CL: It was formed in 1976 by three accountants, Brierley, Price and Prior, so that’s how they called it BPP. It started out as a distance learning publishing business creating distance learning study materials and using the new word processing technology that had just been released to create better materials. Then they started doing face-to-face tuition and it’s grown from that.

The PIE: When you became a university, what difference did that make to your reputation, enrolments, bottom line etc?

I would estimate that the university title has probably added about 40% to our growth

CL: We got degree awarding powers in 2007 and at that time we were BPP College, and the usual things that would come up at that time is that everybody didn’t understand what on earth BPP was, and what a college was, and why would you do the degree there. We gained university college status in 2010, and it suddenly started to make things a lot easier.

Going to full university status last year means that you don’t have people questioning what your status is anymore. In terms of bottom line, getting degree awarding powers added between £50-100 million of value for our shareholders.

We’ve been able to grow our undergraduate numbers, we only have something like a thousand domestic undergraduate students and we have around 3,000 international students studying on undergraduate and postgraduate courses. I would estimate that the university title has probably added about 40% to our growth.

The PIE: Tell me about the process of going from college to university status.

It was great to create a law school that now has about 32 of the top 40 law firms sending all their trainees exclusively

CL: It was very expensive, obstructive and very difficult. It involves scrutiny of your governance, your financial sustainability. We spent over £100,000 on consultancy fees to create the reports that the government needed to be satisfied that we were a university. They’re expecting very high standards, rightly, from universities. So I’d be surprised if there will be many more to be honest, I don’t think it’s an easy route, but it’s a valuable route.

The PIE: You’ve gone from teacher to practitioner- what do you like most about it now?

CL: It was great to create a law school that now has about 32 of the top 40 law firms sending all their trainees exclusively. So I’m really pleased about that. And it was based upon a theory I had that courses ought to be more practical and we just keep rolling that theory out and it seems to win each time. But the bit that I like most at the moment is looking at the international opportunities.

The PIE: And what is your internationalisation strategy?

CL: The history of BPP was an accountancy and tax training provider, so we’ve gone into certain countries where the “Big Four” have asked us to provide face-to-face classroom training and so we’ve got campuses in places like Warsaw, Romania, Bulgaria. For us when there is this issue about bringing in people from the EU to the UK, actually we don’t want to do that because we’ve got centres there that we’d like them to study in and stay there in those countries.

The PIE: Any plans to expand beyond the EU?

My core operation around accountancy training is moving online massively

CL: More recently we now operate in Hong Kong, and we have a relationship in Malaysia. We’re owned by a large American corporation that has much more international assets than BPP has, so there’s an element of working with their subsidiaries to see what opportunities there are for BPP, but we are a separate business and separate operation. At the moment we’ve targeted 21 countries that we want to establish a presence in, including Africa and the US. I think Canada and the US offer opportunities for UK education. In my niche area, in law and accounting and health, there are definitely opportunities.

We go from looking at setting up full service campuses to partnerships and also to looking at online. One of the big issues that I have at the moment in my business, it’s a fascinating strategic issue, is that my core operation around accountancy training is moving online massively. I’m seeing a 20% flight to online each exam sitting.

The PIE: Do students take the whole course online?

CL: Yes. We’ve got 14 UK centres and we have accountancy training in all of them, and what we’re seeing is those centres are gradually getting smaller and smaller as more and more people are doing the online class.

The PIE: So what proportion of all your accountancy students are online?

CL: From all accountancy we’re up to about 35% of our intake, and it grows by 20% each sitting. So it’s large. And so when I look at the MOOC and online study move, I don’t really see it impacting higher education as much as professional qualifications. I was in The States in the early part of the last decade where I saw a similar transition for the Americans. It all flipped from being your distance learning, classroom-based to being more distance learning online and I think the UK is going the same way. Now, when I go out internationally I don’t see as much as that, they’re still wedded to a traditional classroom format, but I wonder whether or not we will gradually see a greater move to online.

I don’t really see the MOOC and online study move impacting higher education as much as professional qualifications

The PIE: And I’m assuming it’s cheaper for students to study online?

CL: Yes. The fee is about 20% cheaper on the headline fee.

The PIE: This is tapping into the sort of global trend of vocational needs as opposed to academic aspirations.

CL: Yes. We’ve got a particular niche, we don’t pretend to be an Oxford and Cambridge research type university, our focus is on practical career education. It’s around the professions; we’ve got niches in law, accountancy, banking and finance, a bit of management, and health. So those are our three core areas and we do English training to supplement those.

The PIE: But do you see scope to bring more international students into the UK?

CL: Yes I think there is. There is a great appetite for people to study in the UK and study professional qualifications, so yes there is an opportunity to do that, but there will be a limit to it, because obviously it’s not politically acceptable to have large mass migration into the UK.