The Cover
Strategic unity
The UK has a new international education strategy, and Australia looks set to start work on its own framework. Why do we have these strategies and what do they achieve?
By Anton John Crace
"One country’s national education strategy helped close the loop on another’s international education strateg."
“Top-level international education strategy provides a set of unifying ambitions and goals for a country’s sector.”
“Alignment is not automatic; there will always be differing views on priorities.”
"International student recruitment started to evolve as a business... on the back of strategy."
"While strategies set direction and intent, they cannot account for external shocks, or changing global conditions."
In brief
- National international education strategies unify sectors and signal strong government backing in a competitive global market.
- These frameworks serve three key audiences, government, the sector, and the public, facilitating major cross-border successes like the establishment of new UK university campuses in India.
- Success requires managing political pressures and external shocks. While often compromises, these strategies provide essential platforms for innovation and responding to changing global conditions.
The UK international education sector has already had a strong start to the year.
In mid-January, it received what it had been anticipating for some time. After two years of policy changes and plans – such as the tightening of dependent visa rules, a planned reduction in the graduate visa’s duration from next year, an immigration white paper, and an international student levy, also planned for a later date – the government released its 2026 UK International Education Strategy.
Responses have varied.
Jamie Arrowsmith, Director of Universities UK International, called the document “an important moment” and welcomed the “renewed commitment to fostering the global reach, reputation and impact of [UK] universities” in a post on his organisation’s website.
QS Quacquarelli Symonds CEO, Jessica Turner, in a statement on her company’s website, applauded the strategy’s goals as “ambitions that matter deeply to the sector”, adding that “the strategy’s renewed emphasis on openness and reputation is therefore not only welcome, but also essential”.
Others were less generous. In a — somewhat — tongue-in-cheek response, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, Nick Hillman, expressed relief the strategy was “finally out”, before making a point to observe the document’s higher volume of padding, larger font size, and lack of clear “Actions” compared to its 2019 edition. In case anyone wondered if he was being sincere in those observations, he removed any doubt.
“A confident country keen to expand its share of a particular global market tends to project itself as such, whereas a thinner paper that hedges its bets may be regarded, perhaps accurately, as reflecting lukewarm support for educational exports in parts of Whitehall,” he wrote.
Hillman’s comments hint at the power of an international education strategy. For documents that can be fewer than 20 pages or, as he observes, be padded with larger-than-expected font, they can elicit strong and immediate responses.
Strategies are also clearly something that markets and governments want. In addition to the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, among many others, share in having some variation of a strategy, each with their own overlapping and unique goals and ambitions.
But with so many international education strategies around the world, some recently renewed and in their infancy, reaching maturation or under review, one question doesn’t seem to be asked.
Why do we have them?
United front
One of the most obvious and significant reasons for a top-level international education strategy is that it provides a set of unifying ambitions and goals for a country’s sector. Where previously a single institution may have acted in a way to serve its own ends, a strategy creates a sense of direction for everybody. National competition becomes friendlier, or at least gets competitors in the same room, talking to each other.
But there are other benefits for an overarching document. “It's a signal of a government commitment, which means it brings government backing,” says Dr Janet Ilieva, Founder and Director of Education Insight, echoing Hillman’s observations. “It gives much greater weight for universities to be taken seriously.”
That weight leads to two things; renewed confidence for those it seeks to support, and reassurance to those it seeks to engage. This becomes doubly significant if both countries involved have complementary strategies. When UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer took a 125 member strong delegation to India in October 2025, for example, 14 of its members came from universities.
While not as explicitly outlined as it would become in 2026, transnational education has been a part of all of the UK’s international education strategies since their inception. India’s National Education Policy 2020, meanwhile, underscores a desire to engage with foreign universities in ways previously not allowed: namely, setting up campuses without the need for partnering with a domestic institution.
Shortly after the delegation, PM Starmer and Indian PM Narendra Modi announced that the University of Lancaster and the University of Surrey had both been approved to establish campuses in India. Effectively, one country’s national education strategy helped close the loop on another’s international education strategy.
Phil Honeywood, CEO of the International Education Association of Australia, the country’s peak body for the sector, agrees that a strategy provides firm backing, adding that the document typically serves three audiences. “The first audience is the government itself internally to benchmark performance with its own departments,” he tells QS Insights.
“And, philosophically, [it’s] to explain to the civil servants that they employ that these are the things they want prioritised.”
The second audience is the sector, and the document should reflect a degree of consultation with stakeholders and an understanding of their pain points and concerns.
The third audience is the wider community, which Honeywood says contains its own subsets. As with the case for India-UK relations, one subset is those the strategy seeks to engage with. Included in that subset is also international students, researchers, and any other individuals a country is seeking out.
The other subset is the wider domestic community “to make them better appreciate the benefits the international education brings to [a country]'s economy and future relationships”.
“A good national strategy needs to kick all three goals.”
Parts unknown
With the overarching purpose of a strategy being to unite a sector and communicate to all stakeholders a government’s intent, they still require institutional buy-in and support.
“[Strategies] don’t deliver outcomes on their own and nor are they intended to do so. They cannot replace institutional strategies,” says Sharon Calvert, Assistant Vice Chancellor, International, Engagement & Partnerships at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.
She explains that for a strategy to be a successful, institutions and subsectors must respond and align their own strategies accordingly, but that can create challenges. “Alignment is not automatic; there will always be differing views on priorities.”
In New Zealand’s case, its number of universities is small and it can therefore be easier to create alignment compared to subsectors or other markets with higher numbers of institutions. “This gap between strategy and implementation is where complexity often sits,” says Calvert.
To overcome this, there needs to be ongoing engagement between stakeholders and the government. Continued engagement has an added bonus of maintaining a strategy’s momentum after the initial excitement wanes, Calvert explains to QS Insights.
“Strategies can lose momentum when they stop being discussed or are not front of mind,” she says. “Regular check-ins, visible examples of progress and regular statements on progress can help to keep the strategy relevant and front of mind.”
As the global international education sector discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are also external factors that can influence the success or failure of a strategy that are unrelated to stakeholder buy-in.
“While policy frameworks provide the foundation, progress is ultimately achieved through trusted relationships, shared accountability, and an enabling environment that supports innovation, responsiveness and delivery against the strategy’s goals,” agrees Sahinde Pala, Group General Manager, International and Sector Engagement at Education New Zealand.
Pala’s second to last support, responsiveness, is itself one of the major keys to the long-term success of a strategy that is expecedt to cover up to a decade. “While strategies set direction and intent, they cannot account for external shocks, or changing global conditions,” she says.
“Geopolitical shifts, global economic pressures, or global turbulent events such as pandemics can affect the relevance, feasibility, or pace of delivery of certain aspirations.”
These realities cannot be avoided entirely, but their effects can be mitigated through continually reviewing a strategy, says Pala. The UK did just that when it provided an update to its 2019 strategy in 2021, during the pandemic. The foreword included more than 50 references to the pandemic alone.
If you can’t have the strategy you love…
There is an argument to be made that the contemporary international education sector would not exist without government-led strategies. The UK’s 2026 international education strategy is the country’s third, after releasing predecessors in 2013 and 2019, with an update in 2021, but its roots actually date back further.
In 1999, then British PM Tony Blair issued Prime Ministers Initiative on International Students (PMI) after he noticed that many professionals and leaders he met while overseas had been educated in the UK. The PMI’s headline initiative was to increase the number of international students in the UK, but its broader impacts were momentous.
“We can kind of see how international student recruitment started to evolve as a business, and it was on the back of strategy,” says Education Insights’ Dr Ilieva.
The PMI was followed by Prime Minister’s Initiative for International Education (PMI2) in 2006, which further expanded on the original initiative, and worked as a proxy strategy through to 2011.
If history doesn’t repeat, it certainly rhymes, and shortly after the PMI2 was released, a worldwide catastrophe occurred: the Global Financial Crisis. As the GFC soured the economic outlook, increased unemployment and inflation, and pushed many countries into recessions, sentiments towards foreigners soured, with international students conflated into those worries.
While sentiments eventually bounced back and the number of international students increased, there was a clear gap between the “end” of PMI2 in 2011 and the start of the UK’s first strategy in 2013. There’s also a clear change in intent, and UUKI’s Arrowsmith says that this change, from initiative to strategy, came from looking further afield.
“We did a bit of research on what was different between our country and other systems,” he says.
“You could pick out two or three key things. One was… having a coordinated international strategy approach.”
In Australia, meanwhile, around the time the UK’s PMI2 ended, the Strategic Review of the Student Visa Program, also known as the Knight Review, was released by the government with the intent to repair the sector. It would eventually lead to the National Strategy for International Education 2025 in 2016.
Politics and external forces not only shape the implementation of a strategy but its design. “We all recognise that one of the key issues in most countries at the moment is around migration and certainly in the UK,” says Arrowsmith.
It should therefore come as little surprise that the UK’s recent strategy emphasises the development of offshore activities and eschews an international student numbers target for an economic value one. It’s not all one way, however, and Arrowsmith notes that a strategy can have an impact on politics, although he says it would be “naïve” to think that relationship is equal, or that an international education strategy would direct political sentiment.
“What it should hopefully help us do is to have a kind of more open and honest conversation about why we need certain types of migration and actually why migration of international students is maybe qualitatively different from other types of migration as well,” he says.
Honeywood, in Australia, meanwhile, observes that the political climate can also impact whether a country has a strategy at all. In 2024, the Australian government released a strategic framework, in recognition that it’s 2021 strategy, which was projected out to 2030, had become, in Honeywood’s words, “redundant” due to changes created by the pandemic.
But, he says there is a noteworthy shift in moving from a strategy to a framework. “When you have a strategy, that tends to lay out priorities that then signpost the government's intentions, and people can get disappointed and point to them when they've not been delivered,” he says.
“Because of the dynamics of our sector in Australia, but particular situations around enrollments and the current policy settings, it's easier for the government of the day to go with a framework that gives them more flexibility and more Get Out of Jail Free cards.”
… Love the strategy you have
International education strategies are unifying documents, but they are also inherently documents of compromise. Factoring in the disparate goals of an entire sector – which can be as varied as short-term language courses through to PhD programmes – by itself is a monumental task, let alone then prioritising those ambitions.
On top of the sector’s wants and needs are government and community expectations, region-based and city needs, political sentiment, and a broad range of other considerations that are historical, contemporary and future-focused. It should be clear why an international education strategy can provoke strong and varied responses. As Honeywood observes, somebody will be disappointed.
“If you go back to our October 2024 blueprint, there's absolutely aspects in the new strategy there and there are things we haven't secured,” Arrowsmith notes. “It's always a negotiation.”
While strategies can be disappointing, Arrowsmith argues that the sector should try to look on the bright.
“I think that's sometimes we have to recognise, as a sector, that it probably would have been very, very easy for the government not to have had an international education strategy, given the number of compromises and the complexity of the discussions it means having,” he says.
“I think we can maybe be a bit guilty of wanting the perfect thing and not recognising that what we've got is a good platform and it's something that we can use. And I think that's the key point, our response to the strategy.”