Voices

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

My view is we’re an embryonic industry. It’s akin to those first cotton textile mills in mid-18th century Britain which started the industrial revolution, to use an analogy from economic history! We’re only just beginning.

Before we had the internet, you had to advertise and people were sending us coupons for different brands. It was always the same company but they asked two or three agencies for quotes and this was behind the idea.

We had a chance to talk with the Prime Minister of Ireland and I found the opportunity to talk about the problems that I had during the visa process because, you know, whatever happens to me happens to my students as well

Vocational education is a hugely important sector and a major contributor of building soft power for the UK. Many developing countries need access to skills, we have the best skills system in the world, we just need to sell it better.

"I think the TOEFL Search Service is very timely as more and more universities are finding their budgets cut for travel, yet are having increasing pressure put upon them to recruit more international students"

What we think we’re going to see is that over time there will definitely be a drop as the UK is sort of blacklisted by international students because of these visa regulations