This naturally leads to another important aspect of the student experience: well-being and pastoral care. When we talk about student well-being in higher education, the conversation often focuses on mental health and access to counselling or other specialist services. These are undoubtedly important, but well-being is much broader. It encompasses a student’s sense of belonging, safety, confidence and connection, as well as the practical, academic, financial, cultural and personal circumstances that can affect their ability to study and thrive.

For TNE students, these considerations can become even more complex. This is something I have seen repeatedly through my own work with TNE programmes and through conversations with students, academics and professional services colleagues across different international contexts. The specific challenges vary considerably, but there are some recurring themes: uncertainty about where to turn for help, differences in expectations around support, cultural barriers to asking for assistance and, sometimes, simply not knowing who is responsible for what.

Well-being starts before the student enters the classroom

For students studying for a foreign qualification outside their home country, the challenges may begin long before they arrive at their institution. Immigration and visa requirements, healthcare arrangements, accommodation, financial pressures, employment restrictions and understanding local legal and administrative systems can all create uncertainty. For students and their families, navigating these unfamiliar systems can be stressful, particularly when they do not know where to find reliable information or who is responsible for helping them.

This is an important distinction in TNE. A student studying for an international qualification in their home country may have many of these practical support networks around them already. A student studying in a third country may have far fewer. For example, a student from one country studying for a qualification awarded by a university in another country, while physically studying in a third, may need to navigate three different national contexts. The academic relationship may be relatively straightforward, but the student’s lived experience can be considerably more complex.

In these circumstances, pastoral support cannot simply be an online counselling service or a contact number buried somewhere within a student portal. Students need clear information, accessible points of contact and confidence that someone understands the context in which they are living and studying.

The well-being challenge is not always where we expect it

Some of the most interesting conversations I have had with TNE students have been about difficulties that institutions may not immediately recognise as well-being issues. A student can have excellent academic results and still feel isolated. They may be living away from their family for the first time, struggling to establish friendships, adjusting to a new culture or feeling uncertain about whether they really belong within an international university community.

Language can add another layer. As I discussed in my previous article, language challenges are not necessarily about formal proficiency. A student may arrive with an excellent IELTS score and still struggle to understand local pronunciation, accents, colloquialisms, professional jargon or cultural references. The same can be true in reverse. Students studying in their own language may find themselves working with international academics or professional services colleagues whose communication style is unfamiliar.

These experiences can be frustrating and, over time, can contribute to anxiety, disengagement or a feeling of being an outsider. This is why well-being in TNE needs to be considered in the context of the whole student experience rather than as a separate service.

Cultural context matters

Well-being is not understood or experienced in exactly the same way everywhere. Attitudes towards mental health, counselling, disability, family involvement and seeking professional help can vary considerably between cultures. A student may recognise that they are struggling but feel uncomfortable disclosing this to an institution or seeking formal support.

There may also be different expectations around the role of academic staff. In some educational cultures, students may be accustomed to discussing personal or academic difficulties directly with teachers. In others, approaching an academic to ask for help may feel inappropriate or intimidating. The existence of a support service therefore does not necessarily mean that students will use it. Institutions need to consider how support is communicated, who delivers it, how approachable it feels and whether students trust the people providing it.

Should TNE students receive more support?

This is an interesting question, and one I think institutions should be willing to ask. I would argue that, in some TNE contexts, students may need more proactive support than students studying on the home campus, rather than simply the same level of support delivered differently.

That view comes partly from conversations I have had with students studying TNE in different parts of the world. What has struck me repeatedly is how much students can be expected to navigate independently when they are physically distant from the awarding institution. What may appear to an institution to be a relatively straightforward online support offer can feel very different from the student’s perspective.

A student on the home campus can often draw on a wide ecosystem of support almost without thinking about it. They may know where the library is, how to contact their academic adviser, where to access health services, who to speak to about accommodation or how to find student societies. A TNE student may not have the same ecosystem around them. Providing an equivalent email address or online portal does not necessarily create an equivalent support experience. In some circumstances, therefore, equity may require additional or more proactive intervention, particularly during transition points or when students show early signs of disengagement.

Who is responsible for pastoral care?

This becomes particularly important in partnership models. The local partner may know students much better and be best placed to identify changes in behaviour, attendance or engagement. The awarding institution may have specialist well-being expertise, established policies and formal escalation procedures. Neither institution should simply assume that the other is responsible.

In my experience, the strongest partnerships tend to establish clear responsibilities and referral pathways while maintaining a shared understanding that student well-being is a collective responsibility. This does not mean that every partner needs to replicate the full well-being infrastructure of the home campus. It means designing an appropriate support ecosystem for the local context and ensuring that students understand how it works.

Supporting the people who support students

There is also a staff dimension to this conversation. Academic and professional services staff are often the first people to notice that a student is struggling. They may see changes in attendance, engagement, academic performance or behaviour before a student ever contacts a formal well-being service.

Staff therefore need more than good intentions. They need appropriate training and development to recognise potential concerns, understand the boundaries of their role and know where and how to refer students for additional support. This is particularly important in TNE, where the person closest to a student may not be the person with access to specialist support.

I have also seen how much difference it can make when local staff and colleagues at the awarding institution have established relationships and understand each other’s roles. When those relationships exist, concerns can be identified and escalated much more quickly. When they do not, students can sometimes find themselves caught between institutions, with each assuming that the other is dealing with the issue.

Staff also need support themselves. International partnership work can involve significant demands, including working across cultures and time zones, managing complex relationships, dealing with difficult student situations and navigating different institutional expectations. Staff well-being matters not only because institutions have responsibilities towards their employees, but because staff who feel supported are better placed to support students. Professional development, peer support, clear escalation processes and regular communication between partner teams can therefore contribute to both staff and student well-being.

Families matter too

Conversations with students have also reminded me that the family dimension should not be overlooked. In many TNE markets, parents and families play a much more significant role in educational decision-making than institutions in some Western countries might expect. For students studying overseas, families may be particularly concerned about safety, accommodation, immigration status, academic progress and employability.

Clear and appropriate communication with families can therefore help build confidence in the institution and the partnership. At the same time, institutions need to balance family engagement with student autonomy, privacy and confidentiality. The role of families should be recognised without undermining the student’s independence.

Beyond the support service

Ultimately, pastoral care is not simply a service that students access when something goes wrong. It is an ecosystem that can involve the lecturer who notices that a student has suddenly withdrawn from class, the administrator who follows up after repeated unexplained absences, the local tutor who knows how to refer a student to specialist support, or a partner institution that understands when a change in behaviour represents a genuine concern rather than simply poor academic engagement.

These everyday interactions can be just as important as formal well-being services. Technology can certainly help. Digital check-ins, online counselling, well-being platforms and early-warning systems can make support more accessible and help institutions identify potential concerns. But technology should complement rather than replace human relationships.

Building environments where students can thrive

As TNE continues to expand globally, institutions will need to think increasingly carefully about what well-being and pastoral care mean across different contexts. The answer will not be identical everywhere. Effective support needs to reflect local cultures, regulatory environments, available services and student expectations while still maintaining clear standards and responsibilities across the partnership.

After speaking with students studying TNE across different countries and partnership models, I increasingly think the most important measure of pastoral support is not how impressive the formal support structure looks on paper, but what happens when a student actually needs help. Does the student know who to contact? Do they feel comfortable asking for help? Does the person they approach know what to do next? And, perhaps most importantly, does the partnership have enough understanding of its students to notice when something is not quite right?

Successful TNE is not only about enabling students to earn an internationally recognised qualification. It is about creating an environment in which they can feel safe, connected, supported and able to thrive while doing so.

In my next article, I will explore another important dimension of the TNE student experience: administrative clarity, and why seemingly small issues around information, processes and responsibility can have a surprisingly significant impact on student confidence and satisfaction.

– Dr Suzanna Tomassi is Executive Director of External Affairs at NCUK, a leading UK pathway provider, and Founder of CoachEd Global, a consultancy specialising in executive coaching and global education advisory.

She is a highly experienced strategic leader and board member with over 20 years’ expertise across UK Government and higher education. Her work focuses on internationalisation, governance, risk oversight, commercial growth, and organisational transformation. Suzanna’s career spans the UK Department for Business and Trade and four major UK universities, where she has shaped national policy, strengthened regulatory and quality frameworks, and led large-scale international expansion initiatives.

An expert in transnational education and global operations, Suzanna has driven multi-country growth strategies, co-authored accreditation guidelines, and facilitated major international investments in UK higher education.

For additional background, please see:

• “Language and communication in TNE: Building bridges across academic and cultural boundaries“
• “Academic support and learning resources in TNE: Delivering student success across borders”
• “Beyond borders: Why student support matters more than ever in transnational education”

The post Well-being and pastoral care in TNE: Supporting students to thrive across borders appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

Students are choosing to go elsewhere. Post-graduation work permit eligibility has been narrowed, rewritten, partly suspended and then frozen, all within two years. Whatever you make of any individual change, a student committing four years and a family’s savings is not going to put everything on the line for a country that is so unpredictable. Instability is its own deterrent, and it isn’t something a recruitment team can out-work.

That is an uncomfortable truth for many institutional leaders. The numbers are down, the pressure is real and immediate, and the largest single cause sits outside the institution entirely. Canadian institutions have gotten used to operating in the growth-era during which a typical response was to push harder at the top of the funnel: more leads, more applications, more fairs. That’s why most teams are exhausted and still short.

What changed underneath the funnel

During the good old days, when you had several applications for every seat, losing one at a departmental handoff was just noise. You had surplus, and surplus forgives a great deal. Now the surplus is gone. Every new inquiry has to survive the entire lifecycle, because there is nothing queued behind it. That same handoff loss that cost you nothing before costs you the seat today.

You already know applications and inquiries are down; you didn’t need a dashboard for that. A question worth asking now is what happens to the interest you are still generating.

The answer lies mostly at the handoffs between units. Each unit tends to report its own stage as healthy, and it’s not wrong because inside its own boundary it usually is. Recruitment followed up on the inquiries it received. Admissions assessed every application and got the offers out on time. The registrar’s office enrolled every student who showed up. All three can still be true in your worst enrolment year. Each unit owns a stage in the lifecycle, but nobody owns the space between the stages.

Earlier this year, Capilano University commissioned a strategic enrolment management (SEM) audit. Mike Henniger covered international recruitment, Jody Gordon student success and retention, and I marketing, communications and conversion. Through the audit we built a checklist of more than 150 best practices mapped across 16 stages of the student lifecycle, from first inquiry to alumni giving. While the audit findings are confidential, the pattern the audit exposed is not confined to one institution.

The six gaps to check in your own lifecycle

Who chases the student who goes quiet? Recruitment owns the relationship until an application is submitted and then admissions takes over. Admissions chases documents and recruitment chases people, and a student who suddenly goes quiet because they’re still considering a competitor needs more nurturing from recruitment. Instead, they get a reminder about uploading their transcript.

What happens to an applicant while they wait? Most institutions track decision turnaround and have a service standard for it. Almost none has a clear owner for the weeks on either side of that decision. Many institutions cannot see the stage at all: with no mechanism for a student to accept or decline an offer, yield stays invisible until registration, which is far too late to act. Meanwhile, the things that would win the decision – course planning sessions, demo classes, a conversation with a faculty member – run in the wrong weeks or not at all. Your agents feel this stage hardest. They are holding a student’s confidence while your institution is silent, and they have no way to tell you where the delay is.

Who owns the stretch from deposit to first day? This is a stage that tends to get crowded. Recruitment and marketing are often still in touch, student services has begun onboarding, the registrar is sending registration details and finance is chasing tuition fees. Every team is watching closely, but nobody owns the sequence. A student who has received dozens of messages from six departments since the start of the process learns to stop reading your emails unless you take control over frequency, relevance and repetitiveness of your content. All that seems harmless until the one email that requires action or contains important information arrives looking like the rest of them. Yet on each team’s report, the messaging was fine.

Who owns the message when a student withdraws? Withdrawal and refund communications sit between the registrar, finance and marketing, but they are rarely governed by any of the three. Students who have a bad experience with a withdrawal and refund write about it publicly, and those complaints are now being repeated back to your prospective students by the AI tools they use to research you. That’s how an administrative problem becomes a recruitment problem.

Who owns the students who already left? I am not talking about your alumni. The students who paused or withdrew without finishing are a mixed group. Some ran out of money, some couldn’t get their visa extension, some left unhappy, some had a family situation, some struggled academically. A few institutions run re-engagement campaigns for this audience. In most, nobody owns them, and the reason is structural: the registrar holds the records, recruitment is measured on new inquiries, and no team’s targets include a returning student. Somewhere in that group is the cheapest enrolment available to you, and nobody has been asked to go and find it.

What is the true cost of your enrolled student? Marketing knows what it spent, by channel, by campaign, by agent. Institutional research knows who enrolled. Almost nobody can tell you what an enrolled student cost you through each channel. Most institutions capture a lead source in the CRM, which answers where someone came from, not how much it took to get them. So when finance comes to cut recruitment and marketing spend in a year like this one, nobody knows which agents, fairs and campaigns to keep, and the decision gets made on seniority and instinct.

Plenty of institutions already track two or three of these gaps. Very few track all six, and almost nobody has one person responsible for all of them. The ones that try usually stop at the first obstacle, which is definitions. Most institutions don’t have a shared answer to what good looks like at any stage. So you can measure one of these gaps, get a number, and still not know whether it is a problem. Eighteen days between submission and decision is either perfectly fine or a disaster, depending on a target nobody has set.

There is also a reporting-line reason these gaps stay hidden. Recruitment, admissions, the registrar’s office and student services usually report to different executives. By the time their numbers and reports reach an executive table, they have been summarised into stage totals, measured inside one unit’s boundary. That is the one format that cannot show a gap.

Three tests you can run this week

Trace twenty-five student files by hand. Pull twenty-five applications from last recruitment cycle at random and write down the dates at every stage: inquiry, application, decision, offer, deposit, registration. You are looking for the dates with the biggest gap between them. That gap tells you which of the six is yours.

Ask each unit head for their one number. Ask yourself: what is the one metric you’re accountable for? Then lay the answers along your institution’s lifecycle. The stages nobody names tend to be the stages that leak. Whatever nobody claims is where you start.

Mystery-shop your own inquiry form, then go quiet. Submit it from a top source market with a question a real student would ask, reply once, and then go dark. Watch who follows up, whether anyone follows up twice. Note which department the second message comes from. If it never comes, or it comes from a different team than the first, you have your answer.

If it’s everyone’s job, it’s nobody’s job

The fix is not a fancy dashboard or new funding. Name one person accountable for each of the six gaps. Publish them in a single report on a set cadence. Review them with every unit in the room, so no unit sees its number in isolation. Without assigned owners, these gaps revert to nobody’s job by the next intake.

This may look different for institutions running one centralised enrolment division. My sense is the gaps would move rather than disappear.

Capilano’s President, Jason Dewling, framed the question this way: “In difficult times, we should be asking ourselves, ‘are we doing everything we know to do?’”

There is very little new demand to find this year. The institutions that come through this in decent shape will be the ones that stopped losing the students who were already coming.

– Midya U runs , where she works with post-secondary institutions on marketing, branding, enrolment and AI strategy. She spent fifteen years inside Canadian higher ed marketing and recruitment, public and private – building award-winning teams, running eight-figure annual budgets through every regulatory curveball.

The post Recruiting under Canada’s international student cap: Six strategic enrolment gaps that matter appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

Today the session starts somewhere else. The student still arrives with a list. But the first question now usually comes from the parent, and it is rarely about a university at all. Will this degree pay back the years and the money? Will it still be relevant when my child graduates? Will artificial intelligence make it obsolete before the loan is repaid?

I have heard versions of these three questions in counselling rooms in Chandigarh, Manila, Lagos, and Bogota. They are asked quietly, sometimes almost apologetically, but they are serious questions, and they shape family decisions worth billions of dollars every year. They have also quietly changed what good student advising looks like.

Why the counselling room matters

It is easy to underestimate how much of international education still runs through a single conversation between a family and an adviser. According to the American International Recruitment Council, 44% of international students rely on recruitment agents to help them decide what and where to study. And the reason they are in that room has changed too. Career development is now the number one motivator for studying abroad, cited by 67% of students in IDP’s Emerging Futures research. Students are not just buying an experience any more. They are buying a working future.

That places advisers at a point of real leverage. The counselling conversation is where family hopes meet market reality, often for the first time. When expectations shift, advisers feel it before institutions do, and long before policy makers do. Which is why what we are hearing in those rooms now deserves attention.

From prestige to proof

When we ran the fieldwork for the this year, covering 4,812 agents, students, institution leaders and employers across 25 countries, one pattern came through more strongly than any other: families have stopped asking for prestige and started asking for proof.

In South Asia, 89% of recruitment agents told us their top request from institutions is now skill-mapped programme documentation, not brochures. In North America, agents named post-study visa clarity and programme-level outcome data as the top two concerns students bring to them, at 78% and 71%. Across regions, parents increasingly ask employment questions before they ask admission questions.

The shift makes sense once you see the counselling room from the family’s side. A ranking describes an institution. But a family is not buying an institution. They are buying one specific degree, and they want to know what happens to the people who finish it. Institution-level averages do not answer that. Programme-level outcomes do, and families have worked this out faster than much of the sector has.

The safety net that isn’t there

For a long time, advising had a comfortable answer to the anxiety behind these questions: choose a good university, and if the job market changes, you can always reskill later. Our research suggests that answer no longer holds.

Across OECD countries, only 8% of adults take part in formal, accredited learning in a given year, and the open online courses that were supposed to close the gap complete at a median rate of 12.6%. Meanwhile, 53% of the technical skills a graduate learns in year one are judged obsolete within three years. Skills are going out of date roughly six times faster than the system replaces them. Reskilling after work exists, but as a safety net for an entire generation, it is thin. Families who press on curriculum quality before enrolment, rather than trusting the system to patch things later, are being rational.

What is more encouraging is what employers told us they actually hire on. In our survey, 73% of employers said they hire recent international graduates primarily for durable skills, things like communication, judgment, ethical behaviour, and the ability to work across cultures, rather than for a specific technical stack. Technical tools change. These capabilities compound. For an adviser, that is a genuinely useful message to carry into a conversation with an anxious parent: the degree that protects your child is not the one with the most fashionable specialisation, it is the one that builds the skills that survive the tools.

Will AI make it obsolete?

We put that exact fear under a microscope in this year’s Barometer. Comparing internationally-mobile graduates against domestically-educated peers in the same fields, employers placed 71% of the internationally-mobile group in AI-augmented roles, work where AI expands what one person can do rather than replacing them, against 54% for domestic graduates. Only 6% of the internationally-mobile group sat in roles at material AI-displacement risk. For domestic graduates in the same fields, that figure was 14%, over twice as high. PwC’s analysis of nearly a billion job postings found the same pattern at market scale: workers with AI skills now command a 56% wage premium globally, more than double what it was a year earlier.

None of this makes the advantage automatic. It is built on the durable skills, the cross-cultural fluency and the sequenced curriculum design that produced it in the first place. But it does mean an adviser can answer a parent’s hardest question with a number instead of a reassurance.

What good advising looks like now

None of this requires advisers to become labour economists. In our work with counselling teams, the practices that are working are simple ones.

The first is to ask institutions for programme-level employment data, in writing, rather than settling for institution-level claims. Institutions that have this data increasingly share it, and the act of asking signals what families now expect.

The second is to talk to parents about durable skills directly. Parents understand instinctively that communication, adaptability and integrity matter at work. Naming them as the core of a degree’s value, with evidence, answers the AI question far better than reassurance does.

The third is to screen recommended programmes for work-integrated learning and international cohorts. Internships, placements and genuinely mixed classrooms are where durable skills form, and they show up later in employment outcomes. Arizona State University’s National Work-Integrated Learning Accelerator now generates 1.8 million experiential-learning hours per student cohort. In the Netherlands, international graduates who complete structured cross-cultural programmes actually out-earn their domestic peers, 48% of them clear €55,000 a year against 44% of domestic graduates in the same bracket. Programmes built this way are not hard to find once an adviser starts asking for them by name.

The fourth is simply to keep the post-study visa picture current for every destination, because in several markets it has become the first question, not the last.

Advising as trust infrastructure

There is one more finding from our study worth sitting with. Among UK-bound students we surveyed, 64% said they would still choose the UK despite recent visa changes, provided programme-level employment data was transparent. Read that carefully: even in a market facing policy headwinds, transparency holds demand. Families are not asking for perfect conditions. They are asking to see the evidence and decide for themselves.

That, to me, is the real story of how counselling is changing. The adviser’s role is shifting from gatekeeper of options to interpreter of evidence. It is less glamorous than selling dreams, and considerably more valuable. Students get decisions they can defend at the kitchen table. Institutions that publish honest outcomes get rewarded for it. And the sector gets something it badly needs, which is trust built one family conversation at a time.

The questions parents ask in counselling rooms are harder than they were five years ago. That is not a problem to be managed. It is the clearest sign we have that families are taking the decision seriously, and the sector should answer them in kind.

– Dr Priya Ranganathan is research director at MSM Unify, where she leads the company’s global research programme, including the annual MSM Unify Global Skills Barometer, a study of agents, students, institution leaders and employers across 25 countries. MSM Unify is a global education platform supporting institutions, students, and channel partners across international education markets. MSM Unify helps institutions strengthen student recruitment, enrolment management, and education delivery through technology, services, and global market expertise.

For additional background, please see:

• Readers who want to explore contemporary counselling issues more closely should consider , newly released by 91ɬ��Academy in partnership with Successful Graduate
• “Global agent survey reveals international students’ top concerns are visa uncertainty and affordability“
• “What students want: The top decision factors for study abroad“

The post The questions families are actually asking: Inside the student advising conversation in 2026 appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

When we talk about language in international education, the conversation often focuses on English language proficiency. This is understandable given the global reach of English-medium education and the role that English plays in many international partnerships. However, language and communication in TNE are much broader and more complex than this.

To begin with, language is not simply about the words we use. Communication is the thread that connects every part of a successful TNE partnership, from the student experience and academic delivery to partnership management, staff collaboration and external engagement, and creates shared understanding across all stakeholders. This distinction matters because TNE partnerships bring together diverse communities of students, their families, employers, academics, professional services staff, institutional leaders and other external participants. Each group may bring different linguistic backgrounds, educational experiences, cultural assumptions and communication styles. Therefore, the success of a partnership depends not only on what is communicated, but also on whether that message is understood in the way it was intended across all groups of stakeholders.

Beyond language proficiency

One of the challenges in discussing language support is that it is often framed primarily around student ability. Institutions may focus on entry requirements, language assessments, academic writing support, or additional learning resources. These are all important. However, language proficiency alone does not automatically translate into academic confidence.

A student may meet all formal language requirements and still find themselves uncertain about how to participate in seminars, interpret feedback, structure an argument or understand what is expected when asked to “critically evaluate” a topic. These challenges are not necessarily about a lack of ability. They are often about navigating unfamiliar academic cultures.

Higher education systems vary significantly in how they approach teaching and learning. Expectations around independent study, questioning ideas, engaging in debate, working collaboratively, or expressing disagreement may differ considerably between countries and institutions. The challenge is not that one approach is better than another. Rather, it is about ensuring students understand the expectations of the environment in which they are studying. In this sense, effective communication goes beyond helping students understand academic content. Instead, it is about helping them understand how to succeed within a particular academic context.

The hidden curriculum of higher education

Many students entering TNE programmes are also navigating what is sometimes described as the “hidden curriculum” of higher education – the unwritten expectations, behaviours and conventions that experienced students and staff may take for granted. This may include:

• What does a lecturer expect when they ask students to contribute to a discussion?
• How should students approach feedback from academic staff?
• When is it appropriate to challenge an argument or ask for clarification?
• What does academic independence look like in practice?

For students who are familiar with the academic culture of their institution or the country where they study, these expectations may feel natural. For others, they can represent a significant challenge. This is particularly relevant in TNE because students may be studying an internationally recognised qualification while remaining within their local cultural and educational context or they might be pursuing foreign qualifications outside of their home country and the country of the degree provider. As such, supporting students effectively requires recognising both parts of that experience. The goal should not be to replace students’ existing educational identities or experiences. Rather, it should be to help them develop the confidence and skills to navigate different academic environments.

Communication challenges within partnerships

While student communication is clearly important, some of the most complex communication challenges in TNE happen behind the scenes. TNE partnerships are, at their core, networks of people working together across geographical, institutional and cultural boundaries. This includes academic teams, professional services colleagues, quality assurance teams, administrators, senior leaders and external stakeholders.

In my own experience, some of the most challenging aspects of international partnership work have not necessarily been related to strategic alignment or programme design, but to the everyday communication required to make partnerships operate effectively. A phrase such as “student support”, “quality monitoring”, “course”, “module”, “term”, “credit” or even “engagement” may appear straightforward, but different colleagues may interpret these concepts in different ways. Expectations around timelines, decision-making processes, escalation routes, and responsibilities can vary considerably.

Many operational challenges within partnerships are, at their core, communication challenges. Successful partnerships therefore require more than formal agreements and governance structures. They require ongoing dialogue, opportunities to build relationships, and a willingness to understand how different teams operate.

Communication across languages and locations

It is also important to recognise that not all TNE is delivered in English. Across the world, there are successful international partnerships delivered in local languages, reflecting the needs of students, national contexts and institutional strategies. In these cases, language-related challenges may look very different.

For example, a local partner may deliver a programme in its national language, while colleagues at the awarding institution who are not part of the core delivery team, may not have sufficient language capability to fully engage with teaching materials, student feedback, or academic discussions. This can create challenges around communication, oversight, quality assurance and partnership engagement, possibly even feelings of exclusion or disengagement.

The solution is not necessarily for every colleague involved in a partnership to become fluent in every language used across the network. However, institutions do need to consider how they maintain effective communication and shared understanding when linguistic differences exist. This may require additional investment in translation processes, bilingual staff capability, local expertise, technology solutions, or simply greater awareness of where communication barriers may emerge.

The role of staff capability

Much of the conversation around TNE focuses on student preparedness, but staff capability is equally important. Academic and professional services colleagues working in international partnerships need opportunities to understand each other’s contexts, expectations and ways of working. This includes understanding differences in:

• academic cultures;
• administrative processes;
• communication styles;
• approaches to student support;
• expectations around decision-making and accountability.

Staff development therefore becomes an important part of effective communication. This is not simply about induction or familiarising colleagues with institutional policies. It is about creating opportunities for academic and professional services staff from both partner institutions to learn from one another, understand different educational cultures and develop the confidence to communicate across them. Joint training, staff exchanges, peer observation, collaborative curriculum development, and regular partnership meetings can all help create a shared understanding that ultimately benefits students.

The strongest partnerships I have encountered are those where staff relationships are actively developed (and often in person) rather than assumed. Regular communication between teams, opportunities for knowledge exchange, and genuine collaboration help build the trust required for partnerships to succeed over the long term.

Communication beyond the classroom

Effective communication in TNE extends well beyond the partnership itself. Students are rarely the only audience institutions need to engage. Parents, employers, professional bodies, government agencies and local communities all play an important role in shaping perceptions of international education.

Clear communication is particularly important when explaining the value of TNE qualifications. While awareness of international education continues to grow, there can still be misconceptions about how TNE programmes compare with degrees studied on the awarding institution’s home campus. Institutions therefore need to communicate consistently that students are working towards the same academic standards and learning outcomes, while also highlighting the additional benefits many TNE graduates develop, including intercultural competence, adaptability and the ability to operate across different cultural and professional environments.

Employers, too, increasingly value graduates who can work confidently across borders and cultures. Helping external stakeholders understand these strengths not only benefits graduates, but also reinforces the credibility and long-term reputation of TNE partnerships.

Technology can support communication, but not replace it

Technology has transformed the way international partnerships communicate and frankly, how we liaise with others across all industries. Virtual meetings, digital learning environments, collaboration platforms, and increasingly sophisticated AI tools have made it easier for teams and students to connect across borders. However, technology can support communication, but it cannot replace human understanding.

A translated document may communicate words, but it does not always communicate meaning. A virtual meeting may enable discussion, but it does not automatically build relationships. As TNE becomes increasingly digitally enabled, institutions will need to continue investing not only in platforms and systems, but also in the human connections that allow partnerships to thrive.

Building shared understanding

As TNE continues to expand globally and competition grows between nations and individual providers, language and communication become increasingly important. The future of international education will involve partnerships between institutions, countries, and communities with increasingly diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The most successful partnerships will not simply remove language barriers. They will actively create shared understanding between students, staff, institutional partners, employers, and wider communities.

Perhaps the most important question institutions can ask themselves is not simply whether information is being communicated. It is whether that information is being understood in the way it was intended. Because ultimately, effective communication in TNE is not about ensuring everyone speaks the same language. It is about ensuring everyone understands the same purpose. In the end, successful TNE partnerships are built not simply on shared programmes, but on shared understanding.

In my next article, I will explore another important dimension of the TNE student experience: wellbeing and pastoral support, and how institutions can create environments where students feel supported, connected and able to thrive across different international contexts.

– Dr Suzanna Tomassi is Executive Director of External Affairs at NCUK, a leading UK pathway provider, and Founder of CoachEd Global, a consultancy specialising in executive coaching and global education advisory.

She is a highly experienced strategic leader and board member with over 20 years’ expertise across UK Government and higher education. Her work focuses on internationalisation, governance, risk oversight, commercial growth, and organisational transformation. Suzanna’s career spans the UK Department for Business and Trade and four major UK universities, where she has shaped national policy, strengthened regulatory and quality frameworks, and led large-scale international expansion initiatives.

An expert in transnational education and global operations, Suzanna has driven multi-country growth strategies, co-authored accreditation guidelines, and facilitated major international investments in UK higher education.

For additional background, please see:

• “Academic support and learning resources in TNE: Delivering student success across borders”
• “Beyond borders: Why student support matters more than ever in transnational education”

The post Language and communication in TNE: Building bridges across academic and cultural boundaries appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

The scrutiny is coming from more than one direction. Admissions offices are tightening their own checks on the authenticity and consistency of English-language evidence, in response to well-documented fraud vulnerabilities and inconsistent evidence standards across the sector.

At the same time, UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) now runs an annual Basic Compliance Assessment (BCA) for every institution holding a student sponsor licence, scoring them on visa refusal rates, enrolment rates, and course completion rates. Falling short on any one of those metrics can strip an institution of the right to self-assess a student’s English ability altogether, forcing a shift to mandatory secure testing across the board. Further, a new Agent Quality Framework is being extended so institutions can no longer treat agent-sourced evidence as somebody else’s responsibility. In short: the English-language evidence an agent helps assemble now feeds directly into a compliance metric that determines whether an institution can keep recruiting internationally at all.

That’s the backdrop and it’s also the opportunity. Agents who understand this chain of evidence, and can speak to it confidently, become more valuable partners to the institutions they work with, and better advisers to the students who trust them.

Academic readiness is the cornerstone of student success

Academic readiness is the strongest predictor of first-year performance, progression, retention, and completion. When students arrive without sufficient English proficiency, the impact is immediate: difficulty engaging in seminars and group work, falling behind in reading-intensive modules, rising stress, and a higher likelihood of assessment failure or withdrawal.

Meeting a minimum entry requirement isn’t the same as being ready to perform at it. A student who scrapes the headline overall score with a weak reading or writing subscore is often the one who struggles most in postgraduate, research-intensive programmes, where extended reading and academic writing carry most of the assessment weight.

In practice, that means: looking with the student beyond the single overall band to the subscore breakdown; recommending a margin above the minimum particularly in speaking and writing wherever a programme is writing- or seminar-heavy; and encouraging an early retake where subscores are borderline, rather than waiting until an offer is at risk. Agents who steer students toward the cheapest or fastest route to a passing score to obtain a visa rather than genuine readiness, aren’t doing anyone any favours: those are the students most likely to need extra support, delay progression, or withdraw outcomes now visible to institutions through the BCA’s own completion-rate metric.

The growing scrutiny of MOI

Medium of Instruction (MOI) evidence is under sustained scrutiny, and institutions increasingly treat it as a case-by-case judgement rather than a standard alternative to testing. Practice varies widely: some institutions require MOI letters to be corroborated by transcripts, curriculum details, or interview; others have withdrawn MOI acceptance for certain markets or programmes altogether, following BCA findings that linked MOI-based admissions to weaker completion or higher visa refusal rates.

For agents, that means treating an MOI recommendation as a considered call each time, not a default and being able to talk a student through the reasoning.

Three questions are worth working through together: First, does the receiving institution’s current policy actually support MOI for this student’s country, subject, and level of study? Policies here shift often, so this is worth checking fresh for each application rather than assumed from a previous case. Second, was the student’s prior study substantively delivered and assessed in English not just described as such on paper in a way that plausibly matches the demands of postgraduate or research-intensive study in the UK? Third, is an MOI-based application more likely to trigger additional verification, delay an offer, or be queried at visa stage for this particular market?

Where any of these three is uncertain, recommending secure testing alongside or instead of MOI is the safer, more defensible choice for the student’s academic readiness, and for the agent’s credibility with the institutions they work with.

Secure testing as a strategic enabler

Secure English language testing is worth repositioning, in conversations with students, as more than an entry hurdle. It supports identity validation, demonstrates genuine academic readiness, reduces institutional exposure, and gives students greater confidence going into study. Viewing testing as an unnecessary cost is short-sighted: the real cost is poor preparation academic, financial, and emotional. Framing testing as an investment in a student’s own success, rather than a bureaucratic step, tends to land better with students and parents alike and it happens to be true.

BCA reviews are raising the bar

The Basic Compliance Assessment is an annual Home Office review of how well a sponsoring institution is managing its international student population against three metrics: visa refusal rates, enrolment rates, and course completion rates. Institutions rated amber or red face restrictions including, in some cases, losing the right to self-assess English-language ability, which pushes their entire cohort toward mandatory secure testing. As English-language evidence sits upstream of all three metrics a student who was never really ready for the course is more likely to be refused a visa, to under-enrol, or to withdraw, institutions are having to demonstrate, more rigorously than before, how that evidence was gathered, verified, and judged sufficient at the point of offer, both to their own compliance teams and to UKVI itself.

Agent-sourced evidence is now squarely inside that chain of justification. As regulatory attention on institutions increases, so does attention on the English-language guidance and evidence that agents provide upstream of the admissions decision. Weak guidance creates a vulnerability that traces all the way back to an agent’s file; strong guidance protects the student, the institution’s compliance record, and the agent’s own standing with institutional partners.

Defining practice that works for students and agents

A forward-looking standard is emerging, and it rewards informed, student-centred practice, which includes:

• Recommending the right test for the destination and programme, factoring in university acceptance, subject demands, security requirements, and timing
• Where subscores are borderline, especially speaking and writing for postgraduate, research-intensive courses, advising testing to a margin above the stated minimum, and supporting an early retake rather than a late one
• Treating MOI as a case-by-case judgement using the three questions above, not a standard substitute for testing
• Communicating secure testing to students as an investment in their own progression, not a hurdle to clear
• Keeping documentation authentic, consistent, and aligned with each institution’s current expectations, since these shift
• Engaging admissions teams early to confirm current requirements and reduce delays

These aren’t extra burdens layered on top of an agent’s advising role they’re the parts of that role now most visible to institutions, most consequential for students, and most likely to distinguish the agents that institutions want to keep working with.

The role of agents in a changing landscape

Agents are often a student’s first trusted adviser. Their guidance shapes not just admission outcomes but a student’s confidence, performance, and ultimately their success once they arrive. Getting the English-language piece right is one of the clearest, most immediate ways an agent can add value to that relationship and one of the clearest ways to build a track record that institutions notice.

How ELSAA supports the sector

ELSAA is the English Language Standard Advisory Authority [link to https://englishlsa.com]. Our mission is to strengthen standards, improve transparency, and support risk-aware decision-making across the English-language ecosystem. We work with agents and institutions to:

• Interpret emerging regulatory and compliance expectations
• Identify appropriate English-language pathways
• Reduce institutional and agent risk
• Improve student progression and retention
• Build trusted, future-ready recruitment practices

Agents who build this expertise put students at the centre of every decision and in doing so, strengthen their own standing with the institutions they work with. Strong English-language guidance isn’t an extra step; it’s the advantage.

The English Language Standard Advisory Authority (ELSAA) is an independent organisation dedicated to improving transparency, understanding, and informed decision-making in high-stakes English language testing. Through independent test reviews, comparative analysis, training, and advisory services, ELSAA supports universities, professional bodies, employers, and policymakers in evaluating and using English language assessments with confidence.

For additional background, please see:

• “Study highlights gaps between English standards set by test developers and those used by universities and professional bodies“
• “Narrowing bands of compliance: How the UK’s new RAG system will impact international student recruitment“

The post Why sharper English-language guidance is becoming an agent’s sharpest tool for student success appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

For students studying through TNE, academic support is often one of the most significant factors shaping their confidence, engagement, and ultimately their success. Yet it is also one of the most complex aspects of international partnership delivery.

I believe that the question is not whether students have access to support. Most partnerships can rightly point to virtual learning environments, online libraries, academic skills resources, and local teaching teams. The more important question is whether students studying thousands of miles away experience the same opportunity to succeed as their peers on the home campus. And that distinction matters.

Academic equivalence does not necessarily require identical experiences, but it should require equivalent opportunities to achieve learning outcomes. As TNE continues to diversify across franchise arrangements, validations, joint programmes, international branch campuses, articulation pathways, and increasingly flexible digital delivery models, ensuring that equivalence becomes both more challenging and more important.

Academic support is more than providing resources

It is tempting to think about academic support as a collection of services: access to journals, study skills workshops, writing centres or library inductions. But in reality, academic support is an ecosystem. Students need access not only to resources, but also to guidance on how to use them effectively. They need timely feedback, opportunities to ask questions, confidence in academic expectations, and clear pathways to seek help when difficulties arise. Many students entering TNE programmes are also navigating unfamiliar approaches to learning. Expectations around independent study, critical thinking, referencing, group work or academic integrity may differ considerably from previous educational experiences. What appears straightforward to academic staff may represent a significant transition for students.

Supporting that transition should not be viewed as remedial work. Rather, it is an essential component of helping students succeed within a different academic culture.

The challenge of delivering consistency across multiple locations

While one of the greatest strengths of TNE is its ability to bring internationally recognised qualifications closer to students, it also creates one of the sector’s greatest operational challenges.

Unlike a single campus, TNE partnerships operate across different educational cultures, regulatory systems, technological infrastructures, languages, and institutional environments. A student studying the same programme in Kuala Lumpur, Cairo, or Tashkent may technically be enrolled on the same degree, but their day-to-day academic experience can look remarkably different.

Some partnerships benefit from sophisticated digital infrastructure, extensive local library collections, and highly experienced academic support teams. Others operate in environments where internet connectivity is less reliable, access to licensed databases may be more limited, or students balance full-time employment alongside their studies. These differences do not necessarily indicate lower quality, but they do require thoughtful adaptation.

Successful partnerships recognise local realities while remaining focused on achieving equivalent academic outcomes.

Technology has transformed access, but not necessarily engagement

Digital technologies have undoubtedly reduced many of the barriers that once separated TNE students from their home institutions. Virtual learning environments, online library collections, recorded lectures, AI-enabled learning tools, digital assessment platforms, and virtual academic advising have significantly expanded access. However, access alone does not guarantee engagement.

Institutions often monitor whether students have been given access to online resources, but far fewer examine how confidently those resources are being used. Students may have thousands of electronic journals available to them while remaining uncertain about where to begin their literature search. Similarly, an extensive online study skills repository has little value if students are unaware it exists or find it difficult to navigate.

Academic support therefore requires active engagement rather than passive availability.

Partnership working makes the difference

Perhaps more than any other aspect of TNE delivery, academic support illustrates why successful partnerships depend upon genuine collaboration rather than contractual compliance alone, as responsibility for supporting students rarely sits neatly with one institution.

Home universities typically retain responsibility for academic standards, while local partners often provide much of the day-to-day teaching and student support. This shared responsibility requires strong communication, mutual trust, and clearly defined expectations. The most successful partnerships I have encountered tend to move beyond simply dividing responsibilities. Instead, they invest in joint approaches to staff development, regular dialogue between academic teams, and shared ownership of the student experience. As a result, academic support becomes something both institutions continuously refine together rather than something either side simply delivers.

Listening to students

One of the most valuable sources of insight is often the students themselves. Student surveys frequently measure overall satisfaction, but they may not always reveal the practical barriers students encounter during their academic journey. Questions such as these can often generate more meaningful conversations:

• Do students know where to seek academic help?
• Are support services available when students actually need them?
• Do students feel comfortable asking questions?
• Are learning resources accessible within local contexts?
• Do students understand what academic success looks like?

Listening to these experiences allows institutions to identify relatively small improvements that can have significant impacts on student confidence and achievement.

Moving beyond compliance

Quality assurance frameworks rightly examine whether institutions provide appropriate academic support. Increasingly, however, universities are recognising that compliance should represent the starting point rather than the destination. As competition within international education intensifies, the quality of the student experience is becoming an increasingly important differentiator.

Students are unlikely to judge their university primarily on the wording of partnership agreements or the sophistication of governance structures. Instead, they will remember whether they felt supported when they struggled with an assignment, whether feedback helped them improve, whether they could easily access learning materials, and whether they felt genuinely connected to their university. Those everyday experiences often shape perceptions of institutional quality far more than the organisational arrangements operating behind the scenes.

Looking ahead

As TNE continues to evolve, academic support will become increasingly important. Artificial intelligence, personalised learning technologies, hybrid delivery models, and expanding global partnerships will all create new opportunities to support students more effectively. At the same time, these developments will require institutions to think carefully about digital inclusion, staff capability, academic integrity, and equitable access across diverse international contexts.

Perhaps the most important question institutions that are serious about TNE and their student experience can ask themselves is not whether overseas students receive the same support as students on the home campus. Instead, they should ask themselves whether they are “giving every student, wherever they study, an equivalent opportunity to succeed?”

The answer is unlikely to be found in a single policy or platform. It will emerge from thoughtful partnership working, continuous dialogue, and a shared commitment to placing students at the centre of international education.

In my next article, I will explore another important dimension of the TNE student experience: language and communication, and how institutions can help students navigate both academic expectations and intercultural learning across increasingly diverse partnership environments.

– Dr Suzanna Tomassi is Executive Director of External Affairs at NCUK, a leading UK pathway provider, and Founder of CoachEd Global, a consultancy specialising in executive coaching and global education advisory.

She is a highly experienced strategic leader and board member with over 20 years’ expertise across UK Government and higher education. Her work focuses on internationalisation, governance, risk oversight, commercial growth, and organisational transformation. Suzanna’s career spans the UK Department for Business and Trade and four major UK universities, where she has shaped national policy, strengthened regulatory and quality frameworks, and led large-scale international expansion initiatives.

An expert in transnational education and global operations, Suzanna has driven multi-country growth strategies, co-authored accreditation guidelines, and facilitated major international investments in UK higher education.

For additional background, please see:

• “Beyond borders: Why student support matters more than ever in transnational education“

The post Academic support and learning resources in TNE: Delivering student success across borders appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

I started modestly, with two LinkedIn posts exploring aspects of student support in TNE. What surprised me was not only the level of engagement, but also the quality of the conversations these posts sparked behind the scenes and across the sector. Those discussions made one thing very clear to me: While TNE continues to expand globally, there remains a growing appetite to talk more openly and practically about the student experience within international partnerships.

That interest has inspired me to develop a short mini-series focusing on student support in TNE. At about the same time, 91ɬ��Monitor invited me to create a series of slightly more detailed reflections and articles, so here I am!

TNE as a core pillar of internationalisation

The timing of the series feels particularly relevant. Earlier this year, the UK government published a revised International Education Strategy (IES), reaffirming TNE as a central pillar of the UK’s global education ambitions. TNE is no longer viewed as a complementary activity sitting alongside international student recruitment; rather, it is increasingly recognised as a strategic mechanism for extending educational access, strengthening international partnerships, supporting skills development, and building long-term global influence across different levels and subsectors of education.

For me personally, this evolution has been especially interesting to observe. I was fortunate to be involved in several revisions and iterations of the IES following its original publication in 2019, during my time with the UK Department for Business and Trade. Over the years, it has been fascinating to see how the conversation around TNE has matured, from something often discussed primarily in commercial terms, to a much broader recognition of its role in diplomacy, skills development, capacity building, research collaboration, and student opportunity.

The scale of global international education continues to grow at pace. UNESCO estimates that globally mobile students now number more than 7.3 million worldwide, up from around 2 million in 2000, with demand .

Alongside this mobility growth, TNE itself has expanded dramatically. According to the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), in 2024/25 there were 669,950 students studying for UK qualifications through TNE programmes overseas, an +8% increase on the previous year and . Given the drop in direct student recruitment, this figure is expected to exceed the number of international students physically studying in the UK at many institutions.

Key markets for UK TNE continue to include China, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Egypt, Hong Kong, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and increasingly countries across Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. We are also seeing growing interest and expansion in regions where demographic growth, skills demand, and pressure on domestic higher education systems are creating significant opportunities for international partnerships.

Competition intensifying

At the same time, competition is becoming far more diverse and sophisticated. While the traditional Big Four destinations (Australia, Canada, the UK, and US) remain highly influential, countries such as Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, the UAE, China, Malaysia, Singapore, and even emerging regional education hubs in Central Asia and the wider Gulf are investing heavily in internationalisation and TNE capacity. In many ways, TNE is becoming one of the defining features of global higher education internationalisation.

Multifaceted potential

Institutions engage in TNE for many different reasons, and while financial sustainability undoubtedly remains important, I like to think that the motivations today are often considerably broader and more strategic.

For universities, TNE can:

• Create a springboard for multilevel strategic engagement in priority markets;
• Extend institutional reach and global visibility;
• Support international research and innovation partnerships;
• Diversify student pipelines and international engagement;
• Strengthen alumni networks in strategic regions;
• Enhance institutional resilience against geopolitical or recruitment volatility;
• Contribute to civic and diplomatic objectives;
• Create opportunities for curriculum innovation, intercultural learning, and employability.

As such, for many institutions, successful TNE partnerships are now viewed as long-term strategic relationships rather than purely recruitment channels.

Equally important are the reasons that host governments, local providers, employers, students, and families choose to engage with TNE.

Host nations increasingly view TNE as an important strategic tool for supporting national development ambitions and expanding access to high-quality higher education opportunities. In many countries, growing youth populations and rising demand for tertiary education are placing significant pressure on domestic education systems. TNE partnerships can help address this challenge by increasing capacity, broadening programme availability and enabling students to access internationally recognised qualifications without necessarily needing to leave their home country.

At the same time, governments often see TNE as a mechanism for supporting national workforce development and skills priorities, particularly in sectors linked to economic transformation, innovation, healthcare, technology, engineering and business. TNE can also help reduce outbound brain drain and the associated economic leakage that occurs when large numbers of students study overseas. By retaining students domestically, countries are often able to keep talent, investment and graduate outcomes within local economies while still benefiting from international expertise and academic collaboration. Beyond student access, many host nations and local institutions value TNE partnerships for the opportunities they create around knowledge exchange, curriculum development, staff training, research collaboration and the strengthening of local higher education capacity. In this sense, well-designed TNE partnerships are increasingly seen not simply as education delivery models, but as long-term contributors to economic development, institutional enhancement and international collaboration.

Local institutional partners may benefit through curriculum enhancement, staff development, quality assurance practices, research collaboration and international reputation. Employers frequently value TNE graduates because they bring internationally benchmarked qualifications alongside local cultural and market understanding. Students and parents may gain access to globally recognised degrees at a significantly lower cost than studying overseas, while avoiding visa, travel and living expenses. At a macro-economic level, well-designed TNE ecosystems can support productivity, innovation, human capital development, and regional competitiveness. In short, the value proposition of TNE is increasingly multi-dimensional.

But what about student supports?

Yet as TNE partnerships continue to grow globally, institutions are increasingly asking an important question: how can we ensure students studying in different locations feel equally supported, connected, and able to succeed? This question sits at the heart of many conversations I have had over recent years.

We have spent considerable time across the sector discussing quality assurance frameworks, regulatory structures, market entry strategies, and partnership models. All of these are relevant. But sometimes, the lived student experience, particularly in distributed or partnership-delivery models, receives less attention than it deserves.

The reality is that students studying through TNE may face very different challenges depending on geography, language, local infrastructure, cultural context, digital access, teaching models, and expectations around support. A student enrolled on the same UK degree in different countries may experience that programme in very different ways. And while many partnerships deliver exceptional student support, others continue to wrestle with questions around consistency, communication, ownership, and integration.

As we pilot this series of articles over the next few editions, I plan to reflect on and explore practical considerations around several areas of student support in TNE, including:

• Academic support and learning resources
• Language and communication
• Well-being and pastoral care
• Administrative clarity
• Student voice and engagement
• Employability and career development
• Partnership working in student support

Rather than to present definitive answers, my aim is to encourage discussion, share observations from across the sector, and highlight examples of thoughtful practice. TNE is now firmly embedded within the future of international higher education. But if partnerships are to remain sustainable, credible, and genuinely student-centred, the student experience must remain central to how we design, manage, and evaluate international provision.

I hope these musings spark further conversation and exchange of practice across the sector. If you are currently working in TNE, or thinking about developing provision, I would .

– Dr Suzanna Tomassi is Executive Director of External Affairs at NCUK, a leading UK pathway provider, and Founder of CoachEd Global, a consultancy specialising in executive coaching and global education advisory.

She is a highly experienced strategic leader and board member with over 20 years’ expertise across UK Government and higher education. Her work focuses on internationalisation, governance, risk oversight, commercial growth, and organisational transformation. Suzanna’s career spans the UK Department for Business and Trade and four major UK universities, where she has shaped national policy, strengthened regulatory and quality frameworks, and led large-scale international expansion initiatives.

An expert in transnational education and global operations, Suzanna has driven multi-country growth strategies, co-authored accreditation guidelines, and facilitated major international investments in UK higher education.

The post Beyond borders: Why student support matters more than ever in transnational education appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.