Students need to be able to work in the UK while they study, college representatives have told a Westminster parliamentary committee.

Speaking in front of the Scottish Affairs Committee, which was hearing about on the impact of Brexit on the sector, Edinburgh College principal Annette Bruton said there was a crucial “interconnectivity between ability to work and ability to study”.

Last week, Tes revealed that the international market was worth £57 million a year to colleges surveyed by the Association of Colleges.

Simply making sure that students could still come to Scotland to study after the UK leaves the European Union was not sufficient, Ms Bruton told MPs; the ability to work was also  “really key”. “Any immigration system would need to allow students to sustain themselves while they are here,” she added.  

EU partnerships ‘important’

“Fees will be less of a deterrent for students if they have the ability to work as well,” she told the committee. “And as well as Erasmus, there are other partnerships that are also important, like TVET [technical and vocational education and training] investments, which we have been able to benefit from. So continuing EU partnerships beyond Brexit arrangements would be important as well. The students that come to Edinburgh College to study don’t come from the sort of backgrounds that they could apply through the current Tier 4 process [the process students from outside the EU have to go through and which requires sponsorship by an institution].”

Andrew Witty, director of sector policy at Colleges Scotland, agreed that being able to work and contribute to society was important to students. “With regards to the immigration structure going forward, we want to have our voices heard, because of the crucial role colleges play. We want to be able to maintain that role both for Scottish students, as well as for students from outside Scotland. That notion that Scotland is open for business is a key one,” said Mr Witty.

Professor Andrea Nolan, convener of Universities Scotland, said it would be “very helpful and a great statement for the government to remove students from the immigration target”.

Immigration targets

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Theresa May came under fire after she confirmed that students would not be taken out of immigration figures. Former education secretary Nicky Morgan reportedly said: “How do we expect to build positive relations with India and China if they think their students aren’t welcome.”

Neil Carmichael, former chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, told Tes that including students in immigration figures was “an error”.

Also this month, the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) calculated that the gross benefits to the UK from the around 230,000 new international students in HE each year - including fees, other spending and knock-on benefits - totalled £22.6 billion. Nick Hillman, director of Hepi, said trying to persuade the Home Office that international students nearly always benefited the UK could “feel like banging one’s head against a brick wall”. He added: “Our work […] includes all the potential costs and conclusively proves these are tiny compared to the huge benefits.”

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