Tag Archives: education exports

What is the role of the State in schooling?

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This is an interesting philosophical question for a Sunday morning. It arises out of my post yesterday questioning a decision of the Labour government to allow a state school to open sites overseas, presumably for profit. Has Labour gone mad? | John Howson

The genesis of that blog  post was a tes magazine piece about a grammar school in London teaming up with a global brand to open sites in Dubai and Delhi Queen Elizabeth’s School to open fee-paying school in Dubai | Tes

What is the role of the state in schooling in the second quarter of the 21st century? When the 1870 Education Act was passed, as one of the Gladstone government’s first Bills before the new parliament, it was to ensure all children received at least some education. There was a feeling that a lack of literacy was resulting in British’s industry losing its advantage in the industrial revolution to countries with better educated populations.

After 1870, the State increasingly became the default position for schooling. Parents didn’t have to use it, but if they didn’t choose an alternative, basically the private sector or home schooling, then attending the local school from five to early teens was required of children. State paternalism or practical politics to allow the economy to continue to be successful?

155 years later, and we have the State, now run by a Labour government, sanctioning a state-funded school partnering with a global company to create school sites overseas selling its brand of education.

Why not allow this? After all, as someone pointed out on LinkedIn, the State too often rescues loss-making industries, why then shouldn’t it make money out of education?

Of course, the State already helps British Industry and commerce make money from exporting aspects of our successful education enterprise, from textbooks to teachers and private schools with sites overseas, as well as private schools bring in overseas students and their fees the government offers help and advice.

So, should State capitalism in this country support state schools opening branches overseas, and those schools making a profit on that work, to be ploughed back into their school in England, thus potentially earning it more cash than the State provides?

Firstly, profit is not a given. Secondly, how will the countries where such schools are located react. Happy not to worry about attracting expatriate workers because there will be high quality education for their children. And, also happy for its own citizens to attend such schools, with a different curriculum to what State schools in that country might teach?

The issue of state schools topping up their funding, whether from parents, donors or now profits, has worried me ever since I taught in Tottenham in the 1970s. School fetes, a feature of those days, run by primary schools in Highgate made thousands of pounds, those run by schools in Tottenham couldn’t match such income. Was this acceptable? At that time, local authorities ran schools and could compensate for this discrepancy. Now, the National Funding Formula make such compensation more challenging, except through the Pupil Premium.

The entrepreneur in me applauds the school making money overseas; the politician takes the opposite view. In this case, I think the politician wins. We need to debate afresh the role of the State in schooling in England, and both its purpose and its limits.

Has Labour gone mad?

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Queen Elizabeth’s School, a selective grammar school in North London, is to open an affiliate fee-paying branch school in Dubai – becoming the first state school to open overseas. Queen Elizabeth’s School to open fee-paying school in Dubai | Tes

I am going to state my opposition to this proposal outright. If we had a sufficiency of high-quality teachers for all our schools, then I might, just might, look on this as part of the export drive using resources not currently needed for the home market.

But the blunt truth is that we don’t have enough qualified teachers for our secondary schools. It is bad enough private schools offering UK teachers jobs overseas, but most of them probably weren’t in the state system anyway.

Here we seem to have a state funded school spending leadership time becoming part of a global brand, and at the very least risking taking a couple of hundred teachers out of the UK system to teach middle class children in the UAE and India.

 Even if the investment is funded by Global Education, a company with a strong base working with universities and higher level vocational providers, I am not sure why a Labour government has allowed the DfE to approve this move?

I do think there should be a policy designed to maximise UK revenue from our strong background in education across the board, but a government’s first duty is to its own citizens, and this move by a state school, along with the growth of our private school’s overseas campuses, risks the education of our own citizens by sucking teachers overseas, and away from schools that badly need them, not only in some of our most deprived communities.

The DfE must make clear both why it approved this venture, and what happens if lots more state schools want to go down this road as a means of earning income to support the homebase.

As regular readers know, I am a strong support of democratic accountability for our schooling, and the academy system doesn’t provide that support to our system. Rather it provides fragmentation and encourages this sort of move all the while costing the system millions of pounds in unnecessary CEO’s salaries and other overheads.

This move reminds me of the Attlee government struggling with the aftermath of the Second World War and restricting sales of cars and other items in the home market to boost exports. Here we have a Labour government opening the doors to sending UK teachers to educate children of parent s that can afford their fees, and to directly set up in competition with private schools.

I might have understood a Conservative government sanctioning this move, but not a Labour government.

Please tell me I have missed some important value here.

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Making money from Education

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At this time of year, the DfE publishes data about the success of the education sector in generating income from exports. The income can be as a result of students from overseas – traditionally excluding EU students – coming to study in schools; colleges; universities or language schools. Set alongside that is the physical export of goods and services to customers in the education sector overseas. The latest data release covers 2020 and must, therefore, be considered an abnormal year because for much of that year the covid pandemic severely affected opportunities for income generation. UK revenue from education related exports and TNE activity 2020 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

 The recorded income for education exports in 2020 was some £25.6 billion pounds; up from £25.4 billion in 2019. To put those figures in some form of context, it was estimated that the Track and trace system for tracking covid possibly cost the government and taxpayers more than £30 billion over two years according to many reports on the web.

Higher education was the largest earners, responsible for £19.5 billion of export revenue. In comparison, Further Education, which consists of non-EU students only, accounted for £0.2 billion. The flow of overseas students into the further education sector these days probably doesn’t even warrant being called a trickle.

The income generated from Education Products and Services and Trans National Export activity was broadly similar, at around £2.1 billion and £2.3 billion worth of revenue generated, respectively. English Language Training and Independent Schools generated £0.5 billionand £1.0 billion, respectively. While the contribution from language training has been either static or declining in recent years, down from £2.23 billion in 2010 at current prices, income across the private school sector dipped from it record level of £1.05 billion in 2019, to £1.01 billion in 2020, presumably because of covid affecting the number of new registrations. On the other hand, TNE activity continued to increase, from £2.19 billion in 2019 to £2.28 billion in 2020.

Over the period between 2010 to 2020, the share of Higher Education to the total revenue from UK education related exports and TNE activity has increased by 16.3 percentage points from 60.0%to76.3%.

UK TNE activity increased by 2.2 percentage points over the same period from 6.7% to 8.9%. The share of English Language Training (ELT) and Further Education (non-EU students only) have both fallen by 12.2 and 5.2 percentage points, respectively: the ELT share dropping from 14.0% to 1.8% and the Further Education share dropping from 5.8% to 0.6%.

In 2020, international (EU and non-EU) Higher Education students at UK universities generated an estimated £18.0 billion in exports through living expenditure and tuition fees (£15.9 billion in 2019), which accounts for around 70.2% of the total value of education exports and TNE activity (62.6% in 2019). Overseas students are now clearly a vital part of the income stream for UK higher education institutions and have helped to cross-subsidise home students where fee levels have not kept pace with increases in costs.

The remaining £1.5 billion of exports revenue generated from Higher Education is made of research contracts and other exports income. 

With the development of national programmes, such as the new Oak Academy, there must be scope to increase ethe income from experts within the education sector. Should overseas students decide to seek university places in other English-speaking countries and avoid UK universities, this might be of great concern to that sector and its funding.

DfE announces a bit of history

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Last week, the DfE published the annual results of revenue related exports and transactional education activity in 2018. That now seems like a different world. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-revenue-from-education-related-exports-and-transnational-education-activity-2018

Still, 2018 was a good year for education experts, with even the Further Education sector reversing the downturn of previous years and experiencing upturns in both fee income and income from living costs: albeit only by small amounts. Still, this was the first upturn in FE exports since 2010, the year when I think the data for the time series was first established.

Overall, across all areas, there was a 10% increase in export activity and a slight fall of 0.8% in transactional education activity in 2018

Higher Education once again earned the lion’s share of the income, accounting for 69% of all exports and transactional education activity in2018.  This was higher education’s largest percentage share, and some 9% more than their share in2010.

Further Education and English Language Training have been the main losers of market share since 2010, although both recorded upturns is 2018. ELT increased its market share by one percent to eight per cent. However, FE still saw its market share remain at one percent in 2018.

Independent schools market share reduced from five to four per cent at the end of 2018, back to their share in 2010. However, this was largely due to the strong showing from the higher education sector during 2018.

Transactional education activity, where the exports are delivered overseas through ventures such as satellite campuses and overseas consultancy lost ground in 2018, falling back to only 9% of total activity.

Among sub-sectors, equipment sales were strong in 2018, but educational publishing failed to maintain the growth witnessed in 2017. Most of the higher education student growth was, perhaps not surprisingly, in the non-EU student sector of the market. The latter remained stable. What will happen to this income stream in 2021 and future years will be interesting to observe, but it might be 2025 before data are published that reveal any trend post Brexit.

These figures may well be the penultimate in a run of good years for exports. There is little reason to believe that 2019 will not have produced further growth, although EU higher education income might have slowed down. Come the 2020 data, the results might be different. Will new income from distance learning have been sufficient to offset losses elsewhere resulting for the covid pandemic affecting the second half of the year?

Perhaps now is the time to remove overseas students from the immigration statistics, at least for those on first degree courses, even if not for sub-degree and postgraduate level courses where monitoring might be more challenging?

Still, let’s congratulate a successful export drive in 2018, and hope that covid and Brexit between them create new opportunities rather than decimate an otherwise successful sector of the British economy, since these are UK numbers and not just for England.

A Minister for Education Trade?

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Following on from the general election last Thursday, the period of Purdah has come to an end and the routine of government has re-started. This includes the publication of a whole swath of education statistics.

One set of statistics published during Purdah was the annual update on the United Kingdom’s annual revenue from education related exports and transnational education activity. Post Breixt, this part of the service sector is going to continue to be an important part of our economy. The data published related to the calendar year 2017, so almost two years ago. The statistics can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-revenue-from-education-related-exports-and-tne-activity-2017

As in the past, the higher education sector dominates the data, accounting for two thirds of the revenue. Changes at the overall percentage level tend to be slow, but it is clear that the further education sector now contributes little by way of expert revenue, recorded in these statistics as accounting for just one per cent of revenue. In, 2010, it accounted for six per cent. After the issue of bogus college that harmed this sector, there does seem to be room to explore whether there might new avenues of export generated revenue around the area of teaching and learning in the skills sector that could be led by the further education sector.

English Language training has been the other sector in decline in terms of export revenue; down from 14% of revenue in 2010 to 7% in 2017. In cash terms this is a decline from £2,230 to £1,570 (both to the nearest £10 million). However, there has been continued limited growth in this sector from transnational revenue earned overseas.

The independent school sector in the United Kingdom has increased its revenue, as has these schools contribution to transnational education. This is presumably due to the number of overseas campuses now in operation by schools. However, this sector only contributes some five per cent to total revenue.  Even so, this is five per cent that might have disappeared has the outcome of the general election been different.

Amongst education products and services, growth between 2016 and 2107 was steady, with equipment sales showing the strongest growth year on year, and a 20% growth over two years.

In terms of higher education, the bulk of fee income originates from students arriving from outside the EU, so this should not be at risk after the United Kingdom exists the EU in 2020. Whether EU income changes as a result of our exiting the EU won’t be obvious in this dataset until probably 2022 or even 2025 when existing EU students have completed their courses. However, any changes in research funding will most likely become apparent much sooner. In these figures, research income is not differentiated between EU and non-EU sources, so it is not possible to calculate the likely outcomes from the UK’s departure from the EU.

Education is an important and growing part of the United Kingdom’s expert drive, and I am sure that the new government will recognise this fact and want to ensure that as much as possible of the growth is directed to areas away from London towards parts of the United Kingdom that can benefit from this economic activity in their localities. Perhaps there should now be a Minister for Education Trade in the new government?