In her closing speech at last week’s Conservative Party Conference, Prime Minister Liz Truss made it clear that her Government’s priority is all about growth. In the speech, Truss stressed the need for the UK to be ‘internationally competitive’ and justified cutting taxes as means of ‘attracting the best talent’ and ‘putting up a sign that Britain is open for business’.
What the new Prime Minister appears to have overlooked, however, with her failure to give even the slightest nod in her speech to the importance of universities or Research and Development (R&D) to her new growth agenda, are the existing competitive strengths of our country’s higher education sector and the significant growth potential to be had in prioritising international education exports. This is an industry which the Prime Minister herself, in her former role as Secretary of State for International Trade, personally re-committed to growing to £35 billion by 2030 in the 2021 update to the UK’s International Education Strategy.
