Victory for English language schools on visa restrictions

ENGLISH language colleges have welcomed a High Court ruling that the government's attempts to restrict visas for their courses is illegal.

Yesterday's ruling came after attempts by Alan Johnson, the former Home Secretary, to introduce restrictions preventing students with only beginner's English from entering Britain for English language courses.

English language schools throughout the UK warned that if the legislation had been successful it would have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs and millions of pounds a year of foreign earnings.

The restrictions formed part of a drive against illegal immigration and bogus applications.

Mr Justice Foskett, sitting in London, declared the fresh restrictions had been achieved through altering guidelines when there should have been a formal change to the rules, with the matter referred back to Parliament.

English language schools generate more than 5 million annually for the Scottish economy, not counting accommodation costs and other spending by thousands of overseas students.

Edinburgh has nearly 20 English language schools offering a range of courses. They charge 350 to 450 for week's pre-university English classes.

Alex Magee, sales and marketing executive at the Edinburgh School of English in the Canongate, which attracts about 1,000 overseas students to its courses each year, said: "The ruling is a relief. The regulations for English language schools seemed to come in very quickly, almost overnight, and kept getting tighter and tighter. People kept getting annoyed that they kept creeping up."

He added: "One understands why the government wants to do something about immigration but this kind of regulation could have had a detrimental effect on schools such as ours."

David Orr, director of the Global School of English in York Place, said: "This is a very welcome decision as the message was going out to overseas agents that the UK was a rather unattractive place to come to study English.

John Thoumire, business development manager at inlingua Edinburgh, said: "It's a bonus for all English language schools and this will secure more work for Scotland."

Tony Milns, chief executive of English UK, the national trade association for the majority of English language schools which brought the case, said: "This judgment upholds our basic case that the Home Secretary was wrong to introduce a substantive change without laying that change before Parliament.

"We are pleased that Mr Justice Foskett saw the merits of our case and we believe that his decision is good for the UK economy, to which the English language sector contributes about 1.5 billion in foreign earnings each year."

English UK estimates the ruling has saved "more than 3,000 jobs and over 600 million a year in foreign earnings".

The coalition government says it is reviewing English language requirements across the visa system.

Last month it said it would bring forward to the autumn other measures planned by Labour requiring many immigrants marrying UK citizens to prove they have a command of English.