QAA findings on international foundation years and international year ones

The back end of January 2024 saw a fascinating, if flawed, investigation in The Sunday Times concerning international foundation year (IFY) and international year one (IYO) provision.

This had been a long time coming. You don’t have to scratch too far below the surface of international recruitment to start becoming concerned about the activity of agents (and frankly, institutions) in bringing large numbers of international students onto courses that may not suit them.

Though the focus of the ST investigation – that underqualified international students were somehow taking the places of home students with the proper A levels (as if many courses would be viable without international student fees!) – wasn’t right, the underlying issues are hugely important.

It’s the kind of thing that you would expect an activist regulator – one that has stepped in on strategic national issues like grammar and online lectures – to be all over. But we didn’t get the Office for Students action we expected. Instead, sector representative body Universities UK commissioned the Quality Assurance Agency to conduct a review of the quality of IFYs and IYOs, comparing them to similar courses offered to home students.

The findings

Today’s report finds there is a “broad equivalence” between entry requirements for international foundation years (IFY) and home foundation years, and between entry requirements for international year one (IYO) and traditional undergraduate degrees.

There are, in each case, a few “minor discrepancies”, but these were “nothing that would give… cause for concern” regarding entry standards for subsequent courses and years of study. This, at least, is the finding of an evaluation of international pathway programmes conducted by the Quality Assurance Agency on behalf of Universities UK.

Because IFY and IFO provision is routinely delivered by partners rather than within the nominal host institution, there are some differences in approaches to assessment and regulations – and there was a particular finding that IYOs delivered by a partner provider were more likely to be outliers in this way than those delivered in house, particularly when it came to resit regulations. QAA recommends that providers involved should seek to standardise these where possible.

Providers should also be keeping an eye on progression rates – there were some differences (in both directions) between international students and home equivalents, and while this may simply be sampling issues it is best for everyone if the sector stays on top of these.

Given a self-selecting sample, this is as close to a clean bill of health as we might expect for these kinds of courses. But it should not be taken as a green light for all international entry course provision – and it is precisely the kinds of courses that didn’t feature in this study that need urgent attention.

A process story

The problem with a speedy review (and, perhaps, the reason that the regulator didn’t steam straight in) is that there is a great difficulty in identifying these courses in sector data. You can’t separate these out in the HESA student return, or in HESES – and you can forget about UCAS entirely (international students don’t apply to these courses via UCAS).

So after identifying 124 providers from across the UK that get involved in this kind of provision, QAA carried out a bespoke data gathering exercise of its own. If you think about the kinds of people in providers who would have been able to pull this data together (student records officers), and what else they may have been doing during the early part of this year (dealing with the enormous shitshow that was the HESA Student 2022-23 collection), you’ll be unsurprised that just 34 providers ended up being able to supply all this plus course contextual information.

QAA selected 185 programmes within these 34 providers – trying to get a broadly representative sample of IFYs and IYOs within the constraints of this being a volunteer exercise. It reckons that there are more than 700 of these programmes in the sector – way more, to be frank, than anyone was expecting.

This is the point at which QAA got seriously in depth – looking at everything from entry requirements, to programme documentation, to assessment and progression regulations. Academic subject specialists and QAA staff saw samples of actual entry grades (2,731) and assessed student work (2,603). This may have been a desk exercise, but it was a gold standard desk exercise.

QAA also asked about comparator programmes – 18 providers declared equivalent domestic foundation programmes (from 32 offering IFYs), while 10 providers offer equivalent domestic year 1 programmes (from 20 offering IYOs).

This investigation was one arm of a three-pronged UUK strategy – the others were a review of the Agent Quality Framework, and an update to the Admissions Code of Practice. Changes to both of the above will be predicated on these findings. UUK has said:

The review found that that providers are following their published entry requirements and that entry requirements are broadly equivalent. It also confirms academic standards on international pathway courses are of an expected standard in the vast majority of cases. However, while there are no systemic issues, the review has found some areas where more consistent application of best practice is needed, and this needs swift action. We will be discussing with our members the steps we must take as a sector to further strengthen the robustness and transparency of admissions.

The missing recommendations

To me – as regular readers may well expect – there is a data issue that underlies all of this. If we take it as read that we live in a data-driven quality assurance world, then we need to recognise the limitations of this approach. Without QAA (under the auspices of UUK) gathering bespoke data, there is no way any issues with these courses would ever have been visible nationally.

You could argue that this state of affairs offers an impetus to collect more data, more often, from more places. If we are going to do this, we need to be aware of the costs (both human and financial) in doing so. And we need to be aware that this is not a problem we could simply solve for all time. Maybe we specifically collect data on internationally focused entry courses. But what do we do when the pendulum shifts to the delivery of arts foundation years? Or postgraduate top up professional qualifications? Or foundation years delivered at franchise providers? Or articulated multi-provider courses?

The list is long – the possible data items to be collected innumerable. And fighting these “monsters of the week” issues by adding data burden is not sustainable. We’re long overdue a root and branch reexamination of tertiary data collections – let’s do that, decide what we meaningfully need to collect and do so reliably, and address the rest via a limited and targeted increase in active investigations and inspections.

The other issues are touched on by the report – nomenclature and visibilities. Though the language of IFYs and IYOs is helpful for the purposes of this report, it is not universal throughout the sector. Different providers describe these courses in different ways – internally, and to prospective students. Sometimes it may not be clear to home students that an IFY or IYO exists, which is the situation that put the sector on the defensive when the initial Times story landed.

There is nothing wrong with universities (either themselves, or with partners) offering entry courses for international students. Most international compulsory systems do not get applicants to a state where they are ready to enter year one, others may do so academically but not culturally (hence the IYO). The issues are when it is seen as a way to get unsuitable students onto the wrong courses for purely financial reasons. Clarity and transparency could go a long way towards addressing that perception.

As was hinted right at the top, providers who get this stuff mostly right are also those more likely to get involved in voluntary exercises like this UUK/QAA review. The original ST investigation focused (inevitably for a broadsheet) on the Russell Group, and the clean bill of health applies here. If there are problems, they will be in other parts of the sector – and if providers there aren’t buying into a sector owned approach there may still be a need for regulation.