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John Mountford, Association of Colleges, UK

JM: It’s a mixture. A lot of colleges would recruit for A-levels, foundation years and English as a foreign language. Typically what they’d do is what they would call English Language Plus, so they do English plus something vocational, or plus an A-level. So they can take advantage of an authentic English language learning environment and learn a subject.

"There are about 50,000 EU and non-EU students students studying at colleges"

Also we do a lot of higher education work, things like higher national diplomas or foundation degrees. In general you can’t get a visa for the lower level courses offered at colleges.

The PIE: Private providers such as INTO University Partnerships and Navitas seem to get all the airplay when it comes to pathway provision. How come?

JM: A lot of FE colleges do offer quality one-year foundation courses. I think it’s due to us not promoting our message strongly enough. I would argue that if you want to go to a UK university you would be much better off going to a British FE college and getting a genuine British learning experience. It is going to give you a real insight into British classroom behaviour, much more than going to a private provider where the cohorts are usually 100% international.

“We are working with the Brazilian government on a vocational version of the Science Without Borders scheme”

The PIE: Is AoC increasing its international advocacy at the moment?

JM: Yes, because of the growing opportunities overseas. India is a good example: the government wants to up-skill 500 million people in the next ten years. They don’t have the domestic capacity to do it in anyway, so they are looking around the world for international partners to do that and are very interested in the UK’s FE model.

But what we have found is that places like India, despite the opportunities, can be quite challenging. It’s not always easy to get the model right or access to the opportunities. So we’ve set up our AoC India office in Delhi, a permanent base to represent 32 of our colleges with the aim of helping them work directly with Indian partners.

The PIE: Is offshore delivery taking more of AoC’s attention than inbound recruitment, given the tougher immigration climate?

JM: We wouldn’t consciously push one over the other. I think we just find that the way the market is going that there are more and more opportunities to deliver in-country. But overseas student recruitment remains an important source of short term income for colleges which allows them to engage those medium to long term projects offshore.

A good example is the work we’re doing with the Brazilian government at the moment to develop Skills Without Borders – a vocational version of the Science Without Borders scheme. It would allow students to come to a UK college to a high level vocational sandwich course for a year.

“You would be much better off doing a pathway at an FE college and getting a genuine British learning experience”

The PIE: Some say we struggle to communicate the qualities of FE sector overseas. Do you agree?

JM: I think that’s fair. We have a brilliant offer – high quality, flexible, employer driven – but we don’t have a great articulation of that offer, which is something we need to work on. Other countries such as Canada, Australia and Germany are very good at branding their FE sector. Even if in certain cases where their system is not as flexible as ours, they are better at simplifying and explaining that.

The British government does have its new Education UK strategy to better brand British education abroad. FE is a focus in the plan, so I would hope there are better resources available to help us explain our offer.

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