§ The Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Mr. Charles Clarke)Following the recent announcement notice by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary which set out new immigration measures being developed for marriages, students and managed migrants I can now provide further details of the measures relating to education.
Student mobility is a welcome feature of 21st century globalisation and we benefit from it. The recent British Council report showed that students from overseas currently contribute £3 billion a year to the UK economy. It estimated that half a million English language students come to the UK annually. But we must make sure the system is not abused. Those coming to study here must be genuine students studying at a genuine and registered college.
As you will know, we are encouraging English language schools to seek accreditation with existing bodies such as the British Council or the Association of British Language Schools. This is a positive step forward to ensuring we retain our reputation for high quality educational provision. It will provide reassurance to students coming into the UK to learn English and safeguard the future of the sector within the UK.
We have also been looking at measures to ensure that students attending other private education providers are able to receive genuine opportunities. Partly for this purpose, the Department for Education and Skills has been developing plans for a register of educational providers and I can now announce that this will be in place by the end of the year. We will then make the register available to the Home Office to support them in making their decisions on granting leave to study. They propose only to issue leave to study to students attending providers on the register.
The register will be of educational providers who are able to provide evidence of their business and will prevent entirely bogus providers from bringing purported students to the UK. We know these providers are in the minority and that a much greater number of providers are working to make genuine opportunities available to their students. For this reason we are working to make the scheme as straightforward as possible for those genuine providers, who will easily be able to provide evidence of their work. Those providers who receive public funding, and private providers who are accredited, have undergone robust assurance measures already and we will not be looking to undertake further checks on them I will provide further information on the registration scheme in the summer.
62WSThere were other measures proposed to support student immigration. These included asking institutions to report students who have leave to study but do not attend to the Home Office. We are currently consulting with the education sector on these measures and will provide more information in a month or so's time.