During the Covid-19 pandemic, UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) was forced to relax rules about international students and remote learning.
The original position was that students who had travelled to the UK to study at university also had to travel to their campus to do so with continued visa eligibility linked to attendance.
With the advent of Covid-19 restrictions, this clearly wasn’t sustainable – so from April 2020 to June 2022 concessions were in place to allow international students to study in any way that was possible at the time without prejudicing their immigration status.
As ministers, regulators, and the press have noted, the end of pandemic restrictions did not herald a grateful and complete return to the campus. Many students found that the flexibility afforded by remote learning options worked for them in terms of anything from learning preferences to the ability to squeeze in part-time work. The state of the art as it came to university level online learning had changed too – we were (briefly) experiencing one of those “the future is online” moments that turn up every decade or so.
If it was possible for home students to experience at least some of the benefits (or persist through some of the drawbacks, if you’d rather) of hybrid learning, and there were sound pedagogical reasons for this being the case, why should international students not get a slice?
