The following is from the recently published report of the parliamentary Home Affairs Committee on Bogus Colleges.
It is difficult to ascertain a precise figure for the number of bogus colleges in existence. One method of forming an estimate is to look at the discrepancy between educational establishments listed on the previous Register of Education Providers, which provided the only means of obtaining a student visa until March 2009, and those listed on the register of sponsors under the points based immigration system, which has replaced the Register of Education Providers and requires more stringent checks of educational establishments’ credentials. There are around 2,200 colleges which were on the Register of Education Providers but are not on the register of sponsors. Whilst failure to transfer from the Register of Providers to the register of sponsors does not automatically mean a college is “bogus”, we suspect that a significant proportion of these colleges are not legitimate.
That report has no doubt set the Home Office alarm bells ringing. What is a “significant proportion” of 2200? Are we really awash with bogus colleges? How many do they mean? 400? 800? 1200?
If you compare the DIUS register of education providers with the UKBA register of sponsors you will quickly discover that you are comparing apples with oranges. To start with, the DIUS register is ten times as big as the UKBA register, and the applicable criteria for inclusion are obviously different.
· To deal first with that headline claim, there are really not 2200 colleges (or “academies”) listed on the DIUS register which are not on the UKBA register, and the number is absurd. Is it possible that the committee has based this statement on a frequency count of the word “college”? I hope not. City of Wolverhampton College is listed with multiple entries – here 6, one for each campus – as are many others eg. Glan Hafren, North West London, Birmingham, Bristol, Westminster, Sunderland, Plymouth, Cornwall etc. Perhaps one of the committee could be deputed to make an accurate manual count over the parliamentary holiday.
· The treatment of the registers by institutions is different. For example, those of us in the world of EFL know that the group that includes Basil Paterson College has about 20 schools in it. They are all listed individually on the DIUS register while on the UKBA register they are grouped together under the single entry of The Gins Alliance. There are others.
· Sifting through the DIUS register is a pretty major undertaking since it contains prep schools, Public Schools, industrial training outfits, prisons, local Age Concern centres, local authorities, equestrian centres, business links and much else besides. A handful of these are potential “sponsors” under the new system, but only a handful. And they are not bogus.
My research is based on the first 3300 in the DIUS register corresponding (approximately) to the first 375 on the UKBA register, representing between a fifth and a quarter of all institutions listed in each case. Where there was a college with no obvious explanation I made some preliminary research. As a result of that research I have (privately) listed about 20 institutions that are clearly open for business that I would query, of which I would expect that some have a proper explanation for what they are doing (e.g. that they do not wish to sponsor visa nationals as their market is UK based or EU based).
Let me be clear. I think it highly likely that there are some bad eggs among those colleges I have looked at. I do not deny that this problem of dodgy/bogus/criminal colleges exists, and like everybody else I deplore their existence and want to see them closed down now (and indeed I don’t begin to understand the delay). But I do say that the number of such institutions nationwide is, based on my comparison of the two registers, likely to be no more than 100, that the analysis of the Home Affairs Committee is sloppy, and that the proposed response – the need for UKBA stormtroopers to pounce unannounced on the premises of our many excellent and thoroughly respectable institutions – is disproportionate and inappropriate. It is also, like so many recent developments, likely to be damaging for the UK’s international education market.
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