A boom in professional short course numbers has indicated that six month visitor visas were at a bottleneck in the spring, and could be at the same time in 2023, according to stakeholders.
Independent HE said that the idea of having both study and tourism stints that are under six months in one visa may not be viable – especially when it is affecting movement of students altogether.
“It started off in spring when there was a massive delay in the visitor visa – across all the visas,” Joy Elliott-Bowman, director of policy and development at IHE, told The PIE News.
“They began rushing through the [long-term] student visas, but they didn’t really do anything about the [bottleneck on] visitor visas,” she explained.
