Quality assurance ‘toughest challenge’ for universities overseas

When Suzanna Tomassi first saw a job advert open up for a higher education specialist at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), she said she had been unaware that the government body had an international education team at all.

If she had been, she said, her previous job, fostering a university’s international partnerships, may have been much easier. The work that DBT does in supporting the UK education sector to expand overseas has become a lot more visible in recent years, Tomassi said.

But, more recently, some critics have argued that Civil Service cuts threaten the future of the department that has become instrumental to universities pinning their hopes on overseas expansion amid an ongoing financial crisis. 

Responsible for championing UK higher education overseas and supporting providers to grow internationally, Tomassi’s four-year tenure as DBT’s in-house university specialist spanned four prime ministers, the changeover from Conservative to Labour rule, and a significant expansion of UK transnational education (TNE). 

She was one of four specialists in the department, each of whom focused on a different part of the education sector. During her time at DBT, where she started in 2022, she was involved in approximately 28 trade missions to 30 countries, which led to, cumulatively, millions of pounds of investment. 

“Education was actually one of the biggest export winners – for the lack of a better term – in the whole department,” she said. “Much bigger than a lot of other better-known industries and that’s not something that…we talked much about; we probably should have talked about it more.”

Universities have significantly expanded their offshore activities in recent years, driven by both stricter immigration controls at home dampening their ability to recruit international students, and the need to diversify their income streams in response to growing cost pressures.  

When the financial difficulties in the sector became apparent, “the level of enquiries went up, that’s for sure,” said Tomassi. 

But, she added: “We can’t tell them what to do. It’s their decision where they want to operate.”

And establishing TNE is far from a simple exercise, as universities are forced to navigate geopolitical and economic headwinds. “You have shifts in visa policy, you’ve got diplomatic tensions, you have economic uncertainty in key [markets] and they create massive risks for long-term planning,” she said.

“Look at what’s happening in the Middle East at the moment. And one of the priority markets [Saudi Arabia] is there and it’s a big TNE market for our sector,” she said.

Along with the regulatory difficulties that come with navigating two or more countries’ higher education systems, Tomassi said quality assurance has, at times, also been a challenge for universities. 

“Ensuring parity of academic standards, assessment, student experience across multiple countries and delivery partners – I think that probably still remains one of the sector’s toughest challenges. I don’t think it’s about lack of will, necessarily; it’s about how complex it is.”

She added that, in some cases, “rapid expansion” has outpaced institutions’ abilities “to conduct robust due diligence”. 

“I think quality assurance is very important because, at the end of the day, it’s linked to our reputation and it takes years to build good reputation and it takes days or weeks for it to crash and collapse.”

During her time in the Civil Service, Tomassi worked under three Conservative and one Labour prime ministers. 

“I think each of them was quite distinct…in terms of their ideas about economy and trade and investment,” she said, emphasising that she was speaking from a personal perspective. “It feels like there was far more approval and perhaps recognition of the importance of international students under the Conservative governments, and perhaps there was also more understanding of the importance of soft power of international education.”

Since coming to power in 2025, Labour has developed a new iteration of the International Education Strategy. The document marks a significant departure from previous versions, shying away from focusing on the onshore recruitment of international students and instead focusing on growing education exports. 

Tomassi said the development of the document involved months of consultations and “quite careful balancing of sector priorities with political realities”. 

“Immigration policy was very politically sensitive and the government wanted growth without domestic political backlash, so the [strategy] had to be framed in ways that aligned with economic priorities.”

The launch of the latest international education strategy coincided, perhaps unfortunately, with cuts across Whitehall and among staff working abroad, such as in embassies. 

Given the success that DBT has experienced in growing education exports in recent years, Tomassi, whose fixed-term contract came to an end in December 2025, said she was “gobsmacked” by the scale of the cuts. 

“They have already lost or are about to lose colleagues who have served UK government and UK education for years, and these are the people who share market intelligence, who solve barriers for your organisations in days rather than months.”

At a time of financial decline for universities, she said institutions need “as much help as possible rather than help and support being removed”. 

“We’ll get through this because we’ve been through a lot of ups and downs, but I think it will be difficult, slow and frustrating,” she said. 

“We have the foundations and we have the expertise and the global demand is certainly there. We just need the policy environment and resourcing to match the ambition.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com