Bring your questions on visas and safeguarding to two of our top experts at the English UK Student Experience Conference at the end of the month.
Two of the sessions at the conference, for staff specialising in welfare, accommodation and other student contact roles, will show that following best practice on visas and safeguarding have wide-ranging beneficial effects for member centres, beyond meeting immigration regulations and the inspection framework. There are also sessions on topics including customer service, dealing with difficult people, and making homestays as good as possible.
Both Naadiya Rawat, English UK's public affairs, policy and research manager, and Nigel Heritage, safeguarding trainer, are keen to answer questions brought by participants, and will talk about ways in which a slightly different approach can pay dividends in relationships with students and customer satisfaction.
Naadiya's session will involve visa refusals and how centres can work with students much earlier to avoid problems. She will suggest that it can be a good idea to check students' documents in the same way as for Tier 4, which not only helps refusal rates to fall, but also builds a good relationship with students before arrival, which in turn can help to attract others.
Nigel will focus on the areas of safeguarding in the Accreditation UK framework which are most frequently not met, and discuss ways in which centres can improve. One area he mentions are policies and procedures for dealing with abusive behaviour: centres sometimes have a policy but fail to make sure that everyone involved is aware of it "in a language-appropriate way" rather than just staff. Another area of focus will be that around providing an accurate description of care and support for under 18s, so that parents are fully aware of how their child will be treated if, for instance, they are on an adult course but only 17.
The English UK Student Experience Conference is at Anglo Continental in Bournemouth on Wednesday 30 November.
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