the damage is the image that we send out about the UK, and the UK higher education sector-whatever we think, whatever our moans and groans-is the second strongest in the world. It can grow. It can bring in more earnings to this country and more jobs, not just in universities but in all the communities around them.

Q84 Mr Winnick: What is our standing at the moment, before these restrictions come into force? What is our standing in the countries where students want to come and study?

Professor Smith: Incredibly high. I mean incredibly high. We get 11.8% of the international students in the world. It has stayed the same since 2001. The US has gone down from 25% of the market to 20%. That market, as I said earlier, is going to expand. If we wished to, we could expand our involvement in that market as well. I think it is a win-win and it is a big win for the UK economy.

Q85 Nicola Blackwood: You have spoken about the impacts on the economy of some of these changes. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the impact on the academic standards at the universities that these changes might have.

Professor Acton: I think that it relates to the point that Dr Huppert brought up. The experience of home and EU students of intellectually mingling with those from 150 different counties in the world is greatly enriched. British students are extraordinarily reluctant to go abroad. We must all encourage them to do so more. But at least they can spot how fast the world is changing and study other cultures alive by sitting alongside them in seminars.

Q86 Nicola Blackwood: But is it simply a matter of cultural enrichment or is it a matter of learning alternative methodologies and actually increasing academic status and standing of students?

Professor Acton: Enormously at the research level, enormously. We must really recognise the advantages of different approaches that other cultures bring to us. At the undergraduate level I do think British higher education is the best in the world. I think it teaches a method of problematizing and not just taking it as read from the professor that many cultures still really value, because that is our approach and it is not, as yet, universal.

Q87 Nicola Blackwood: How many foreign research students are involved in that undergraduate teaching and what would happen if those numbers were reduced?

Professor Acton: Well, a lot of them are, partly by way of training them for a prospective academic life. I do not think I have a figure for that. Would you, Steve?

Professor Smith: No. There are 23,000 postgraduate research international students in the UK. As you will know, commonly now students are not just thrown into it. When I did a PhD you just went off and did it. Now it is about research training and so teaching is part of that; so you will find that. To be honest with you, the key issue is that international students enrich every aspect of the life of our campuses and I think it is a mindset issue, to be candid. We want the UK to be more globalised, more open. The economies that are going to succeed in the future are going to be the knowledge economies-preparing people for jobs for the future, not jobs in the past-and to do that you have to have those linkages with the other leading knowledge economies in the world.

By the way, the really interesting thing is that because of these connections with international students coming to the UK, UK universities are increasingly forming deep, sustainable research linkages with the other leading universities in the world. What we do not want to do is to say, "We do not want to be part of that game".

Q88 Chair: So those who are rubbing their hands with glee are the Americans and the Canadians and the Australians?

Professor Acton: They really are. The same agents very often guide prospective applicants: which of these three English-speaking countries would you like? At the moment, until we finish this and get the message out for pre-university pathways, "Britain is the warmest place", there is a danger. There is a sort of nervousness in the market. I do not know what the British Council said, but to us they have said there are rather worrying articles appearing in India and China especially. Almost whatever the consultation were to say there would be worry. Some of the proposals, and the B2 one is the absolute Exocet, would have repercussions. We would sit here in a year and say, "Could we really have done that deliberately?"

Q89 Chair: There is no prospect of filling this gap by universities themselves opening campuses or offices in other countries?

Professor Acton: You see, the point of the pre-university route is that you need, especially from Asia, to have immersion in a society where English is what you hear on the radio, watch on the telly, hear spoken all the time. People who study English for years and years and years but never mingle with anybody English speaking cannot get to B2 from Asia. They can a bit in North Europe. They cannot even in Southern Europe. It is hopeless in Asia.

Q90 Chair: Professor Acton and Professor Smith, thank you very much for coming in. We would appreciate something in writing on the points that have been raised by Members of the Committee if you are able to do that. Thank you.

Professor Acton: Thank you.

Professor Smith: Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor David Wark FRS, Imperial College London/Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Mr Simeon Underwood, Academic Registrar, London School of Economics, gave evidence.

Q91 Chair: Professor Wark and Mr Underwood, thank you very much for coming in. Professor Wark, we have made the decision not to ask you any questions on physics. This is just about visas, though Dr Huppert, I think, probably is one of those who would be able to ask you those questions. Can I start by asking each of you about the dependency that Imperial and the LSE have on foreign students? How important are international students to the work and the life of your university? Professor Wark?

Professor Wark: Well, our international students and our non-EEA students are absolutely critical to Imperial College. I have sent some of these numbers in. I will just quickly repeat a few, just to make the point. About 29% of our student body are non-EEA but we derive from those 29% of our students 62% of our fee income. So last year £75.1 million in fee income came from non-EEA students. Obviously, from a purely financial point of view, it would be devastating to Imperial to have any significant cut in that number of students.

In addition, there were several points made here today. I will not go into great lengths but I just want to reinforce what has been said on a couple of points. One is the absolute critical problem that would be produced in many of our research areas if we lost our postgraduate research students who are non-EEA. Many of our most critical subjects-engineering, for instance-are heavily dependent on these students. 40% of our engineering students come from non-EEA. If we were to lose those students it would have a severe impact on our ability to perform the research that keeps Imperial College as a world-leading institution. That would have an obvious effect on the UK students. If 40% are non-EEA, 60% of them are home or EU. If our programmes are crippled it will hurt those students and then-

Q92 Chair : Mr Underwood, the LSE? Now, we would imagine that probably everyone is an international student there?

Mr. Underwood: A slight exaggeration but not much. 51% of the full-time student population at the LSE are non-EU international students. They account for 41% of our undergraduate population and 59% of our postgraduate population. It depends on how you count this, but they are drawn from over 100 countries across the globe. The fee income from students paying overseas fee amounts to £65 million, which is 30% of the school’s income.

Q93 Chair: Of the 51% that you mentioned, how many do you think would be affected by the Government’s proposals?

Mr. Underwood: It is very difficult to tell without crying wolf. Our impression from actually surveying our own students is that, of the Government’s proposals, the one that would matter most to the students-and this runs counter to previous evidence you have had this morning-is the post-study work restrictions or rather discontinuation.

Q94 Chair : If that stopped your 51% would be what?

Mr. Underwood: Would certainly reduce dramatically at the postgraduate level.

Q95 Chair: Professor Wark, you gave us a figure. What was your figure for overseas students?

Professor Wark: 29% of our total student body.

Q96 Chair: If these proposals were implemented, what would that do to your figure, roughly?

Professor Wark: Well, obviously it is going to go down. I do not know how you estimate by how much. I can run through each one of the proposals in order if you like but, all in all, they seem to be producing an attempt to reduce the numbers by making it less attractive to come here to study. We feel that that would be a disastrous thing for Imperial. Imperial competes for the very best students in the world, and if you simply make it less attractive to come here to study the people you deter first are the very best, not the scammers that you want to get rid of.

Q97 Chair: But those who are following this debate, the politics of the debate, would not have expected that proposals of this kind-which is to do primarily with cutting down on students who are not genuine-would be affecting world-class institutions like Imperial College and the LSE.

Professor Wark: Let me give you a few examples of how-

Chair: Not too many; just one or two.

Professor Wark: Yes. First, to back up a point that has been made earlier, more than half of all of our undergraduates who arrive non-EEA come to us through a UK non-degree-granting institution, more than half. So any reduction in the ability of those non-degree-granting institutions to get non-EEA students would obviously directly affect us. I have to agree about the post-study work, which would make us quite a bit less attractive. The idea of spouses being unable to work, I personally would not be sitting here if that were the case because I would have never come to Britain 21 years ago.

Q98 Chair: I am not checking your immigration status but you came-

Professor Wark: I feel as if somebody is about to feel my collar.

Chair: But you came as a spouse?

Professor Wark: No. I came as an academic but if my wife, who is a highly trained orthopaedic nurse, had been unable to work in the UK we would not have come.

Q99 Mr Winnick: Migration Watch will not like that.

Professor Wark: Well, my wife is a specialist nurse in a hospital that is desperately trying to recruit nurses from the Third World, so I do not think Migration Watch would object.

Q100 Chair : Figures?

Professor Wark: The other point I would raise is, once again, this question of English proficiency tests. We would strongly hold that that is an academic judgement. The level at which somebody has to speak English is very different for a classics degree at Oxford or a degree in electrical engineering or theoretical physics, and we feel we are the best place to make that. I just point out that if the US had imposed that requirement when Nambu came to the United States, I do not think he could pass a B2 test today but it did not stop him from getting a Nobel prize. So I think that we would be limiting ourselves to a subcategory of the students, those with exceptional English skills, who are not necessarily the ones we are most interested in at Imperial.

Q101 Chair: But you heard the point made by Mr Clappison, or maybe you did not, about the level of English that is required? I am not suggesting Mr Clappison is up for a Nobel prize but-

Professor Wark: But, once again, with all due respect, we teach these students every year, thousands of them, so we are quite aware of how well they can speak English when they arrive. Obviously, we would prefer that they speak English better. However, their level of training in the specialist areas that are of primary interest to us are so good that we are-

Q102 Chair: So you support the English language colleges when they talk about the pathway?

Professor Wark: Yes. Well, we would certainly support the idea that you should leave the judgement of someone’s English language skills to the higher education institutions that can make the judgement of whose English is good enough to attend our course.

Chair: Thank you.

Q103 Dr Huppert: Firstly, having done university admissions, I would echo that. Nobody wants to teach a student who cannot understand, so one tries to judge that. I was just interested in the figures about students coming particularly with a post-study work visa. Have you seen the survey that the National Union of Students did that found, I think, that about 73%-I am not sure on the last digit-of students said that if it was not for post-study work visas they would not come? Would that fit with your experiences?

Mr. Underwood: We have conducted our own survey at the LSE of our own students across the board. We got a response rate of about 40%; so we got 1,800 students responding. Of those, when we asked a slightly more neutral question than the NUS, "When you decided to apply to study in the UK was the entitlement to PSW a factor in your decision?", 56% answered yes. So it is a slightly less loaded question than the NUS. It is a slightly lower figure but it is still higher than one might expect. In the free text comments we have a number of individual cases where students spell out the choices they had and, looking through those comments that we have received over the past fortnight, I would say that in a significant minority of cases it is not just that post-study work was a factor but that it was the factor.

Q104 Mr Winnick: In fact, you speak about your immigration status in a memo that you kindly sent us, Professor Wark, and you say that if you had not been allowed to stay arising from your marriage you would have left the country.

Professor Wark: I would have never come in the first place. If my wife was unable to secure work in the UK-I took a significant-

Mr Winnick: I meant it in that way. I put it somewhat differently.

Professor Wark: Yes. I took a significant pay cut coming here. To have coupled that to my wife going from more highly paid than I was to being unemployed, I am afraid that would have not been appealing enough.

Mr Winnick: I am sure the academic community are very pleased indeed, Professor, that you have stayed on.

Professor Wark: I hope a majority at least.

Q105 Mr Winnick: Can I come to the question again in your memo where you say, "30% of our students gave us more than 70% of our fee income"? That is at Imperial College. Are you basing to a large extent your argument that so much-70%-of the income, in student fees at least, that the college gets is from overseas students and that is all the more reason it should continue?

Professor Wark: Well, I do not think one, in the current economic climate, can possibly ignore that point. To me, I must admit I was shocked when I discovered that number. I had not realised it was so large until I looked into the evidence for this Committee. From my personal point of view, the more important point is that science is a completely international activity. I work in projects that span the globe and we more or less ignore national boundaries. The people who do this science flow back and forth to try to find those groups that are the world leaders in the specialist subject that they are pursuing. For the UK to continue to compete successfully in that, then our groups that are world leading have to be able to bring in the people from other countries who want to work in those groups, while our people who want to work on a different specialty that we are not the best at in the UK go to a group somewhere else. There is this constant flow of researchers back and forth. If we cut ourselves off from that we might stop people coming in; we will not stop the ones going out. The consequence of that is UK science will be weakened to the detriment of those people in the UK who study in my group. Almost all of my current students are UK and they benefit from the interaction with the international people who are allowed to come in to teach them.

Q106 Mr Winnick: Mr Underwood, would that be the position as far as LSE is concerned; that the bulk of your income comes from foreign students?

Mr. Underwood: 30% of our overall income comes from foreign students, so it is the majority of the fee income. I would agree with everything Professor Wark has said except the emphasis on science. The LSE is fundamentally a multicultural institution. It is recognised globally as such and part of the point of it is actually the exposure of both UK and international students to this multinational, global community.

I think one of the points, if I might pick up on the discussion about post-study work, that is actually at issue here is that we are finding, through having asked employers, through having asked our students, that some of the jobs that they are getting with post-study work are not, in effect, British jobs. They are jobs in multinational organisations, multinational companies. In a sense it is global companies seeking global analysts to do global jobs and that is very much what an LSE and I think an Imperial and the science area is training its students for.

Q107 Mr Winnick: The overseas income that the colleges receive, Imperial and LSE, how far does that contribute to helping UK students?

Professor Wark: Obviously, Imperial College is an educational charity and does not make a profit, and so the money that we bring in is spent on our mission. The teaching income we bring in is spent on the mission of teaching. Foreign non-EEA students are not given preferential treatment in teaching, even though they pay more, and as a consequence the UK, the home students that we teach, get a better standard of teaching. They have more resources available to them, subsidised by the non-EEA students. It is just inevitable given the numbers.

Mr. Underwood: Yes, there is a significant cross-subsidy. The amount that we get under current arrangements, through the current student loan arrangements and the Tier grant from Government, adds up to about £6,200. The actual cost of teaching students varies enormously by different discipline but call it somewhere in the region of £7,500. So there is an implicit subsidy from international students across to our home student activity. Of course, in the current range of discussions about where we are going to set our fees this becomes a very live issue for all universities.

Q108 Chair: On average how much does it cost for an overseas student to study at the LSE?

Mr. Underwood: At undergraduate level in the region of £10,000. At postgraduate level it varies enormously because we have banded fees, so anywhere between £10,000 and £20,000.

Chair: A year?

Mr. Underwood: Yes.

Q109 Chair: What about Imperial?

Professor Wark: I have the figures on my computer. As is the case at LSE, the amount varies by a huge range.

Chair: But undergraduate is about £10,000, is it?

Professor Wark: No, rather more than that.

Chair: How much more?

Professor Wark: Can I write you a letter? I hate to give you a number that is wrong, but it is more like £17,000, I believe, is the average.

Chair: Indeed, you can do that. Thank you.

Q110 Nicola Blackwood: I have a letter here that has been published in The Times today from UK business schools who are concerned about the impact that these proposals will have on them. You are concerned about the impact it will have on science; the LSE has other concerns. Which disciplines do you think will be disproportionately affected or do you think that all disciplines will be equally affected by these proposals?

Mr. Underwood: I do not think anyone knows because the UKBA consultation document does not really include any figures that show the potential impact, either by various strands of Tier 4 or across the subject disciplines. There is a feeling on the part of the Russell Group, including institutions like Imperial, that the impact will fall disproportionately on science subjects. Unless Professor Wark has some particular evidence for that, I do not know, though, that it is a proven contention.

Professor Wark: First let me correct a point. Imperial College has a large and very successful business school. I should point out that I have the numbers of foreign students broken down across our four major divisions within Imperial: Medicine, Natural Sciences, Engineering and Business and Humanities. It is actually Business and Humanities, which is dominated by Business at Imperial, that has the largest fraction of non-EEA students at 45%. I should also point out they charge the largest fees, so this is disproportionately valuable. The medics 16%, Natural Sciences 25%, Engineering 40%. So what you would conclude from that is all of the areas of our college would be damaged. I would draw from this the fact that as the areas become less blue skies and more applied, the fraction of non-EEA students goes up. So I would say that the damage will fall disproportionately on exactly those parts of science that the Government would most like to enhance.

Q111 Nicola Blackwood: Mr Clappison has already made the point that there is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy with this, that if we do not have the international students coming in, then we will not have the quality of students because we are not producing the quality of students at 16. This was raised by earlier witnesses. Do you think that if the number of international students reduced, putting aside the fees issue, the number of UK students would expand to fill that gap?

Professor Wark: I do not see any causal linkage between those two. In fact, I would argue if there is a causal linkage it is exactly the opposite. Because preventing the international students from coming in would do grave damage to our leading universities, and having fewer leading programmes in your country in an area is not a way to induce young people to go into that area. As has been pointed out, the international students we take do not take places away from domestic students. So cutting the international students will not make more places for the domestic ones. I sense a rejoinder is on the way.

Q112 Mr Clappison: My point was not quite that. It was more that it was a sad commentary that we were told that we were not producing enough scientists in this country and that as far as putting skilled-

Professor Wark: I completely agree with that. I could go on at tremendous length on that point, but this is not the way to address it.

Q113 Mr Clappison: Yes. I am not suggesting it was a trade-off between the two.

Mr. Underwood: At postgraduate level, where there is no control over numbers in the way that there is at undergraduate level, we are actually to a large extent led by demand times quality. There, of course, the change in the undergraduate student fees regime is causing us concern about the possible longer term impact on the willingness of students already settled with significant debt to go into Masters and PhD work. To some extent there is an issue that maintaining the international recruitment at postgraduate level may be very important to us in a range of ways, including ultimately in institutions such as ours maintaining the academic workforce.

Q114 Dr Huppert: If I can follow on from the point that Nicola Blackwood made, I was at one of the three excellent universities in my constituency at the end of last week, Anglia Ruskin, and talking to some MBA students there. They had particular concerns about the ability to work. One of the points that they made was that a very important part of the MBA programme is working during holidays and working afterwards in jobs that are lined up, connected to the MBA programme. There was a second point they wanted to raise, but just on that one, is that a concern that you would particularly have, that leaving aside anything else the ability to work is integral particularly to that programme?

Professor Wark: Yes, I would agree with that 100%. The particle physicists that I teach do not spend much time working in the burgeoning private particle physics industry of Britain. They gain their educational bona fides from the work they do in our labs. Business students, of course, are enhancing their CV by demonstrating their ability to work in the western business culture, so there is no better way to do that but to work in the western business culture.

Mr. Underwood: It is clear from the feedback we have got from students to our internal survey that many of them actually see this as part of a package; that it is about improving their CV not just by having the LSE as part of it, but by having employment, whether through internships or through post-study work, with reputable international employers. So what they are doing here is seeing this whole thing as a combined package. The students are much more focused on the employability than I think we were 15, 20, 30 years ago.

Q115 Dr Huppert: The other issue that was raised was that for students who have chosen to come to Britain as opposed to another country expecting to be able to get post-study work visas, they face a situation where the rules have changed while they are here, effectively. Is that a concern of the way that the Government may introduce this scheme; that people who have chosen to start a three or four-year degree should have a reasonable expectation of finishing it with the same rules they started with?

Professor Wark: Obviously, Imperial College would not like a situation where we had recruited students on one set of conditions and then halfway through their degrees those conditions changed. It clearly would not reflect well on us internationally if those people go back to their countries and say, "They changed the rules on me".

Mr. Underwood: Yes, self-evidently that is a source of anxiety. There are a number of, if you like, coded messages coming from UKBA officials at public presentations to the effect that change will not be introduced with immediate effect. But those remain oral and in the meantime what is written is causing a number of our students a great deal of alarm, even about what they will be able to do in six or eight months’ time. If I could through your offices ask the sooner the UKBA issues clarification on this point, the more helpful that will be both to students and to employers.

Q116 Chair: Where will they go if they cannot go to world-class institutions like the LSE and Imperial College? Who are your competitors? Which universities will they end up going to?

Professor Wark: Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, MIT; need I go on? In my own narrow field, the primary competition is mostly in the United States. Of course, there are excellent universities on the continent but they have a very different system. So our primary competition-

Q117 Chair: Students are not part of the cap in the United States, is that right?

Professor Wark: No. To my knowledge the J1 visas are not capped.

Q118 Chair: Mr Underwood, whenever I meet your Director he is always in some other country trying to drum up-

Mr. Underwood: Yes, we have noticed that, too.

Chair: -more business; this presumably with the assistance of the British Foreign Office. For example, the High Commission in New Delhi is extremely helpful to the LSE and other British universities. How will this affect his ability to get more people to come here?

Mr. Underwood: It will make it more difficult because what the Director is, of course, doing is a combination of both a bit of student recruitment, keeping tabs with our alumni activities, and a certain amount of what has been called earlier this morning soft power. There are certain countries around the world-I think the recent examples he could cite would be Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Greece where I am afraid to say several of the recent Finance Ministers have been LSE graduates-where actually graduates of the LSE dominate public life. This is very much part of what an LSE or an Imperial is about. Our concern obviously is that that dries up over time. It is not just about, if you like, the drying up of the students we recruit or the drying up of alumni donations, but the drying up of influence, whether through the LSE or through Government.

Q119 Chair: I am meeting the Foreign Minister of Yemen shortly. He did medicine at Edinburgh, and last week the Prime Minister of Bangladesh was telling me that half her Government studied in this country. Professor Wark?

Professor Wark: Yes, I just wanted to add to that. I have looked through the figures for Imperial College for where we derive our non-EEA students, and 38% come from the BRIC nations. The Government has stated that they wish to enhance our links with these countries, these growing and developing economies. What better way can there be that they come here and we educate the leaders of the future? I should also point out that 20% of our non-EEA students come from countries whose GDP per capita is higher than the United Kingdom and, therefore, are unlikely to qualify as economic migrants.

Mr. Underwood: If I could just elaborate slightly, within our own survey the main concern about post-study work has come from Chinese and Indian students, and I think that is a particularly significant factor in the broader trade policies of this Government.

Q120 Chair: Is there anything further you can do to help the Government with the politics of this? Obviously, you are not politicians, but the Government needs to be seen to be controlling immigration, which they say is out of control or has been out of control. What can you do in order to assist them?

Professor Wark: I fear that what I say will be considered dodging the question, but as I often tell my students, you cannot give the right answer to the wrong question. The problem is that the definition of immigration is being applied inappropriately here. Our students come, they learn, they leave. In the evidence there was a point I wanted to warn you about. A study showed that 20% of those students who came in 2004 were still here in 2009. I am surprised it is so small because students who come here for an undergraduate degree often do so because it gives them a leg-up on getting a PhD at a premier UK university. If they came here to do an undergraduate degree and then did a PhD they would still be here in 2009. So I would be very careful about interpreting that number to mean 20% are somehow cheating.

I think the primary problem is defining students as immigrants. They are not. They are our colleagues, they are our customers, and we will only damage ourselves by cutting off our access to them.

Q121 Chair: What further can institutions like yourselves do in order to make sure students leave at the end of their course? They will graduate; you will give them their certificate; there will be a ceremony. How do you say goodbye in a way that means goodbye?

Professor Wark: Well, at Imperial this is mostly done by handing them their degrees and saying goodbye. We do not-

Q122 Chair: Is there any more information UKBA can give you or you working in partnership with Mr Underwood with UKBA to get rid of the students when they have done their course?

Mr. Underwood: I think some of this will emerge over the next two to three years as the sponsor management system and the associated e-Borders system come into play. There is tremendous potential here to track precisely those areas we know the UKBA is most worried about. It is worried about students who come in through Heathrow but do not actually make it to the LSE or Imperial. It is worried about the students who finish but do not actually go home. Now, those are in our experience very small numbers, but the SMS is going to give us the kind of data that will both enable us to track those things more properly and also on the back of that enable the UKBA to award highly trusted sponsor status, as it were, more efficiently than it has hitherto.

Professor Wark: If I could just say I think that one thing that would be helpful would be to attempt to break the perception that there is some sort of automatic link between being a student and being an ongoing permanent resident. I do not think that that is anything like the problem that is perceived, and the right way to correct that is not to keep the people from coming, it is to correct the misapprehension that they stay.

I would not, however, like to see any regulation passed that those who study here cannot remain in the country afterwards, because we get the opportunity to pick the cream of the crop and we should not pass that up.

Q123 Steve McCabe: I just wanted to check if the problem is defining students as immigrants. Do we need a better definition of student so that we separate the people you are talking about from the people who do add to the public perception and demonstrate it by going to rather dubious language schools or business schools or whatever?

Mr. Underwood: That, as I understand it, is very much behind the ideas about accreditation and highly trusted sponsor status. One thing that I found particularly disappointing about the consultation document is how little use is made of highly trusted sponsor status within its proposals. Other than the first one, the sub-degree level 1, it barely features. When we developed highly trusted sponsor status, and UKBA did that in close association with the sector, we were offered a number of, if you like, incentives for it. A number of the proposals in the document could be made more tangible, more effective, if they were linked to highly trusted sponsor status.

Professor Wark: Yes, Imperial College would strongly support the idea that if there is going to be an attempt to restrict the numbers it be done by ensuring that the institutions are bona fide, because we believe that Imperial could easily pass any such condition. The problem is when instead you try to do it by making it less appealing to come here to study, because that will, of course, damage us.

Mr. Underwood: May I elaborate slightly by citing an example from Australia where, as Professor Smith said, the Government in 2009-10 introduced a number of restrictions that were designed precisely to eliminate abuse. Then, as a result, they affected the sector as a whole and a highly reputable institution like Monash had to cut 300 academic jobs on the back of changes in immigration regulation.

Another very reputable university like La Trobe is planning on the basis of a cut in 7% of its international students. We know that because the Vice-Chancellor there is a former prodirector at the LSE. These are live figures and show the damage that indiscriminate policymaking in this area can do precisely to the institutions it is not intended to harm.

Q124 Chair: Professor Wark, Mr Underwood, thank you very much for giving evidence today. We may write to you with further figures that would be helpful to the inquiry. Thank you very much.

Professor Wark: Thank you.

Chair: That concludes the inquiry into student visas. We have the Minister for Counter-Terrorism now who is giving evidence on the new counter-terrorism proposals. Thank you very much.