Voices

Students use our services because nine times out of ten we’ll have a counselor that understands their language, our service is free, and we are very centrally located.

I wanted to start something that enabled agents to meet not only European and US education providers but also those in Vietnam, Japan, Burma, Mongolia, Tawian etc. These could be good markets too, so I wanted to bring Asian business into the mix

The UKBA is not focused on opportunities for Scotland. It's focused very narrowly on an agenda set by the coalition government which is really focused on what it perceives are the needs of the South East of England. We would like to have a different approach.

If the US got their act together and had one national agency such as the British Council or AEI in Australia, instead of having 3 different departments with conflicting opinions – State, Commerce and Education - then things could really really start cooking.

Marketing at LSBF is much more central to the operation. We are truly global and we don’t view agents in the margin. We also have a different approach to students – counselling them rather than just trying to sell them something...

India in the next 10 years is an economy that is going to double in size and no country with a serious international education agenda can afford to ignore India.

We are in the the countries who are providing more students than others in the region. But we are also doing the fairs in a Turkish way. We do really good business yet we are fun and foreign schools really enjoy attending our events.

About one in three international students in the UK is studying business and management. And if there are half a million students studying UK degrees offshore, 350,000 are studying business management. That's a huge market for us.

We have 70,000 English language students per year which is about 6% of the UK's numbers. We're ahead of South Africa and New Zealand. That's pretty good for an island with a population of 400,000.

In most of Asia the agency industry is highly fragmented and so when you go to international events like agent workshops you’re seeing maybe 1% of the agencies out there. There’s no way a school is actually capturing the whole market...

It was an experience I and the other founders had all been through: researching and applying to colleges, and really being confused about what drives the recruitment and selection of students. We felt that it was inefficient

"The main problem in Europe is that we are all looking for students in science, technology, engineering and maths and naively many still think they can get them from within Europe. That’s not true – they have to go outside Europe"

The biggest impact of the Bologna Process was the introduction of the Bachelors and Masters system in Continental Europe, because before there was no split. In 2000 there were 500 Master programmes and now there are 50,000

I don’t that UK EFL is resistant to innovation and change... I think that as a good competitive group of schools they are typically looking for ways to innovate and to try to bring value to the student, and they do that quite well...

In the international market there’s not a lot of demand for Chinese just yet. We forsee that there’s going to be a lot more demand in the years to come, but right now it’s pretty competitive... Manadarin House has a head start but we expect to catch up to them pretty quickly