The UK's new 2026 international education strategy appears to prioritise off-shore transnational education (TNE) over traditional onshore study abroad, in a pivot that the international education community will be monitoring closely. Here are the most important details, datapoints and takeaways.
Last month saw the publication of a new International Education Strategy for the UK, the first since 2019. This document comes at an important time for British higher education with shifts in enrolment and search trends at a time of turbulence for the ‘Big 4’ study destinations (Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA).
But higher education isn’t the exclusive focus of this strategy. When it is, it has less than usual to say about traditional ‘onshore’ delivery. Instead, much more attention is given to ‘offshore’ delivery via Transnational Education (TNE).
Here we’ll briefly summarise the key points of the strategy for professionals in international higher education recruitment, marketing and policy. Explaining how it differs from other approaches taken by the UK and its competitors.
We’ll also focus on TNE specifically, explaining what it is, why it makes sense as a strategic priority for the UK and what prospective audiences think of it, according to Keystone’s data.
What's in the UK International Education Strategy for higher education?
A key difference between this strategy and its predecessors is in how it sets and measures priorities: specifically the things it does and doesn’t put a number on. We think there are three focus areas to be aware of for higher education:
1. A less specific commitment to onshore recruitment
The most remarkable – and one of the most remarked – aspects of the UK’s new approach is its refusal to put a numerical target on traditional ‘onshore’ recruitment to physical study abroad at UK universities.
This is one of the most relevant strands for people working in international higher education, so we’ll spend more time on it before moving on to other areas.
The previous 2019 UK strategy, published just before the Covid-19 pandemic, almost immediately hit a target to grow to over 600,000 total international students by 2030. Enrolments rose from 554,625 in 2019/20 to 600,180 in 2020/21 and peaked at 758,865 in 2021/22 – an increase of 37% in two recruitment cycles.
Numbers have since dropped, largely in response to deliberate policy interventions such as a ban on dependents for taught Masters degrees in 2024 (heavily impacting recruitment from South Asia and West Africa).
These actions were partly prompted by concerns over the impact of rapidly expanding international recruitment on local housing and public services.
Therefore, whilst the new strategy confirms the UK’s commitment to 'recruit high-quality international students from a diverse range of countries’ this is to be done ‘sustainably’ and ‘responsibly’ with a specific focus on ‘strong support systems, adequate infrastructure and access to local housing’.
In principle these goals work to underline and enhance the UK offer, in so far as all of the above are things international students should expect and receive.
But this is a significant shift for the UK. The strategy is more specific about the kinds of ‘high quality’ and ‘diverse’ students it wants to recruit without being specific (at least yet) about what these terms mean and without specifying what the overall size and shape of this recruitment should actually look like.
2. Establishing a new Education Sector Advisory Group
Much of the actual work to deliver the UK’s strategy will be undertaken by a new Education Sector Advisory Group (ESAG), bringing together individuals from government, industry and representative bodies across the UK education sector (not specific to HE).
They will focus on areas such as:
- Ensuring delivery of adequate support systems, services and housing for students studying abroad in the UK
- Promoting integrity in recruitment, via encouraging and supporting initiatives such as the UK’s Agent Quality Framework (AQF)
- Representing and advocating for UK education abroad, for example at trade shows and in-country missions
- Driving growth in education exports and supporting TNE
This last point is key to the remaining two areas of the UK’s strategy.
3. Growing education exports to £40billion by 2030
This revises up a previous target to grow education exports to £35billion by 2030, with data cited by the strategy showing that these had already reached £32.3billion as of 2022.
‘Exports’ here refers to a range of activities generating income for the UK economy via education. The most significant of these is traditional ‘onshore’ higher education, accounting for £23.7billion (73%) of the total as of 2022.
However, the strategy looks for growth from other areas, specifically mentioning EdTech and English Language Training.
It also places a particular emphasis on transnational education (TNE).
What is TNE? - facts and figures
At its core, TNE describes education delivered by auniversity in one place but taking place in another. This makes it highly varied by nature as TNE happens in different places in different ways. For that reason transnational education is better thought of as a category, rather than a specific type of delivery.
But all types involve one thing: students from one country earn a qualification delivered wholly or partly by a university in another country without needing to leave their country of residence.
It is, essentially, a way of studying internationally without studying abroad.
The following are all examples of TNE:
Branch campuses
The most ‘high profile’ form of TNE happens when a university in one country establishes an additional physical campus in another and recruits students there.
An example of a solely operated branch campus is the University of Nottingham Malaysia University (UNM) which is operated in Malaysia by the UK’s University of Nottingham without a local partner.
Joint campuses
Joint campuses are international branch campuses operated asa partnership between an overseas university and a local host.
An example of a ‘joint campus’ is Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) which is operated in China by the UK’s University of Liverpool in partnership with China’s Xi’an Jiaotong University.
The nature of these arranegements can vary in terms of how involved each partner is in different parts of the campus’s activities (such as curriculum design, learning delivery and assessment) and how extensively or independently the campus operates (Do students move between it and other host or overseas campuses? Does it operate across one faculty, or many?).
But, in principle, a joint campus is always a separate physica lcampus in a host country with meaningful involvement from an overseas partner.
TNE hubs
Sometimes branch campuses operate semi-collectively, in local clusters. This usually happens when a host country designates a hub to attract international universities, often with shared facilities and infrastructure such as student accommodation and transport.
A high-profile example of this approach is Dubai’s Dubai International Academic City, a purpose-built town with international campuses on behalf of universities in the UK, USA, France, Australia and elsewhere.
Other types of TNE
Strictly speaking, a form of ‘transnational education’ takes place whenever anybody studies towards a wholly or partly overseas degree from their home country. That includes:
- Franchising, subcontracting and accrediting – when an overseas university confers or approves a degree awarded by a partner university, without being responsible for delivering it
- Dual and joint degrees – when a student studies at a local university but gains a qualification also awarded by an overseas institution (either in the form of two separate dual degrees, or one jointly awarded)
- Online study – when a student studies for an overseas qualification completely remotely from their home country
But, most of the time when people refer to TNE they mean a branch campus of some sort, in which a university from one country establishes a dedicated physical presence in another. And it’s this kind of delivery that gets counted as TNE in most datasets. Speaking of which…
How many international branch campuses are there?
Exact numbers for branch campus activity vary, partly because the definitions are quite loose. But the best source by far is published by the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-Bert).
You can view some detailed breakdowns of branch campus activity there, but here’s what it looks like if we visualise some of that data:
We’ve picked some of the biggest exporters (sending countries) and importers (host countries) from C-Bert’s data here, as an indicator of how many countries establish and receive branch campuses. Just bear in mind that there are many different types of campus within this list.
As of January 2026, top exporters are the USA with 97, the UK with 53 and Russia with 43. The top importers are China with 50, the UAE with 39 and Uzbekistan, Malaysia and Singapore all on 16-17.
There are three things for international education professionals to note about this distribution.
The first is that the ‘footprint’ of exporting countries can be very different. The UK and USA have a broad spread with a lot of campuses in China and the MENA region, whereas Russia is responsible for more than 1/3 of the campuses in Uzbekistan and more than 1/2 of those in Kazakhstan.
The second is that the current distribution of TNE is often quite different to traditional onshore recruitment. For example, India has been one of the biggest source countries for study abroad in the UK, but only hosts five IBCs, currently, with only one of them operated by the UK. This is something the UK’s international education strategy looks to change, which underlines its significance: a potential pivot to recruiting traditionally onshore students, off-shore. We’ll come back to how successful that might be.
The third thing to observe from data on current branch campus arrangements is that the pattern of sending and receiving TNE is complex. It’s not the case that one group of countries sets up campuses in another.
Several importing countries are also big exporters; an obvious example is China, which is home to 50 branch campuses, but also runs 13 of its own (more than the Netherlands, Germany or Canada). Some of the countries we traditionally think of as sending international students abroad also ‘send’ branch campuses; an example is India which has 19 IBCs (many of them in the UAE). Finally, countries who export branch campuses also import them; an example is the UK itself, which runs 53 campuses overseas, but is also home to 14 set up by overseas institutions.
All of this means that a ‘pivot’ towards TNE in the UK (or more generally) could be much more transformative (and fascinating) for global higher education than we might assume. Flows of campuses can look very different to flows of students.
Why is the UK pivoting to TNE?
There are several reasons TNE makes sense as a strategic pivot for the UK.
The first is partly political. Because international students studying in the UK are counted amongst net migration statistics, increases in study abroad can exert pressure to control those numbers. This has led to a number of policy changes on the part of different UK governments following the recent surge in international recruitment. Focussing on TNE instead is a way to deliver UK international education without impacting migration to the UK.
Another reason for the UK to develop a strategic focus on TNE is that this is already a key capability for UK HE:
The chart above compares numbers for international students studying in the UK to those studying outside the UK via TNE over time.
The UK already educates a lot of students via TNE, with steady growth and a lack of policy intervention closing the gap to ‘traditional’ study abroad. Having an international strategy in its favour (and high profile visits to target partner countries) looks like pushing at an open door for the UK as a whole.
But do students want this?
How popular is TNE with students?
The simple answer is ‘very’. But answers aren’t usually simple.
The data we’ve already brought together shows the scale of TNE provision and participation. But we’ve also seen that there’s a very particular pattern to this.
The question, for the UK and other countries, is whether students who don’t currently study via TNE will pivot to that.
This is where audience data like Keystone’s comes in handy.
Our Pulse research reveals that 1/3 of prospective international Bachelors and Masters students would consider studying at a branch campus instead. That’s an impressive proportion, given that these are people who are otherwise seeking to study abroad in the traditional sense. It could be said to represent a reasonable amount of latent demand amongst these audiences.
But that demand isn’t evenly distributed:
Here we see that more than 40% of audiences in East and Southeast Asia would consider studying via TNE. This perhaps makes sense, giventhe prevalence of branch campus activity in these regions (there are nearly 100 IBCs across China, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea).
But only 27% of audiences in South Asia would consider this option. This partly reflects the much lower concentration of IBCs in the region (with only five currently in India, for example). But it probably also reflects a preference for traditional study abroad on the part of this audience.
The UK strategy understands the need to work on this, with a tactical focus on building partnerships and awareness in countries like India (along with countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam).
If effective, those tactics could lead to a successful strategic pivot to TNE, but achieving this will take time (needless to say, setting up a branch campus takes far longer than creating and marketing a program).
Traditional study abroad in the UK (and elsewhere) will remain important even as TNE becomes more widespread. And Keystone’s data will continue to monitor and explore opportunities for both.
Dr. Mark Bennett
Dr. Mark Bennett is the VP of Research and Insights at Keystone Education Group. Leveraging Keystone's unique data and insights, Mark regularly presents on global higher education trends, recruitment, and policy topics, having previously spoken at events organized by NAFSA, CASE Universities Marketing Forum (UMF), HELOA, NAGAP, ContentEd, the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE), Westminster Forum and others. Mark taught at multiple UK universities prior to joining Keystone and holds a PhD in gothic literature from the University of Sheffield.