Looking outward, facing inward: the UK’s International Education Strategy

By Emma Meredith, Director of Skills Policy and Global Engagement

Published in January but without great fanfare, the UK’s International Education Strategy 2026 (IES) was nonetheless much anticipated by the international education sector. Under a Labour-led government, it signalled that as a £36.7bn p.a. international study destination, the UK remains open for business.  

The IES has three main ambitions: to increase the UK’s international standing, to recruit international students and to grow education exports. Against a backdrop of fragile international study patterns, changing UK relevance after Brexit and continued geopolitical shifts and shocks, the strategy looks to leverage all parts of the UK’s education sector to achieve its ambitions. As a result, the IES reads as much a policy statement about UK soft power, diplomacy and immigration control as it does about international education.

The IES was the policy I chose to analyse for year one of my University of Glasgow EdD. For two decades I’ve watched colleges quietly internationalise: building educational partnerships around the world, sending local students on visits of a lifetime through Erasmus+ and the Turing Scheme, and all without the recognition or attention that they deserve. This attention deficit extends to academia, judging by my struggle to find writing on college internationalisation (an imbalance I’m keen to help redress).  

By taking an academic lens to the IES, I could take a step back from my professional context and consider the strategy differently, including its implications for colleges. I chose to apply Bacchi’s (2009) What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) framework to analyse the IES. Drawing on poststructuralism, WPR examines policy through a set of key questions. It encourages you to turn policy on its head and consider how policy problems are represented, in turn revealing assumptions, silences and tensions. Here I share two of my findings.  

The first is the strategy’s significant intertextuality (Rizvi and Lingard, 2009), or interconnection, with other government publications. The IES is part of what Ball (1993) describes as a policy ensemble, where policy texts cross-reference each other, mirroring language and ideas. If you didn’t catch the IES when it first came out, that might be because it was overshadowed by a whole suite of other government documents – the Modern Industrial Strategy, the Immigration White Paper, the Post-16 education and skills White Paper to name but a few – all of which are referenced in the IES.  

As a major export sector, UK education is inextricably linked to the wider government agenda of economic growth (mentioned 31 times in the IES) and to priorities of managed immigration and skills. In consequence, the IES is not only nested (Bacchi, 2009) within other UK government policies but also within the problematisations that arise from them. One such challenge is staying competitive in a globalized world. I concluded that IES looks outward - towards the international students and partners it wants to attract - but faces inward due to the domestic policy pressures and influences that frame and constrain it.

My second observation is that the IES extends an invitation, albeit a slightly veiled one, for colleges to get more involved. Further education’s (FE) share as a percentage of education export has been in progressive decline since 2010 when the points-based immigration system was introduced. At this time, student visa measures were tightened and many colleges stepped back from the international education marketplace due to pressures of risk and capacity.  

So why should colleges engage now? Colleges feature in the IES because they deliver skills and thus support the government’s growth agenda set out in its policy ensemble. Wheelahan et al. (2022) describe how policy discourse in education is centred upon skills, in the belief that skills will drive prosperity and competitiveness. As providers of technical education and training, colleges sit firmly within the skills agenda. However, whilst the IES offers diplomatic and trade support to providers, it stays silent on longstanding barriers for colleges to export their skills, held back as they have been by funding, regulation and student visa policy.

Despite these silences, I am optimistic about the potential of colleges to become bigger players within UK international education. The IES opens the door for colleges to get involved and to use their skills expertise to help address challenges of UK global competitiveness. Those of us with long memories will recall that the ‘Deptford not Delhi’ policy environment was not always so encouraging for the sector. The IES leaves space for colleges to step into, shape and own. It’s not perfect – the barriers won't disappear overnight and there will have to be workarounds and compromises – but the IES invitation is there for colleges who wish to take it.  

Reassociation to the Erasmus+ programme is one route into internationalisation and applications open this autumn. And with sector-specific action plans now published on the back of the IES, the strategy gives colleges the chance to gain, not lose, from internationalisation.

References

Bacchi, C. L. (2009) Analysing policy: what's the problem represented to be? Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson.

Ball, S. J. (1993) 'WHAT IS POLICY? TEXTS, TRAJECTORIES AND TOOLBOXES', Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 13(2), pp. 10-17.

Rizvi, F. and Lingard, B. (2009) Globalizing education policy. Routledge.

Wheelahan, L., Moodie, G. and Doughney, J. (2022) 'Challenging the skills fetish', British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43(3), pp. 475-494.