Yesterday, I went to listen to Monica Harding MP, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on international development discuss the importance of our overseas aid budget, and the manner in which successive Conservative and Labour governments have reduced the share spent on aid from 0.7% of the government’s budget, agreed during the coalition government, to 0.3% under present Labour government.

Interestingly, on the same day, The Department for Education announced its new ‘International Education Strategy’ Strategy to boost UK education abroad in major £40bn growth drive – GOV.UK The new strategy doesn’t seem to pay more than lip service to the development budget. Instead, it is firmly and proudly announced “a clear ambition to grow the value of education exports to £40 billion a year by 2030, backing providers to deliver UK education overseas in new and expanding market.”

This will be music to the ears of UK universities, especially if it means more can open overseas campuses backed by government support. One only has to drive around Education City in Dubai to already see the logos of many overseas universities, including some well-known UK names.

The press notice tries to balance fears of further inward migration – music to the ears of Reform – with the explicit encouragement to open campuses overseas.

“Unlike the previous strategy released in 2019, this approach removes targets on international student numbers in the UK and, while continuing to welcome international students, shifts the focus towards growing education exports overseas by backing UK providers to expand internationally, build partnerships abroad and deliver UK education in new markets. 

This strategy goes further by backing providers to expand overseas and ensure top students around the world can access a world-class UK education on their own doorsteps.”

All this is a long-way from 1996, and my attempts to interest Oxford Brookes University in an idea to set up courses in a centre in what was then still known as Bangalore and like other cities in India has now adopted its local name, of Bengaluru. Incidentally, I believe that we corrupted the name of the city to create the word ‘bungalow’.   

In 1996, Brookes had links with an international school in the city and the Business School was also interested in expanding overseas. Sadly, I left the university before anything could come of the project. However, our vision also included home students being offered the chance to take semesters in India.

The idea of two-way traffic doesn’t seem to be feature much the current export drive, with just a brief mention of both the Turing and Erasmus Schemes in the final paragraph, although the full text does have a section about student exchanges.

That’s a shame, because exposing UK students to international experiences is also good for long-term trade, as I know from my time at university in the 1960s, when I joined, and later ran, the international exchange organisation, AIESEC, bringing business and economics students together from more than 50 countries.

As a result of my own experiences, I applaud the export drive in principle, and will discuss the UK school’s element of it in another post, but also believe the DfE’s should have an international policy that at the same time reflects how the UK education sector can also contribute to the development aid budget.