Latest international education news

Four UK education consortia have won contracts to run 12 technical and vocational training colleges in Saudi Arabia as part of the government's Colleges of Excellence programme. The deals will take the total contribution of the programme's contracts to the UK economy to over £1 billion.

A huge study of 22,000 university students and professors carried out by Universia, the largest global network of Spanish and Portuguese speaking universities, has revealed that only 15% of students in Spain, Portugal and Latin America have studied in a foreign country.

Australia's peak body for English language colleges, English Australia, has created a series of professional development courses focussed on online learning in collaboration with International Education Services in a bid to increase the number of Massive Open Online English Courses (MOOEC) offered by its members.

We think that higher education as we know it is going to change fairly dramatically over the next decade. There are things that universities are going to have to improve.

Latest stats from Malta reveal a slowdown in enrolments although a rise in student weeks helped buoy the English language teaching market overall in 2013. Italy, Russia and Germany led the Western European underpinning of the sector, while the impotance of the ELT market within overall tourism was also highlighted.

China and the Netherlands will extend collaboration in the fields of scientific research and vocational training after a high-level mission to Beijing last month. The Dutch Minister of Education signed MoUs and educators met with prospective students at Tsinghua University.

The UK's "unwelcoming" immigration policy is largely to blame for an unprecedented fall in the number of incoming international STEM students, a House of Lords report has concluded. The Lords have called for a "simpler" immigration policy that excludes overseas students from net migration figures and the reinstatement of the post-study work visa.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services have received sufficient petitions for the 'highly-skilled' H-1B visa to fulfil its statutory cap within five days of starting to accept applications for the second year running. The visa is a key route to post-work study for international students and is used by businesses to employ STEM graduates.

After seeing "dramatic" growth in Angolan students travelling to South Africa to study, International House Cape Town has opened a new English Language school in Angola's capital city Luanda. The school also signed three memorandum of understandings to open language schools at private local universities.

Turkey's education system is unable to satisfy demand, meaning business growth for education agencies, says the agency association UED. Its latest figures show that 80% of members have seen an increase in business on last year.

On a trade mission to Asia this week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott rolled out the government's outbound mobility programme, the New Colombo Plan, to Japan as part of a four nation pilot scheme. Japan and Australia also signed a landmark free trade agreement that will strengthen bilateral economic ties.

A study has shown UK independent English language schools outperform proprietary chain schools based on scores ranked against national averages from the British Council-endorsed accreditation rankings. It also revealed that experience can lead to excellence, with most top-ranked ELT players over 20 years old.

The £4.2m English for Education College Trainers’ (EfECT) scheme seeks to place native English teacher trainers in 21 of Burma’s training colleges. It aims to improve English language development in the country and increase teaching quality in relevant educational institutions.

Delays to student visa processing in Russia – due to UK visa application centres being transitioned to a new commercial provider – are putting strain on a market already made fragile by political unrest and a weak ruble, The PIE News has learned.