UKCISA's training courses evolve and adapt to your needs
October 14, 2025
Despite having been at UKCISA for almost four years now, I still acutely remember what it was like being on the front line working in international student advice and compliance. I had the pleasure of working in various institutions and was always fortunate to have had access to support through UKCISA, whether it was practitioner networks, the advice line, or training.
Having now worked on the “other side of the fence”, I have a far greater understanding of, and appreciation for, the way we develop training and how collaborative the process can be between UKCISA and our members.
The butterfly effect of your engagement
Often, it is obvious what has influenced our training and why. “Stop Press – recent immigration changes” is a perfect example of this. We use our expertise and knowledge of immigration rules, guidance, and regulation, combine it with our policy and advocacy work, and deliver Stop Press biannually. It’s an essential opportunity to catch up on recent changes and developments that affect your day-to-day work, to share practice, and hold conversations with your peers across the sector.
The engagement we receive from you helps us to contextualise prevailing issues into our training.
However, it’s not always rule changes or Government decisions influencing our training, it’s very often due to your insights – our members! The engagement we receive from you helps us to contextualise prevailing issues into our training. We work really hard to try and ensure our training is not just a one-way street. We learn from you and want to hear more about what is happening in your area of work so that our training can be as representative and relevant as possible. We are good at what we do because you are great at what you do.
We carefully construct any group work or scenario work in our training to try and get the most out of any discussion and to potentially elicit differing interpretations or opinions. However, truthfully, sometimes the best scenarios come from you and end up being inspired by real-life anonymised examples from our forum or advice line. Your enquiries and discussions with us require great detail and nuance to help navigate and are frequently perfect opportunities for us to learn from each other; plus, this is what you want from a good training scenario!
We run some of our courses with co-trainers from our membership to ensure our content is reflective of what is happening in your day-to-day. This dynamic is always extremely helpful for us and for the course content because it can remain responsive and representative. One example of this is our two-part course entitled “Student route refusals & administrative reviews” that explores the complexity of refusals and admin reviews. It was amended last year to better reflect your feedback that credibility refusals were on the rise. We included new content to explore this, and to highlight a key part of guidance that may help advisers and compliance in navigating a credibility refusal and what may have triggered it.
Our training calendar evolves and adapts to you
UKCISA’s training reflects the current needs of our membership. Aside from seeking feedback from specific courses, we also create new courses according to emerging trends from our member and student advice lines, the forum and our social media channels.
A good example of this came last year where we had a marked increase in requests for more opportunities to do practical group work around residence issues in fee assessments. We also saw enquiries about fee status assessments and residence rise through our member and student advice lines.
We decided to respond to this by creating the “Spotlight on ‘ordinary residence’ in fee assessments” course. We have carefully considered all the feedback we received from this course last year and in December, the course returns. We are pleased to build more content into the delivery this year with a longer run-time, more time to discuss as a group, and more places available for participants.
We’ve also heard your requests for more opportunities to reflect upon and to develop knowledge for fee assessments, and so we’re also excited to introduce to our offer this year, “Fees revisited (England): a practical update”. This webinar will run in April 2026 for experienced fee assessors and will be an opportunity both to reflect on relevant legislative changes in the fee assessment space and to discuss themes and practice with colleagues across the sector. We look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible!
A thank you in advance of the 25/26 calendar
As we commence the 25/26 calendar, would just like to say a big thank you for your engagement with our training programme.
"UKCISA is our international student adviser!"
Without you being such fantastic, engaged, and active members of ours, our training would not be the same. One of my favourite comments to me at UKCISA Conference this year in Manchester was from a member that said, “UKCISA is our international student adviser!”
We hope that you get plenty out of our training programme throughout the remainder of 2025 and 2026, and that we continue to be a source of support and advice for all of you!
Book your place on a UKCISA training programme this year.
