Events company BMI has completed its first global forum for international school counsellors with a highly anticipated week-long program in London.

The event marks a new direction in strategy for the group as it engages school counsellors in professional development training, accreditation and in-bound familiarisation visits.

BMI regional events have a strong reputation among university partners for student recruitment fairs and high school tours in locations around the world.

The model has been reversed for the global forum however, with BMI instead personally inviting 100 international school counsellors from over 35 countries on an all-expenses-paid trip to London to meet university delegates and complete the THE counsellor accreditation program.

More than 55 universities were in attendance to network with school delegates including University of California, Berkeley, King’s College London and Huron Western University.

Kristoffer Toribio, president of the International Association for College Admissions Counselling, was also in attendance to deliver a keynote speech to delegates.

In addition to the professional development seminars, the week-long program included sessions from Education USA, Campus France, Education Ireland and UCAS, along with visits to UCL and Kings College London.

Twenty school counsellors will also be attending a three-day familiarisation trip across Ireland, visiting Cork, Limerick and Dublin as guests of Education Ireland.

While the event was invitation only, The PIE recently reported on the announcement of THE Counsellor – a new open-access digital platform and learning community for the wider school counsellor community.

BMI was acquired by Times Higher Education in 2022 and Patrick Hayes, chief development officer for THE, spoke of his pride at the innovative event and the chance to reward the ‘superstar’ counsellors in schools.

“Hats off to the BMI team. I mean, all of the flights, all the accommodation, everything is catered for on a very individual basis.

“This will always be free for the counsellors as we always make sure it gets the broadest possible reach [around the world].”

When questioned about the financial model of flying in global counsellors, Samir Zaveri, CEO and president of BMI, quipped “I think you could do the maths yourself”.

“Many of these people have never been to Europe. So we have invited them to come in three days earlier or stay on for three days for their own personal time to get to know London.”

Zaveri went on to discuss the long-term career value for counsellors to become THE accredited and that the global forum will become an annual fixture in the events calendar.

“Having a global accreditation status is something that [the counsellors] can use for their career and has always been overlooked in international education.

“We’re looking at other locations around the world as well”

“This [event] would definitely be global. We don’t know if we will always be in London, we’re looking at other locations around the world as well. And each year we hope to improve. But again, we will be guided by the [international counsellors advisory] board,” continued Zaveri.

Simone Goetschalckx, who attended the event from Antwerp International School, told The PIE of the importance of gaining knowledge and contacts across global study destinations as students are researching multi-national university choices.

“It’s very important to have the network, not just with counselling colleagues but also with university staff from a broad range of countries. We need both. So there’s a lot of networking involved and events like this are extremely helpful for that.”

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Three English language schools in South Africa have partnered up to attract learners from select countries via education agents.

IH Cape Town, LaL Cape Town, and the UCT English Language Centre welcomed 10 agents from Brazil, Turkey, France, and Poland in April, to offer them a first-hand experience of Cape Town.

“It’s been proved time and again that fam trips work,” Ilse Liebenberg, from IH Cape Town, told The PIE.

“Agents always find it easiest to work with schools and destinations that they have personally experienced. We have found different markets opening up and previously small markets growing substantially,” she noted.

South Africa “as a whole” has become more reliant on the African markets, such as Angola, Gabon and Congo, Liebenberg noted.

The 14 full, associate and incubator members of Education South Africa, welcoming 5,567 international students, recorded a 70% year-on-year increase in 2021. Saudi Arabian students helped to boost numbers, according to Liebenberg.

“The South African took a huge knock during the pandemic, a few schools closed and some merged. However, those schools have bounced back with great enthusiasm. We are finding that 2022’s student numbers beat 2019’s in some source markets. Specifically, the Saudi Arabian market,” Liebenberg, who is also chair of EduSA, explained.

However, South American student numbers were still low compared with pre-Covid figures.

Among the agents visiting the three schools were guest from Brazil. In 2022, UCT English Language Centre welcomed four students from Brazilian agency IE Intercâmbio through an initiative funded by donations.

“The trip was a fantastic opportunity for language travel agents to get a first-hand experience of the schools and facilities available in Cape Town,” organisers of the latest familiarisation trip said.

“We believe that Fam trips are essential for language travel agents”

“We believe that Fam trips are essential for language travel agents as they give agents a first-hand experience of the destination where they send their students . This way, agents can ensure that their students have a safe, enjoyable, and educational experience in Cape Town.”

“I am confident that my experience in Cape Town will help me to better advise my students and ensure that they have an enjoyable and successful language learning journey,” Elif Tanis, one of the agents invited from Idealist in Turkey, added.

Asked how South African providers can attract more students, Liebenberg answered that “awareness of our destination is key”.

“We need to ensure we are out there educating agents on our stunning country. EduSA has made marketing and digital marketing development its key focus for 2023. Attending various international events is also on the agenda for the year ahead. Awareness and education are key factors,” she said.

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International student recruitment marketplace Adventus.io has raised AUD$22 million in series B funding from its existing shareholders.

The cash injection will allow the company to maintain and consolidate the position it holds in the international education sector, it said.

“This latest round of funding is a strong vote of confidence from our investors and a testament to Adventus’ growth trajectory and potential,” Victor Rajeevan, Adventus.io CEO & co-founder, said in a statement.

“Despite launching in the midst of a pandemic, we’ve expanded our team across 15+ countries, and witnessed remarkable year-on-year growth, and this year is no different.

“The funds will be used to accelerate our technology capabilities (including investments in automation and AI) and deepen our relationship with our partner institutions and recruiters, to ensure we continue to place high-quality students in sought after institutions,” he added.

The Software-as-a-Service platform initially launched in 2020 with a $12 million backing in series A funding, before adding $11m in investment a year later.

Since its establishment, Adventus.io has invested in a real-time data platform, acquired ratings publisher Good Education Media Press and on-boarded cricketing legend Ricky Ponting as brand ambassador.

The company’s admissions and compliance servicing arm, Adventus Professional Services, which London Metropolitan University has signed up for, is said to have been an important addition to the Adventus.io portfolio.

Former CEO Ryan Trainor stepped back from the company earlier this year, and has shared a powerful story of the impact that running the start up has had on his health.

With the latest investment, Adventus.io has made strategic appointments to its team. Peter Backwell, with experience at Altus Group and Australasian Retail Projects as well as accounting firms such as Deloitte and KPMG, is stepping in to the role of chief financial officer.

“This year we’re doubling down on quality and efficiency”

Simon Rosenberg, with over 17 years of broad commercial experience as a senior executive at SEEK, has joined at chief operating officer, while former deputy director/head of international recruitment at Cardiff University, Siobhan Robinson, has recently been appointed partnership director for UK and Europe.

“We have achieved our global enrolment targets for Q1 and continue to grow our revenue while managing our costs effectively, and we have doubled student enrollments in Q1’23 vs Q1’22. It is therefore an exciting time to be joining, as traction with recruiters and global institutions continues to ramp up,” Rosenberg said.

“This year we’re doubling down on quality and efficiency to ensure the right students make it to the right institutions.”

Adventus.io currently works with over 1,600 education institutions and 8,000 recruiter partners globally. It is on track to process 60,000 students this year.

Aggregator platforms may find an uphill battle however as stakeholders, especially in Canada and Australia, are piling pressure on their respective governments to regulate the education agent sector.

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A criminal network operating in Australia allegedly employs migration and education agents to bring “non-genuine” students to the country, some of whom end up working in the sex industry, according to a leaked government review. 

The report found the students enrolled in private vocational colleges that were owned by members of the network, allowing them to cover up non-attendance by those on student visas. 

According to Australian newspaper The Age, some sex workers had paid agents to help them get into Australia while others may have been trafficked. There have also been concerns that last year’s lifting of the 40-hour fortnightly limit on working as an international student in Australia could have driven exploitation.

The work limit is set to be capped once again from 30 June 2023.

The Nixon report, which has not yet been released, called on the government to consider regulating onshore and offshore agents. The Albanese government has yet to set a date for the release of the report but key findings have been shared with Australian media.

It comes as parliamentary hearings focusing on Australia’s international education sector continue, with a session on May 15 discussing the practicalities of agent regulation.

“The current approach, which has been years long of letting providers oversee agents, has comprehensively failed,” said Julian Hill, MP and member of the joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade. 

“These stories just keep coming up, students are being exploited particularly at the bottom end.

“We’ve got to break this business model of dodgy agents and dodgy providers exploiting people,” he said. 

Representatives from the Department of Education highlighted the challenges of regulating offshore agents outside of Australia’s jurisdiction, but Hill rebuffed that there are examples of where offshore activity is regulated, such as modern slavery legislation. 

Sharon Cook, national president of ISANA International Education Association, called for “greater transparency to education agent practices” including the publication of commission payments, while Catriona Jackson, CEO of Universities Australia, asked for comparative agent data to be made available to institutions and for better enforcement of the current regulatory framework. 

“The current approach has comprehensively failed,”

“It seems the bad guys are paying absolutely nil attention to it and getting away with murder,” Jackson said.

Hill argued that universities had “scuffled” previous reform efforts, but Jackson said the “vast majority of the problems lie outside the universities sector”. 

“There is a code of conduct for agents that is very strongly backed by all of my university members and there is action taken against dodgy agents in universities on a relatively regular basis. That is the system working from a university perspective,” she said. 

Both ISANA and the International Student Education Agents Association advocated for more agent training and registration systems. 

“We absolutely see the need for oversight of agents and accountability of agents because that is severely lacking at the moment,” said Robert Parsonson, executive officer at ISEAA. 

“It’s very difficult to get rid of an agent out of the system as it currently stands. There is no cross-talk between providers necessarily and certainly not to the department.”

Karen Sandercock, first assistant secretary international division at the department for education, explained the oversight that is in place. 

“We give information to providers to assist them with the monitoring of their agents,” she said. 

“For instance, we look at agents that have high rates of visa refusals or whose students go on to transfer provider perhaps at higher rates than you might expect or whose students don’t go on to complete, which suggests they may have had other motivations for being in the country.”

Jane Li, Australasia and Japan area director at IDP, said agent regulation was “a good concept” but “it all comes down to the details that go into it”. 

“The majority of students are happy with the education agent service and the sector has been thriving because of the great work that education agents have been doing,” she said, adding that over-regulating is a concern. 

“I think that thought needs to be given as to where you draw the line… whether over-regulating could damage business and potentially punish ethical agents”. 

The US State Department’s 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report identified that “unscrupulous employers [in Australia] coerce students to work in excess of the terms of their visas, making them vulnerable to trafficking by exploiting fears of deportation for immigration violations”.

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Agents are helping international students in Australia switch to lower-cost providers, a parliamentary inquiry has heard, but agents in India insist that it is those working onshore who are responsible.

Some institutions and offshore agents have called for loopholes that allow Australian institutions to ‘poach’ international students to be closed, as concerns about transfers heighten. 

Universities have long complained about private VET providers encouraging international students to transfer to cheaper courses, and now education and migration agents are being accused of assisting students to switch early.

International students must wait six months to move to a different provider, unless there are exceptional circumstances such as illness.

Speaking to the joint committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade, which is conducting an inquiry into Australia’s international education sector, representatives from consultancy The Lygon Group said agents have been helping students to swap providers by connecting them with counsellors and GPs who can provide the documentation needed to change institutions early. 

“Some of them are having that conversation with agents prior to coming here,” said Varsha Devi Balakrishnan, head of student insights and strategy at The Lygon Group.

She added that more students are considering switching to cheaper providers as the amount of hours they are allowed to work is set to be restricted once more from July. 

Deborah O’Neill, senator and member of the committee, described what she had heard as “a scheme that’s been cooked up, facilitated by some of these unethical providers of education”.

Phil Honeywood, CEO of the International Education Association of Australia, spoke on the same day about a trend of offshore agents recruiting students to Australia, only for a family member of the agent based in Australia to “poach the same student off of the university or quality provider and have them placed for additional commission into another provider”.

“Some of them are having that conversation with agents prior to coming here”

Nishi Borram, president of the Association of Australian Education Representatives in India, said the organisation has seen a “huge increase” in the number of new students lured into changing providers by promises of “fee discounts, cash backs, job promises, migration pathways and other freebies” from onshore agents and private institutions. 

“These are genuine students who have come to Australia to study a world-class degree at a university,” he told The PIE News. “They have invested their time and money, plus they are young and impressionable and many fall into this trap.” 

Borram said the issue was a “serious concern” for offshore agents but that members of AAERI “cannot be held responsible for student movement as the students are not in the agent’s control once onshore”.

Ravi Lochan Singh, director of Global Reach, told The PIE there is “no incentive” for the vast majority of offshore agents to facilitate student movement. 

“My observation is that it is the onshore migration agents doubling as education agents for those dodgy private providers that poach on the students recruited by universities from offshore markets,” he said. 

Lochan Singh added that believed claims about agents engaging GPs were “a bit of an exaggeration”. 

“While students seeking medical certificates may be accurate, I wouldn’t go as far as saying that the GPs are engaged by the education agents,” he said. 

“The fact that you can sign up to two courses at the same time is a bad idea”

Representatives from the international education sector told the inquiry that the government should crack down on concurrent enrolments, through which students can sign up to two courses, effectively allowing them to transfer without requiring a release. 

“The fact that you can sign up to two courses at the same time is a bad idea, it just encourages bad behaviour,” Catriona Jackson, CEO of Universities Australia, said at the hearing. 

Representatives from The Department of Education told senators they are aware of this issue and are “having a very serious look” at it. 

AAERI and Lochan Singh, among others, also recommended linking student visas to a specific institution so a student would have to reapply if they move education provider.

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A 16-year-old Mongolian student has won a coveted public speaking prize, beating contestants from over 30 countries and regions across the globe.

The English Speaking Union’s International Public Speaking Competition’s grand final took place on May 12 following 12 heats. The event saw six finalists compete for the overall title.

Egsheglen Javkhlan from Mongolia, one of the youngest competitors, took the top prize.

“I’ve learned so much,” Egsheglen said after she won the top gong.

“I feel like if the whole world could learn about as many cultures as we have this week, we could get rid of so much of the tension between countries. I travelled to London, but I feel like I’ve travelled to 30 different countries,” she continued.

Each competitor in the final was asked to tackle the concept: “relations between nations are too important to be left to governments alone”.

The contest, which began in 1989, was held at the Royal Institution in London, with hundreds also watching on a livestream.

The other finalists were Mohammed Suhail An-Naas Hussain Thawkalkan from Mauritius; Maria Trinidad Guzmán Schmidt from Chile; Valeria Fonseca from Mexico; Shaakya Nathavitharana from Sri Lanka and Beatrice Maria Paun from Romania, who won the runner-up prize.

Judge and director of TedXLondon Maryam Pashar said of Javkhlan that learning such skills at “this age puts you in such a good position for the rest of your life”.

“If the whole world could learn about many cultures, we could get rid of so much of the tension”

“To have confidence in how to construct an argument, how to tell stories, how to interact with an audience, and how to feel grounded in your delivery, is always going to be an asset going forward.

“This competition allows participants to realise that there are people from halfway around the world who they may have more in common with than someone who’s in the same class as them at home – you start to see all the richness of difference and diversity, and how valuable that is,” Pashar explained.

The ESU provides grants to help widen participation in the competition as part of its mission. Both the countries from which the winner and runner-up hailed received a grant this year.

Mongolia’s delegation used the grant for rural community engagement while Romania used its grant for teachers’ continual professional development.

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