Out of the £36.7bn total, roughly 10% (£3.6bn) was generated by TNE, which grew by 17% compared with the previous year and was largely fuelled by a boom in schools and early years TNE activities, according to the department for education.
The newly released figures show an overall growth rate of 2.5% on 2023, continuing the steady upward trend since 2021 when the UK government changed its reporting methodology.
“The growth in TNE value is significantly higher than the education sector as a whole and TNE will continue to present a growth opportunity for cash-strapped UK universities,” Jan Bamford, professor of international higher education at London Metropolitan University, told The PIE News.
While welcoming the increase, which brings the government closer to its 2030 target of £40bn, Bamford raised concerns about educational quality being sacrificed as universities pursue financial motives.
He expressed worries about the “quality of the student experience” at TNE partners “where cash-strapped universities are reducing the number of overseas visits to partners” while pursuing “opportunities for income generation in a struggling sector”.
Elsewhere, the figures showed higher education produced most of the total revenue at £26.6bn, with 90% of this attributed to tuition fees and living expenditure of international students in the UK.
After that, the largest revenue streams in 2024 were education products and services (£4.3bn), TNE activity (£3.6bn), schools (£1.1bn) and English language training (£0.8bn).
This May, England’s higher education watchdog found more than one in three institutions faced deficits last year, with the figure set to rise in 2025/26.
The concern remains the quality of the student experience at TNE partners
Jan Bamford, London Metropolitan University
Meanwhile, the government’s highly anticipated International Education Strategy (IES) published at the start of the year set out a bold ambition for the UK education sector to collectively grow education exports to £40bn per year by the end of 2030 – growth that will need to come from the broader education ecosystem, not from inbound student recruitment.
Amid the rise of branch campuses and other forms of TNE activity, the number of students enrolled in UK universities offshore reached 670,000 in 2023/24 while the number of international students in the UK fell to 685,000, as TNE enrolments close the gap with onshore international students.
