Internationalisation

Recruitment:

• Build on the University’s historical success
  
  
• Meet University’s annual international revenue targets
  
  
• Ensuring compliance with UKVI regulations
  
  
• Ensure our activity is compliance-led to safeguard long-term success of the institution

International Office and Partnerships:

• Physical reconfiguration of International Office – welcome colleagues from Centre for Academic Partnerships
  
  
• Overseas partnerships offering expanded – reviewing provision to ensure it meet University and partners objectives
  
  
• Framework for future ambitions for:
  • More students progressing to study at Bedfordshire
  • More studying overseas with TNE partners
  • Building global reputation
• New oversight on recruitment & partnerships
  
  
• Other changes in process of proposing:
  • Registration for US loans system
  • Reviewing international preparatory programmes
  • Proposals for international scholarship
  • Rationalising agent network to improve performance

Our over-riding strategic objective with our International Student Recruitment strategy is to build upon our historical success, meet the University’s annual international revenue goals and ensure compliance with UK Visa and Immigration (UKVI) regulations.

For 2021/22, we met this target with the biggest international intake for a decade. This is largely due to a significant pent-up post-Covid demand, but we should recognise the immense work done by the International Office to deal with a 130% increase in demand, alongside the implementation of a much more rigorous compliance regime. This demand has continued into 2023, but shows signs of starting to slow down from January 2024 as international competition from other English-speaking countries increases.

To a degree we have not made as much progresss on our sub-KPI’s, especially around diversifying the international student body. We remain committed to this objective with the recruitment staff visiting a number of markets outside of our main six territories in the last 6 months. However, in the short term our focus will now shift slightly to prioritise improving undergraduate recruitment from those core markets.

The team in Centre of Academic Partnerships (CAP) continue to review our overseas partnerships, ensuring that our provisions meets both the University’s and the partners’ objectives. Much work has also been done to improve processes, particularly around admissions, and to significantly reduce aged debt.

The team are also constantly reviewing new partnership approaches, and we will be looking in particular to develop more progression partnerships over the next two years (partnerships under which students come to the UK for at least a part of their studies).

We have also commenced more face-to-face engagement with partners, with attendance at graduations in Egypt, Vietnam, Guyana and Oman in the current semester.

The International Office have run two online programmes with external partners, Mindless Academy and Common Purpose. The first of these has now run twice and proven to be very popular, with students undertaking a four-week internship programme remotely that helps them to develop digital and content creation skills. The second programme, a one-day Global Leadership forum, whilst successful was less popular, and we are currently looking into why this was the case. We continue to look for opportunities for our students to gain international experience without travelling, as we realise that not all students have the time or finances to go overseas.

For those that do wish to travel internationally, the University successfully bid for Turing funding, being awarded around 4 times more than the previous year. This will largely be put towards Faculty-led short term (4 week) mobility programmes of the kind very successfully developed by HSS last year.