Voices

One of the most important things for Latin America in general is you can attract as many students as you want, but you have to get the parents too, because at the end of the day the parents are the ones who pay

Student mechanics have completely changed in the last five years. Have recruitment practices evolved to the same levels? Not necessarily. So that’s where the big gap is.

For me, "flip teaching" relates to the changing nature of young people’s brains because of technology. They’re constantly on social networking, therefore the way they interact with the world is hugely different.

We offer payment instalments, which are very common for Brazilians so, Brazilians think that if they can afford the instalment, they can afford something. We were the ones who started to offer this instalment plan, we were very aggressive on this.

When you track enquiries to UK universities in 2012, there is a clear and marked drop right around the time that UKBA announced proposed changes to the post-study work visa. In Australia, meanwhile, since the Knight Review enquiries have shot up.

I believe trust will increase because most weak and bad companies have fallen down already, but problems still happen. That’s why KOSA got together and screened our agencies and advertised to our clients and universities, so I’m sure trust will recover soon.

Our interest is that more people are interested in studying Spanish and we see that this market is growing. Our focus now is Latin America. We are looking to find good opportunities in many other places.

We want to develop a system to help students get internships while they are studying overseas, not after they’ve finished, to help them come back for short-term training during holidays so they can get to know the Chinese job market.

As we expanded, that also represented an asset for us, which meant we had the interest of schools: we could contribute actively to their nationality mix.

There are 26,000 active agencies worldwide, 5 million arrivals in educational travel and on average less than 200 placements per agent, per annum. The market is fragmented and it is difficult to find quality or the right agent partner.

I think there’s no doubt that more universities are starting to look carefully at offshore provision. It does offer a route to access international markets without falling foul of the visa regime.

We are a very active organisation, not just a shop-front. We always aim to transform our ideas into actions – we are obviously rivals, but above all we are colleagues.

"For now we are not thinking of opening adult language schools in the US, but we won’t rule anything out, including expansion in other English speaking countries"

Increasingly, international students are looking for an ROI on their education and are looking for a better future. It’s one thing to receive their education here, the question is 'then what?'

Quality is a bit of a misnomer; what we are looking for here is creating a level playing field with the bar set at a level that is reasonable. We’re not asking for anything that would be unreasonable.