By Gareth Roberts
Our modern universities are facing an increasingly broad range of challenges when it comes to supporting their students. Our recent blog series by Tom Lowe (Blogs & News | Simac UK IDS) has touched upon some of these challenges prevalent in the Higher Education sector since the Covid-19 days.
An area we’ve not covered in great detail yet is the support we offer to our international students in general and specifically to our students subject to immigration control through the Student Visa (who we once, and often unofficially still do, referred to as Tier 4 students). All of the topics already covered about supporting our students to succeed to the best of their abilities in their studies still apply to this particular cohort, but with the additional challenges of helping students through a complex set of regulations around their studies and activities in the UK.
Not only do we need to take into account the additional requirements of students who may be living away from home, in a different country, on a different continent in terms of the things we all take for granted (being used to the weather, being able to understand the accents of those around us, where’s the best place to buy a cheap coffee or pint of milk etc.) but also how we can help those same students to stay within the regulations dictated by the Home Office to which they must obey.
In Tom’s blog on what counts as a valid reason not to attend at higher education, the issue of needing to work part-time to fund studies arises. The complexity for international students comes from the need to balance a potential necessity to earn with the requirement that study should be your main purpose for residence in the UK with a Student visa and that there are specified minimum attendance levels which need to be met, on top of any institutional or course-based requirements.
But even if we know who our students of interest are, how can we go about targeting the right support and providing details to help them take ownership of their attendance, engagement and achievement (whilst also avoiding a sudden journey home)?
On a general level, it is a good starting point to have a way of identifying who the students we are interested in actually are (we’ll call this either our student record system or our visa compliance team) but this alone is not enough, and we need to layer on top of this our approaches to pro-active and re-active support.
Our re-active support comes from the on-demand services we offer as an institution (our advice and counselling services, careers teams, our compliance teams, academic coaches/personal tutors and other students). These are all valuable resources and can each individually make the world of difference for a student needing to call upon them. If you’re not aware of the full range of support your institution can offer, or who your visa compliance and advice staff are, take a few minutes this week to find out and say hi. Our re-active support may be backed up by a variety of drop-in sessions, team inboxes, referral/request forms, student hubs or help desks or any of a number of other avenues in place and these will vary greatly in reach, profile and efficacy across institutions.
Our pro-active approach benefits from data insights to use information from our specialist teams and institutional systems to target students who may benefit from a helping hand before they know to ask for it. Using our attendance data and engagement data, we can identify when a student might be drifting away from their studies with dropping attendance levels or missed assessments and we can then contact them already to offer support and invite them to engage with us before it is too late. Strong support offerings alongside a clear and easily implemented attendance/engagement policy can help students and university staff to understand their expectations within the process and understand what expectations there may be around this.
At Simac we are keen to support you in your endeavours to provide students with the most effective and valuable study experience possible. We provide a student success solution focussed on using a variety of methods to register student attendance, coupled with implementations of your own institutional policies, requirements and support thresholds to reduce the amount of time you spend identifying where support might be needed, to instead free up your time to focus on undertaking valuable support work with students.
If you’d like to know more about how we can support you and your institution, get in touch.
At time of writing, the Home Office register of student visa sponsors has 437 licenced sponsors in the Higher Education, funded Further Education, Overseas Higher Education, Private Provider and Embedded Pathway Colleges categories. In the year ending March 2024, there were 446,924 sponsored study visas granted to main applicants, not accounting for the additional number of continuing students on courses started before March 2023.
About the author:
Gareth has worked for Simac since 2022 as an implementation consultant, supporting universities from initial implementation to continued process improvement and development. Prior to joining Simac, Gareth spent nearly 10 years working in London Higher Education institutions with as a Visa Compliance manager with some additional experience in timetabling, policy writing and course administration.
