KEEPING BRITAIN SAFE AND PRESERVING ITS EDUCATIONAL INTEGRITY

By:

• Aamir Bashir (Principal)
• Bruce R Duncan (Advisor to the Principal and lecturer)

Concerns Arising

The provisions of Tier 4 (and the proposed adjustments) raise further difficulties for colleges that wish to offer premium education to foreign students. Table 2 refers.

Table 2 Adjustments

Source: UKBA and St Agnes sources

Comments

The UKBA (and colleges) rightly believe that students have the right to study English in the United Kingdom.

This must be an earned privilege not born out of sentimentality or financial considerations.

The six-month special visa to allow students at a low level of English to complete studies in the UK could lead to another process when undesirables could exploit this process and gain entry to the UK for “other” purposes. We have more than our fair share of illegal individuals working / living in the UK.

The UKBA’s English level requirement, as evidenced by the current problems being experienced in colleges and universities, will only cause further problems where, for example:

• Student frustration with course content will be exacerbated – adding to teaching problems and the unfair treatment of students.
• Absenteeism will spiral due to demotivation – dropout rates will increase.
• Colleges and students will be unjustly penalised. After all, the UKBA allows “inadequately prepared students of English” to enter the field of UK tertiary education – their presence has a negative impact on UK educational goals.
• Course providers would remove their courses from a college that had been penalised by the UKBA because of either dropout rates due to an inability to cope with the course because of a lag in English proficiency.
• Colleges will be removed from the register due to low student attendance and poor exam results. The poor attendance being the result of NOT having sufficient funding, as per their visa requirement, will cause students to seek employment outside their 20-hour limit, or in the case of the 10-hour work limit, cause further problems – the 1-hour per week would equate out at around £60 per week. With today’s cost of living this would not be sufficient because few students, if any, bring the money in their home country bank account with them.
• Colleges attempting to gain greater credibility with regard to their academic pass rates suffer because of the non-performance of students who cannot cope with academic English and this in turn will affect negatively the image of UK education. It is unfair to expect colleges to raise their academic standards when students are allowed student visas with an academically low standard of English.
• The English level set by the government could be construed as misleading and bordering on dishonesty. Academic advancement needs English of a higher standard than the low level currently being bandied about. A low standard causes problems now – why perpetuate it?

In this connection, we might consider the analogous situation where the Biblical pharaoh (UKBA) demanded that the Israelites (Colleges) not only build for him but also had to make their own bricks . Colleges have to cope with inadequate “English material = the straw” to meet government standards. We would quote the words of our famous Winston Churchill, “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire…Give us the tools and we will finish the job” .

Part 1: Background issues behind this report and St Agnes College Responses
Part 2: Concerns Arising
Part 3: Recommendations

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