Stricter visa tests for Pakistani students
23 April 2012
Following reports by the National Audit Office that weaknesses in the UK’s student visa system may have allowed as many as 50,000 people posing as students into the UK in just one year, the government has introduced face-to-face interviews for applicants from Pakistan to prevent bogus applications.
This pilot scheme, involving a "credibility test” in the form of a face-to-face interview with British officials, was run in Pakistan from December 2011 to February this year. The scheme led to a sharp increase in the number of British visa applications being rejected. Border checks suggested that as many as 40% of applicants from Pakistan were lying on their application forms.
Until now, the student visa system has been completely paper-based, thus candidates were only being assessed on the basis of their written application forms without any personal contact with officials. About 20% of candidates from Pakistan are already refused on the basis of the application forms alone, the majority of them for suspected poor English skills. Following the introduction of the pilot scheme in Pakistan an additional 20% were found not to have the grasp of English that they claimed to have on their application forms, raising the overall refusal rate to around 40%. Based on these results, the Home Office now demands that all candidates from Pakistan should be subject to the new strict tests of face-to-face or telephone interviews.
The number of illegal immigrants who pretended to be in education in order to enter the UK is more than ten times higher than previous estimates. Immigration officials have recently attempted to tighten the system by increasing checks on colleges and applicants, but the evidence from the National Audit Office has found its controls are still lacking.
The government is considering extending interview schemes to applicants from 14 other countries including India, China and the US. Official estimates have shown that new schemes should cut the number of student migrants by as many as 273,000 over the next five years and will cost the economy in the region of £2.4 billion.
The Government had hoped that the introduction of these new measures would help to weed out bogus applications while still allowing the "brightest and best” genuine students to come and study in the UK.
