Recently, University leaders met with your Students’ Union Executive Officers to talk about the visa check in process. Clearly, there are some problems we need to tackle. I wanted to write to you directly to explain how we’re dealing with these issues, why we have check-ins in the first place, and what we’ve done to push the government to improve the student visa system.
Our efforts for change
We think the growing number of international students choosing Manchester and the UK to study should be celebrated as a national success story – but we know you face additional barriers. The student visa system can be expensive, complicated, and bureaucratic. We’ve been working for years to persuade the government to make it better.
In 2019, we joined forces with other universities to present five principles to improve the student visa system to the UK Government. One suggestion was to reconsider how attendance is checked, because we shared your concern about universities being asked to enforce different attendance rules for students with visas. Unfortunately, not all our ideas were accepted.
Current visa requirements
While we keep pushing for changes, we have to follow the current UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) rules. As a visa sponsor, we must prove that students on visas are actively participating in their studies. We used to do this digitally, through ‘My Attendance’ in My Manchester, but this platform is no longer available after the cyber incident earlier this year.
So, the current international student check-in process for the 2023/24 academic year was created as a temporary solution. We acknowledge that the system that is in place has had an impact on your student experience, but this isn’t something we are simply choosing to do: if we don’t check attendance, we would be in breach of UKVI guidelines. This would risk our ability to act as a visa sponsor and could ultimately mean we were no longer able to welcome students from overseas, which is not something we are willing to consider.
Making improvements
Your Students’ Union Executive Officer Team have shared with us your feedback and experiences of the international check-in process. We are making the following changes as a direct result:
- you can now go to any check-in location, not just your own School location.
- the Engineering Building A check-in has moved to a desk on the ground floor, next to the East Entrance.
- you don’t have to check-in during the Christmas break and the the exam period (but you should continue when teaching resumes on Monday 29 January 2024).
We are very grateful for the feedback. We will continue to listen and make changes where we can.
From September 2024 we will have a new engagement analytics system where all taught students, not just those on visas, will register their attendance digitally. This will help us support every student’s academic engagement and wellbeing. The new system will also fulfil our requirement to register attendance of students on visas and remove the need for a separate visa check-in system.
Open meeting for more discussion
We had to act quickly after the cyber incident to develop the check-in system. That didn’t give us much time to talk to you about the changes. We hope this email goes some way in explaining how we’ve arrived here. We will also arrange an open meeting in the new year to discuss the visa check-in process and answer any questions you may have.
Dr. Simon Merrywest , Director for the Student Experience