6 months is quite a long time really. I know Japanese and Koreans do stay about a year – since it spreads the cost of airfare and so on and fills a year in their CV nicely. Could they go home and come back after 6 months under the new rules? If the government got its levels right and required a pre-intermediate level rather than the upper intermediate would it be OK? Would it be fair if Elementary students came ofr 6 months and if they passed a Pre-int test before their time was up they could stay on?

I met students who were basically working and just came to class to have a visa who never got beyong elementary level because it frankly didn’t matter to them.

We all know their is abuse of the student visa system by people wanting to work or marry in the UK, so some kind of tightening up was on the cards. Sadly, it seems like a typical case of rushing things through by ministers/civil servants who don’t know enough about the real situation.

I hope it is reversed or at least revised before it does too much damage. I suppose that it what parliament is there for? UK based ELT is a huge money maker. And I loved my (sadly too short) stint in UK private language schools. Cynically, one wonders if they were tryng to kill it off to force more and more students into the University/college sector, which never could compete on an equal footing. I worked in Colleges too and while they were cheaper for the students (especially EU students) the quality was laughable mostly. And ironically this is were almost all the visa scammers I met were studying. In the private schools I only encountered one Polish guy who was working in IT at night and ‘studying’ during the day and one Japanese guy who was runnig a business while coming to class as little as possible.

Thanks Alex. I was following this but rather lost track of it all a few months back.