#DynamicUK - Vivienne Stern

Thank you very much indeed. It's an absolute pleasure to be taking part in today's discussion. And I should perhaps just start by saying a little bit about who I am and what I do. I'm the Director of Universities UK International. It's my job to work on behalf of UK universities to help them foster and maintain international connections, including with Cyprus. Traditionally, Cyprus has had a strong link with the UK in the field of education.

Well, it is a very important relationship and there are literally thousands and thousands of individuals who, because they've been educated in the UK and then returned to form part of the professional and business community, the political community in Cyprus, maintain this really strong people-to-people network. And here in London where I live, there's also a very strong Cypriot community. My next-door neighbor as it happens is Cypriot and I'm always very grateful for that because it means I get fantastic lunch every now and again. So we have quite a strong connection. We've always been a destination, the first choice destination for Cypriot students. And in the last year for which we've got figures, there were nearly 9,000 Cypriot students studying in the UK. But more recently what we've seen is a development of provision in Cyprus where predominantly UK universities are working in partnership with Cypriot institutions. And in fact, in the whole world, Cyprus occupies the 10th place worldwide as a host of those programs. So whilst China may be our number one, Cyprus still is a very, very important host country for UK provision. I think that's very important. It means that UK academics and Cypriot academics are working together, they're designing courses together, they're working together to make sure that Cypriot students have access to the best of both worlds. And I think it's really important that we try to foster and grow that. And on the research side, UK universities are really collaborative. All the research that they do, they look to work with partners around the world. And we've been very fortunate, particularly during our membership of the European Union, to have opportunities to work with Cyprus in research, and we want to preserve those.

Yes, I agree. And on our side, we as a university sector have been working very hard to persuade our government to prioritize the maintenance of our relationships in research and the student exchange which you mentioned. We'd like to see that happen through the UK's continued participation in the European research program Horizon Europe. We believe that's possible but it hasn't been secured yet. And we also want to stay in the Erasmus program. Frustratingly, here we are just a month ahead of the end of the transition period, after which the UK's relationship with Europe really does begin to change, and we haven't yet still got that confirmation. But we do have ideas about what we would do if we can't associate with Horizon Europe, and I'm still relatively optimistic that an agreement can be reached.

Well, things are going to change. We left the European Union in January, but actually most of this year our relationship with Europe has been more or less a status quo. Nothing really has changed. At the end of December, at 11 pm on the 31st of December, we move into a new world. Now that world is still being described by those people who are negotiating the UK-EU relationship, and I'm really hopeful that we get some clarity over elements of that relationship before we get to 11 pm in the UK on the 31st. But the key thing for Cypriot students to understand is that the status that they have as students in the UK will change from the first of January next year. If they want to come and study in the UK, they will need to apply for a visa. And also the fee status, which at this point is the same as for UK domicile students, will also change. So they'll be treated in the same way as other international students. Now, I think those two major changes have caused quite a lot of concern for Cypriot students. I'm really aware, for example, of Cypriot students who have to do national service, who have to postpone their entry into higher education as a result, and there have been lots of discussions about that. And what I'm going to say, I hope, will be a little bit reassuring. The first is that although Cypriot students will need to apply for a visa, the process which is being introduced is relatively straightforward. It's not particularly burdensome, and the very vast majority of people who apply for a visa secure one without any trouble. And also there is plenty of advice and support available to students who want to understand what that process is going to be like, both from the UK government but also from organizations like UKCISA, the UK Council for International Student Affairs, which has both an advice line for international students and also lots of really clear information on their website. And so students who want to understand what they need to do can go and read up on those sites, and of course universities themselves are very well equipped to support international students in making that decision. The other aspect is the fee regime, and I know that for students who have been used to paying the same as UK students, that feels like a big change. And my message there would be: go and look at the courses that you're interested in and compare several universities. Because although the fees can vary quite considerably from the fees that UK students pay, they're not in every case significantly more. So when I last looked at the spread of provision between universities, depending on the level of the course, the type of the course, whether it's lab-based or whether it's a course, for example, in medicine or dentistry or veterinary science, there is quite a wide variety of different fee levels. So go and look, and talk to the institutions that you're interested in also about whether there's any financial support available in the form of bursaries or scholarships, because universities will have some provision of that type.

So the mutual recognition of professional qualifications is an issue that will need to be negotiated after the end of the transition period. We have been hopeful that between the UK and the EU some umbrella scheme could be negotiated that allows for the continued automatic recognition that we've enjoyed as part of the European Union. I think that my expectation and my hope is that it will be relatively straightforward to agree mechanisms for students to achieve recognition of their qualifications between the UK and Cyprus, because it's important to both sides that graduates holding those qualifications have a path to recognition. So I'm not anticipating it being a major barrier, but it will take a bit of diplomatic work.

Well, the first point I would make is simply quality. I mean, we in the UK are proud to have a university sector that is internationally renowned for the quality both of its teaching and research. And I'll give you two sort of illustrations of that. I won't talk about international league tables, where yes, the UK is prominent in the sort of upper reaches of the league tables, but league tables only measure what league tables measure. I think it's much more important to look at things like the degree to which students who enroll in our universities complete their courses successfully and then go on to have successful careers, to get jobs, to achieve career progression. And our organization recently did a study of international graduates of UK universities between two and seven years post-graduation, which found extremely high levels of satisfaction in the sort of upper 80s and low 90s amongst graduates of UK universities when asked questions about the degree to which their UK qualification was important in helping them secure their job, the levels of satisfaction with their career opportunities that they've had, and although it's very difficult to compare earnings through those sorts of self-reported surveys, those students and a high proportion of those students also said that in their view they had an earnings advantage over students who had graduated from other universities. Now, we can't prove that actually, it's very difficult to demonstrate, but it shows that a very high proportion of graduates of our system think they got good value out of the experience that they had. On the research side, the UK is the third largest producer by volume of research in the world, but in every year since 2007 we've ranked first for quality as measured by field-weighted citation impact, which is a measure that we use to try and understand how much impact research outputs have, based on an understanding that in some disciplines things are more frequently cited than in others. And now again, those sort of broad measures don't necessarily tell you what the university you're interested in, the course you're interested in, will be like. But I think that one of the things that we've done during the COVID pandemic is try to do a better job of helping students see and feel what the experience of studying at a British university is like, especially during this kind of slightly disruptive period. And the campaign that we launched earlier this year, which is called We Are Together and is basically housed on Instagram and comprised of hundreds of videos shot by current international students describing their experience, is trying to help students understand what it would be like if you actually came to a UK university. And then the final thing I'd say is that there are some sources of data that allow us to compare the experiences of students who came to the UK with students who went elsewhere. And in 2017 we took part in a very significant international survey, which drew on the experiences of students who've chosen the UK compared to the US or Canada or Australia, New Zealand, Germany and a range of other countries, and we ranked amongst those nations first for satisfaction overall. And I think again, if you look on Universities UK International's website, you can also see that broken down into individual components like satisfaction with the teaching and learning experience, with the nature of the welcome, with the support provided by universities. I think it tells a very strong story that UK universities are very serious about not only providing a high quality of education but also making sure that they provide excellent pastoral care to students who come and study with us.

Well, I think that picture looks very strong. I mean, we were very fortunate because I think Cyprus moved very quickly to make sure that there was no immediate threat that the UK's departure from the European Union would place those sorts of partnerships which you've described in any doubt. So we're expecting those relationships to be able to continue. And in fact, in the last year we've seen 55% growth in the number of Cypriot students who are enrolled in those sorts of programs. So they're now 11,000 students registered on programmes that are taught in some kind of combination of either a UK university delivering on its own or in partnership with Cypriot institutions. It's a very sort of big success story in the relationship between the UK and Cyprus.

Yes. The UK has just today entered another period of lockdown. So like many countries, we're still struggling with the virus. But the government has prioritized the continuation of face-to-face learning, and our universities were never closed, although they did move, like many other universities across Europe, to a predominantly online mode of teaching in the first phase of the pandemic. However, now university campuses are operating. Not normally, obviously, they have lots of restrictions in place over the degree to which students can mix socially just at the moment, but they are providing some face-to-face contact. And then like everybody is doing, we're trying to find new mechanisms to ensure that the quality of teaching, the opportunities to interact with academic staff and with fellow students, even though you're doing it via a screen rather than face-to-face, that they are there. And it's something that has, I think, precipitated some really rapid innovation in the way that universities teach students, the way that they support them as human beings. I mean, one of the major preoccupations in the university sector is to make sure that young people in universities who are under some pressure psychologically are well looked after. So there's been a massive investment in support for student well-being and mental health, but also, especially important if you're coming to the UK and it's not your home country, efforts to make sure that there are still physical opportunities to meet fellow students, and there are lots of mechanisms to interact virtually to make sure that you've got an opportunity to make new friends, to integrate with the campus community, and that you're not isolated in those, particularly those crucial first few months at university.

It's been a huge catalyst for international collaboration. I mean, something quite extraordinary has happened in the last few months, particularly in collaboration in the search for a vaccine and also many disciplines related to the COVID response. I mean, the extent and pace of global collaboration in the hunt for those solutions has been extraordinary. And it's also been remarkable. I think when we first started talking about the impact of research, we thought, well, hang on a second, how can you continue to proceed in some areas of research where fieldwork is essential, where access to environments and facilities is essential? How on earth will that happen? And I think we've been astonished by the degree to which the research community has been resilient and has found other ways to do things. Now, I think there will be a cost. I think that there will be a period in which we have to kind of catch up on those things which genuinely required physical international travel, required colleagues to come together and work very closely in some physical proximity. However, you know, we've kept research facilities open in the UK where it's impossible to do without that kind of physical access, and universities have just prioritized what needs to happen. And like everybody else, I think we've discovered that there are some upsides to this digital interaction. What previously would have only really taken place when you flew to another country and sat with your colleagues and had discussions, I've heard people say that they're talking more to their international collaborators in these sorts of ways, via Teams or Zoom, than they were before. And so there will be some benefits as well as barriers. But my guess is that there is a residual pocket of work that hasn't been possible to pursue that we will spend some time trying to recover. My other real concern, and it's more of a policy concern than a concern for individuals, is that we will enter a period in which many countries are facing huge economic pressures, and research obviously isn't free. We need our governments to invest in research. And in fact, in the UK, the government recently committed to increasing investment in the research system to 22 billion over the course of the next five years, which is an extraordinary increase from the current level. And I hope that will be maintained, because the commitment to invest in research, I think, is really critical to the environment we can offer people who come and study as postgraduate students, who want to start research careers with us, early career researchers. And just on that last point, there will be a cost, and for those people who are at the beginning of their research careers, there are things that at an early stage in your career you need to do: build professional networks and get opportunities to present your work. And I think there may be a group of early career researchers who need some additional help.

Well, I hope not. Because although you're right, there's been a huge focus on the sort of medical response to COVID-19, I hope that what the last six months has demonstrated is that pandemics are also social phenomena and they absolutely demand an understanding of how people interact with medical emergencies of this type. I mean, human behavior, decision-making, economics. So I think it is our job as a community of people who think that social sciences have a critical role to play in advancing knowledge and understanding and addressing a crisis like COVID-19. We have to advocate for the social sciences, but I hope people have noticed that these are disciplines which are integral to the pandemic response.

Well, it's tempting to say I think it's too early to draw any long-term conclusions. I think when we look back in three years' time, we will think we're just at the beginning. We didn't know anything about how this would play out. I suppose two things I would say, and I don't mean to sound as though I don't understand the human cost of COVID-19, because the extraordinary human cost should never be forgotten. But look at what has become possible that we never thought would be possible. I remember talking to a vice-chancellor of a UK university in the very early days of the pandemic, when it was still predominantly an issue that we thought about in relation to China, and we were very concerned about whether Chinese students would be able to come to the UK, and that was really what we were worried about. And we were talking about the possibility that this would become a pandemic in the UK, and whether that university would be equipped to move online if we had to. And the vice-chancellor said to me that we've been working on this for five years, it's going to take us a long time to get to a point where we really have the systems and the processes in place, and the buy-in from academic staff and the understanding from students, to be able to teach really effectively in an online mode. One month later, that same university had gone fully online. And I'm sure it wasn't perfect, but what was possible, which we couldn't have imagined. And even professionally in my own sphere, and I hope other people will recognize this: things that I thought couldn't be done, it turns out they could be done. We have a regular international dialogue, which used to involve, you know, I was about to host a meeting, a global meeting. It would have cost us 30,000 pounds, 25 people would have flown in from all corners of the globe with all of the carbon implications of that, and we would have had a meeting that we simply thought couldn't take place online. After the pandemic struck, we simply did it. We just do it this way now. We meet every month. We've got a better relationship than we had before. It's absolutely effective. There are some additional benefits even to doing it virtually. And I think we should be optimistic that it's shown us that we can do things that we didn't really imagine were possible. And I think that's true at the scientific level too. I mean, if we do get one of the many candidate vaccines past the final stage of trials, and there are many vaccines I think that are just at that point of concluding Phase 3 trials, what an amazing achievement, and what a demonstration of the fact that it is essential, just essential, that as a scientific community we work together. So I'm an optimist, and I go back to the point that I make right at the beginning, that I don't think that means we can afford to ignore the misery and grief and terrible damage that the pandemic has done, which should never be forgotten. But there is something positive too which we should hold on to.

I think the one thing that we haven't talked about that I'd like to just go back to, you mentioned right at the beginning student exchange. And I think it's important, in connection with your last comment, that I also think it's important that students have an opportunity to experience life in other countries. For the UK, this is something that we haven't been very good at. We haven't been very successful in persuading UK students to spend time abroad. We're quite determined to change that, and we've in fact had a campaign for the last three years to try to double UK outbound mobility. And we are trying to stay in the Horizon scheme, and that would of course leave open continued opportunities for Cypriot students to come on Erasmus exchanges to the UK. But for those people who are worried about whether Erasmus will continue to be possible, and we may not know the answer to that question for several months, I think I just want to reassure you that we're completely determined to work, as far as it's possible, with our government to make sure that even if we're not in Erasmus, there is some mechanism. And although outside the EU we aren't automatically included within the Erasmus family, even if we don't associate, we could still be part of exchanges under the international element of Erasmus. So I'm hoping that one way or another, those opportunities for short-term exchanges are still available.

Thank you very much indeed. It's entirely my pleasure.