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The Society for Research into Higher Education

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Reconceptualising transnational education through decolonial approaches

by Nilakshi Das

Transnational Education (TNE) represents a rapidly expanding form of cross-border provision, underpinned by an economic imaginary that positions the UK as a ‘key player’ in the global higher education market. While earlier internationalisation strategies focused primarily on bringing overseas students to Britain, TNE reflects a shift towards delivering British higher education to students globally through offshore provisions. The rapid expansion of TNE has elicited growing academic debate about its potential to reproduce the political, economic and epistemic hegemony of the Global North, reinscribing earlier colonial hierarchies and patterns of dependency.

Before the emergence of TNE, the internationalisation of UK higher education was primarily organised through the academic mobility of overseas students, shaped by Britain’s imperial and post-imperial educational networks. During the 1960s, technical assistance programmes and scholarship schemes, such as the Commonwealth Scholarship programme, facilitated student mobility to British universities. In the 1970s, as overseas student numbers gradually increased, differential student fees were introduced alongside tightening immigration regulations, a shift that continued throughout the Thatcher government in the 1980s into the present day. By the late 1990s, the University of Nottingham had established one of the earliest overseas branches, with the general idea that the curriculum in the host country would largely mirror the home institution. From the 2000s onwards, TNE expanded in scope and provision through franchised programmes, joint and dual degrees, distance and online courses in new markets, particularly across the Middle East and Asia. These arrangements allowed UK universities to expand their global presence and competitiveness beyond traditional overseas student recruitment.

Political economy of TNE and latest policy ambitions

The latest articulation of TNE goals includes the Labour government’s new strategy for national renewal by ‘turbocharging education’ as an engine for economic growth, with a target of £40 billion in education exports by 2030. This decision reflects increasing political pressure to cut net migration by reducing overseas student recruitment. Recent policy recommendations have radically argued that universities should be ‘selling education, not immigration’, with growing concerns that student visas are being used as a backdoor route into the UK labour market. Against broader anxieties around immigration in which international students are repositioned as migration liabilities, TNE offers a politically viable solution by exporting education in favour of substituting inward student mobility. As universities’ budgets shrink due to ongoing visa restrictions for international students, TNE engagements are expected to further increase (Hartmann and Lee, 2026).

According to the latest data, the number of students studying entirely overseas through UK TNE increased by 8% in 2024/25, and has risen by 37% since 2020/21. TNE student numbers are now close to the number of international students studying in the UK, with approximately one in six students in UK HE being educated across overseas campuses. Yet, despite this rapid growth, there is a lack of public data on student experiences at TNE. While aggregate data records the number of students enrolled in TNE programmes and level of education, there is limited publicly available information on student progression, degree outcome and labour market prospects. The experiences of students and educators involved in these programmes often tend to remain marginal within UK policy debates.

As higher education increasingly operates through a ‘big business’ model, institutional priorities have rapidly shifted towards generating revenue and maintaining competitiveness. In doing so,commitments to uphold student welfare, equality, and meaningful international collaboration are often sidelined in favour of positional advantage. Therefore, the expansion of TNE under growing market competition raises further pressing questions about equity and power within global HE systems.

Towards a decolonial approach to TNE

Most of the latest policy and institutional analyses of TNE tend to adopt an instrumentalist perspective focusing on business indicators, such as risk assessment, return on investment, international branding and reputation, quality assurance and transnational management strategies. As a result, TNE is mainly understood through frameworks of foreign investment and transnational service delivery further entrenching the logic of the market that frames education as a tradable commodity rather than a global public good (Lauren Clarke, 2021). While these considerations are important for universities operating in a competitive global environment, they risk overshadowing broader questions about equity, inclusion and the social purposes of higher education.

Adopting a decolonial approach to TNE can help address questions around embedding Western systems and structures of education in the Global South. Debates around the coloniality of TNE are not entirely new. Some scholars have drawn parallels between contemporary TNE arrangements and colonial models of education between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Colonial education systems were often characterised by limited access for the local population, a lack of relevance to local realities, the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge systems, the exclusive use of English as the primary medium of instruction, institutional authority with control originating from colonial centres and limited curricula featuring vocational degrees (Teferra and Altbach, 2004). TNE arrangements have been articulated as operating through a similar binary model in which a ‘core’ of sending institutions from the West sets the agenda for a marginalised ‘periphery’ of receiving partners, perpetuating historical legacies of colonialism (Caruana and Montgomery, 2015).

Against this background, there are growing calls for more introspective approaches to TNE that challenge post-colonial structures of dependence and compliance, while remaining attentive to the risk that transnational partnerships may reproduce these hierarchies through networks of alliance with local elites in host countries. Ravindra Sidhu advocates an ‘engaged pedagogy’ and an ‘ethics of care’ in the design and governance of TNE partnerships, emphasising the need to recognise the histories, aspirations and agency of local communities involved in these programmes.

Drawing insights from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship that emphasise justice, inclusion and agency will enable TNE strategies to better examine their implications on student success, outcomes and experiences as well as their wider impact on local communities and higher education systems in host countries. At the same time, greater attention to the national and cultural contexts in which TNE operates, particularly where differing political and institutional norms raise ethical challenges around academic freedom, governance and accountability, can support more informed institutional decision-making and partnerships. These perspectives will ensure that the expansion of TNE is not guided by short-term commercial imperatives but by broader commitments to equity and responsible global engagement, avoiding polarised strategic approaches (Sanderson, 2023).

Nilakshi Das has recently completed her PhD in History of Science. Her PhD was funded by the ESRC and jointly undertaken at the University of Leicester and the University of Warwick. Nilakshi holds an MSc in Education from the University of Oxford and an MA in Sociology from the University of Manchester, funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Historical Research.

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The Society for Research into Higher Education in 2015

by Rob Cuthbert

In SRHE News and Blog a series of posts is chronicling, decade by decade, the progress of SRHE since its foundation 60 years ago in 1965. As always, our memories are supported by some music of the times. This is the last of the series.

2015 was a troubled year, as wars and terrorist outrages proliferated. Russia had invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 and a supposedly agreed ceasefire in 2015 broke down within days, as had a previous agreement in 2014. The war in Iraq involving Islamic State, which had started in 2013, would not end until 2017. Islamic State were also involved in the Syrian civil war, drawing in more and more major powers on opposite sides. It would continue until the Assad regime was overthrown in 2024, but elsewhere the Arab Spring popular uprisings had mostly faded. Massacres in Nigeria by Boko Haram killed more than 2,000 people. Al Qaeda gunmen killed 12 people and injured 11 more in Paris at the offices of newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Al-Shabaab killed 148 people, mostly students, at the Garissa University College in Kenya. A terrorist bomb probably brought down Metrojet Flight 9268, an Airbus A321 airliner which crashed in Sinai, killing 224 passengers and crew. Another Airbus was deliberately crashed by its first officer in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. An earthquake in Nepal killed 9000 people, and at least 2200 people died in a stampede at the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca.

Xi Jinping had been leader of China since 2012, as had François Hollande in France; Angela Merkel was in her tenth year as German Chancellor and Barack Obama was halfway through his second term as US President. The UK general election in 2015 was won by the Conservatives under David Cameron; their former coalition partners the Liberal Democrats suffered their worst result in recent history, paying for their betrayal of Nick Clegg’s “pledge” before the 2010 election to abolish HE tuition fees, even though they almost said sorry. The Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Queen Elizabeth II became the longest-serving British monarch. The Paris Agreement at COP 21 saw countries agreeing to “do their best” to keep global warming to “well below 2 degrees C” and Greece became the first advanced economy ever to default on a payment to the International Monetary Fund.

Australia beat New Zealand to win the Cricket World Cup, jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand. The Rugby World Cup was held in England but the hosts flopped as New Zealand beat Australia in the final. Microsoft launched Windows 10, and a new startup called OpenAI was founded.

Higher education in 2015

In 2015 the dominant theme in higher education was internationalisation. A 2016 book by Paul Zeleza (Case Western Reserve University, US), The Transformation of Global Higher Education 1945-2015 argued that “Internationalization emerged as one of the defining features of higher education, which engendered new modes, rationales, and practices of collaboration, competition, comparison, and commercialization. External and internal pressures for accountability and higher education’s value proposition intensified, which fueled struggles over access, affordability, relevance, and outcomes that found expression in the quality assurance movement.”

The Economist leader in March said the world was going to university but: “More and more money is being spent on higher education. Too little is known about whether it is worth it”. Students in Canada, Netherlands, UK and elsewhere were still protesting, trying to hold back the river of commercialisation, but they were just washed away.

Simon Marginson (by then at the UCL Institute of Education) naturally provided the authoritative commentary in his 2016 article in Higher Education: “Worldwide participation in higher education now includes one-third of the age cohort and is growing at an unprecedented rate. The tendency to rapid growth, leading towards high participation systems (HPS), has spread to most middle-income and some low-income countries. Though expansion of higher education requires threshold development of the state and the middle class, it is primarily powered not by economic growth but by the ambitions of families to advance or maintain social position. However, expansion is mostly not accompanied by more equal social access to elite institutions.“

The Going Global conference in 2015 in London had 1000 VCs and others debating “the impact of the greatest global massification of higher education ever experienced”, as NV Varghese, Jinusha Panigrahi and Lynne Heslop reported for University World News on 27 February 2015. Oxford University provided its own report on International Trends, and there was continuing progress towards a common European Higher Education Area, as the 2015 Implementation Report said: ““The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has evolved towards a more common and much more understandable structure of degrees. There is, however, no single model of first-cycle programmes in the EHEA.” No single model for pop music either, as the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna was won by Sweden with “Heroes” (no, me neither) and George Ezra’s European tour included Budapest.

UK HE in 2015

In 2015-2016 there were 162 publicly-funded HE providers in the UK; HESA held data on all of them, plus the decreasingly private University of Buckingham. In addition there was HE provision in FE colleges and other places. Of the 2.3million HE students, 60% were full-time undergraduates. 56.5% of all students were female, 43.5% male. Total numbers had been falling since 2011-2012, because the decline in part-time numbers had outstripped the continuing growth of full-time and sandwich student numbers, up by 5.8% over the same period. Business and administrative studies was the most heavily populated at both UG and PG levels, as in previous years; at PG level Education was second. Reflecting the globalisation of HE, UK universities in 2015-2016 had over 700,000 students registered in transnational education.

The 2004 Higher Education Act (2004 c. 8) had established the Arts and Humanities Research Council and provided for the appointment of a Director of Fair Access to Higher Education. It set out arrangements for dealing with students’ complaints about higher education institutions and made provisions on grants and loans for FHE students. Then came the 2005 Education Act (2005 c. 18), which renamed the Teacher Training Agency (established by the 1994 Education Act) as the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). The Learning and Skills Council was set up by the 2007 Further Education and Training Act (2007 c. 25) and the 2008 Sale of Student Loans Act (2008 c. 10) allowed the government to sell student loans to private companies. The school leaving age went from 16 to 18 under the 2008 Education and Skills Act (2008 c. 25) and the2009 Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act (2009 c. 22) created a statutory framework for apprenticeships, and established among other things the Young People’s Learning Agency for England (YPLA), the office of Chief Executive of Skills Funding and the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual).

Labour might have had a head full of dreams, but many of their new structures were dismantled after the coalition government was elected in 2010. There was bad blood between Education Secretary Michael Gove and the teacher unions’ ‘blob’; his 2011 Education Act (2011 c. 21) put an end to the General Teaching Council for England, the Training and Development Agency for Schools, the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency for England. The Act also ended the diploma entitlement for 16 to 18 year olds and abandoned Labour’s aim of making 18 the upper age limit for participation in education.

The tortuous rise of HE fees for undergraduates was usefully summarised in a 2015 House of Commons Library Briefing Note. The £1000 fee introduced in 1998 had risen to £3000 after 2006, in a move which almost brought down the Labour government. The 2010 election saw the Liberal Democrats renege on their pre-election ‘pledge’ to abolish tuition fees, instead agreeing with their Conservative coalition partners to triple them instead, which had many asking ‘What do you mean?’ The £9000 fees were partly a consequence of the Browne Review, but the government as always cherry-picked the recommendations it liked and ignored the package which was proposed. A 2010 vote set fees at between £6000 and £9000, but as everyone had predicted – except the Universities Minister David Willetts – English universities scrambled en masse to charge £9000, for fear of otherwise being labelled as inferior. The £9000 fees took effect in September 2012, while in other parts of the UK tuition fee arrangements increasingly diverged from England’s world-beating fee levels. The fee rose with inflation to £9250 but was then frozen, fiscal drag which would cost HE many £billions in revenue and lead to today’s widespread financial problems.

In June 2011 the government published the White Paper Higher Education: Students at the Heart of the System, but the anticipated Higher Education Bill did not follow. Minister David Willetts was not letting go; he brought forward a package of reforms to change HE regulation: placing the funding council in an oversight and coordination role; establishing a Register of Higher Education Provision; introducing designation conditions for HEIs, and a new designation system for alternative providers; updating the Financial Memorandum; reforming student number controls, including a system for alternative providers; and creating a Designation Resolution Process. Once again Sue Hubble of the House of Commons Library provided a definitive record in September 2013, noting some commentators’ criticisms that such sweeping changes had been achieved by administrative procedures rather than primary legislation.

In July 2015 DBIS updated the statistics on widening participation, which showed continuing but erratic progress despite too many policy interventions. We had to wait until November 2015 for a Green Paper, Fulfilling Our Potential, which proposed establishing a Teaching Excellence Framework, abolishing the Higher Education Funding Council for England and replacing it with the Office for Students. It would not be until 2017 that the Higher Education Reform Act confirmed and enshrined these changes in statute. HEPI Report 161, edited by SRHE member Helen Carasso (Oxford), looked back on the 20 years since HEPI’s formation in 2022-2023. It included a chapter by SRHE Fellow Michael Shattock (UCL) on how ‘self-governed’ universities (I doubt if we’ll see you again) were forced to say Hello to a ‘regulated’ university system: “The year 2003 can be seen as starting point in a process of systemic governance change in UK higher education.”

SRHE and research into higher education in 2015

By 2015 research into higher education had been noticed even in the furthest corners of academe. A 2012 book chapter by philosopher Andre V Rezaev (St Petersburg State University) was thinking out loud: “… to articulate a possibility for integrating a number of perspectives in studying higher education as a scholarly subject in current social science. We begin with the reasons for such an undertaking and its relevance. We then develop several basic definitions in order to establish a common conceptual basis for discussion. The final section presents new institutionalism as one of the ways to integrate several approaches in understanding higher education. This chapter is rather theoretical and methodological in its outlook. We develop the basic approach that, in many respects, is still a work in progress. We take in this approach a set of arguments that open up new research agenda rather than settled a perception to be accepted uncritically.” Even latecomers were of course welcome.

With due ceremony SRHE staged a 50th Anniversary Colloquium in London on 26 June 2015. The congregation of more than 200 people included almost everyone who had been anyone in HE research in the UK, and many places beyond, gathered in Westminster for discussion and celebration, primed by ‘think pieces’ from SRHE Fellows past and future. The themes encapsulated the scope of research into HE: Learning, Teaching and the Curriculum (Marcia Devlin); Academic Practice, Identity and Careers (Bruce Macfarlane); The Student Experience (Mary Stuart); Transnational Perspectives (Rajani Naidoo); Research on HE Policy (Jeroen Huisman); Going Global (Paul Ashwin); Access and Widening Participation in HE (Penny-Jane Burke); and, Reflective Teaching in HE (Kelly Coate).

The Society had managed to shake off its financial woes and was flourishing in financial and academic terms. The chairs from 2005 were Ron Barnett (UCL), George Gordon (Strathclyde), Yvonne Hillier (Brighton), and Jill Jameson (Greenwich). The successful series of books published by the Open University Press had ended when it was swallowed by McGraw-Hill, but a seamless change led to a new and even more successful series with Routledge from 2012. SRHE News was reimagined and relaunched in February 2010, and the SRHE Blog followed from 2012. The Society’s office moves continued, switching in 2009 from the Institute of Physics in Portland Place to a brief sojourn at Open University offices in 44 Bedford Row, London, before finding a longer-term home on the second floor at 73 Collier Street in London. In 2009 the annual Research Conference was held for the first time at Celtic Manor in Newport, Wales (where François Smit might often have said shut up and dance). It would return every year until 2019, just before Covid disrupted the world, including the world of research into higher education. The Society would however emerge even stronger, having discovered the power of online meeting (if you don’t believe me, just watch) to expand its global reach, as a more prominent complement to the still essential face-to-face meetings in networks and conferences.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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Promoting access to higher education worldwide

by Graeme Atherton

The shift to the political right in many countries in the world, including it appears the UK now, presents a new set of challenges for equitable access and success to higher education. Not that it needed any new ones. Inequalities in participation in higher education are pervasive, entrenched and low on the list of priorities of most governments. Since the early 2010s we have been working with other organisations across the world including the World Bank and UNESCO to understand the extent and nature of these inequalities but more importantly to initiate activities to address them. In 2016 working with colleagues including the late, great Geoff Whitty I undertook a project to bring together as much secondary data we could on who participates in higher education by social background across the world.

The Drawing the Global Access Map report found that in all the countries where we could find data (over 90%) higher education participation was unequal. The extent of this inequality differs but it binds together countries and higher education systems of all varieties. Following convening 2 global conferences on higher education access around the time of this report in an attempt to galvanise the global higher education community, we then launched World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED) in 2018. The aim of WAHED was to create a vehicle that would enable universities to launch activities to address inequalities in access and success on the day in their own place. As the pandemic hit we also started a global online conference and up to 2022 over 1000 organisations from over 100 countries engaged in WAHED. We also produced research to mark the day including the All Around the World – Equity Policies Across the Globe report in 2018 which looked at policies on higher education equity in over 70 countries. The report found that only 32% of the countries surveyed have defined specific participation targets for any equity group and only 11% have formulated a comprehensive equity strategy.

WAHED played an important role as a catalyst for activism, especially in contexts where individuals or departments felt that they were acting in isolation. However, progress will be limited if efforts are restricted just to an International Day of Action. Hence, in December 2024, working again with the World Bank, UNESCO as well as Equity Practitioners in Higher Education in Australasia (EPHEA), and a number of educational foundations, we launched the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). The aim of WAHEN is to construct an alliance for global, collective action on higher education equity and more information can be found here. It will focus on:

•              Capacity Building via the sharing, professionalisation and enhancement of practice in learning, teaching and pre-HE outreach

•              Collaboration – enabling organisations to formulate and deliver shared goals through a set of global communities of practice.

•              Convening – bringing together those from across countries and sectors to affect change in higher education through World Access to Higher Education Day.

•              Campaigning – advocating and working with policymakers and governments around the world producing research and evidence.

•              Critical thinking – creating an online space where the knowledge based on ‘what works’ in equitable access and success can be developed & shared.

It was because there was a national organisation that works to tackle inequalities in higher education in the UK, the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), that I founded and led for 13 years, that WAHED and WAHEN happened. NEON led these efforts to build a global network. There remains a large way to go for WAHEN to be sustainable and impactful. We are working intently on how to position WAHEN and how it should focus its efforts. Inequalities in access and success are locally defined. They can’t be defined from a Euro-centric perspective, and they can also only be tackled through primarily work that is regional or national. The added value of international collaboration in this area needs to be articulated, it can’t be assumed. But at the same time, nor should the default assumption be that such a network or collaboration is less required where equitable access and success is concerned than in other parts of higher education. This assumption encapsulates the very problem at hand, ie the lack of willingness to recognise the extent of these inequalities and make the changes necessary to start to address them.

The present challenges to higher education presented by the global shift to the right brings into sharp focus the consequences of a failure to deal with these inequalities. Universities and left leaning governments are unable to frame higher education as open and available to all with the potential to enter. The accusations of elitism and the threats to academic freedom etc then become an easier sell to electorates for whom higher education has never mattered, or those in their family/community. It is more important than ever then that something like WAHEN exists. It is essential that we develop the tools that give higher education systems across the world to become more equitable and to resist populist narratives, and that we do this now.

Professor Graeme Atherton is Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford.

A hybrid conference Access and Geopolitics: Next Steps in Tackling the Equity Crisis in Global Higher Education, was held on 3 June 2025 at the Department of Education in Oxford, jointly organised by WAHEN, The Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). There were almost 40 presentations on: the politics – and geopolitics – of widening participation; the challenge of financing access; private provision and higher education as a public good; populism and the equity ‘backlash’; and, the challenge of generating meaningful participation data. Speakers included: John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, England;  Dr Jamil Salmi, global tertiary education expert; Professor Shamit Saggar, Executive Director of Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success; Professor Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education, Oxford and President of the British Sociological Association; Professor Johanna Waters, Professor of Human Geography, UCL; Dr James Robson, Director of SKOPE and Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, Oxford; Graeme Atherton, Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford; and Danielle Watkis, DPhil student, Department of Education, Oxford. A full record of the event will soon be available on the CGHE website.