Saturday, January 29, 2011

UK government threatens education sector


I'm assuming that readers of this blog are a fairly open minded bunch and would thus be on board with what I'm about to ask here.

The UK government is currently considering proposals to massively restrict the amount of international students applying to study in the UK. The most damaging of these proposals is to restrict non-EU students to those that meet an equivalent language level of B2 on the CEFR or above (roughly equivalent to IELTS 5.5-6.0, or higher 'A' level standard). In a nutshell, this means that students who wish to come to the UK to develop their language level enough to be able to study here will have to speak English well enough already. Study Group believes that this would have an effect of the loss of £180 million to UK universities after three years and could run to potential UK job losses as high as 20-30,000.

The UK Border Agency has a survey (click on link to visit) open at the moment where it is garnering opinions about these proposed changes. I urge anyone that thinks these changes would be a bad idea for a sector that is supposedly worth £40 billion annually to fill out the survey and add their voices to the opposition for these measures.

The survey expires on Monday 31st January. If anyone is interested in some suggested responses for the survey, let me know in the comments section and I'll post a link to a document with some suggestions.

Thanks

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