IDP commits to the UK Agent Quality Framework training for UK-facing student counsellors

Jointly led by the British Council, BUILA, UKCISA and UUKI, the UK Agent Quality Framework (AQF) has been put in place following extensive feedback and research from students, education providers, education advisers and agents.

The framework is designed to enhance the partnership between the UK education sector and agents and counsellors, and to recognise and share best practice.

There are seven parts to the framework: the UK agent and counsellor engagement hub, UK agent and counsellor training, the National Code of Ethical Practice for Education Agents, the Good Practice Guide for UK Education Agents Partnering for Quality, a database of certified agents and counsellors, a student guide to choosing an education agent, and the Good Practice Guide for Providers using Education Agents.

Committing to the AQF signifies that IDP has made an undertaking to uphold the principles of the Framework, as well as putting them into practice with a set of basic quality measures. These include:

• Empowering student choice and enabling informed decision-making

• Ensuring good agent governance and professionalism

• Promoting ethical agent practices, professional knowledge and competency

• Increasing transparency and accountability

Alongside providing clarity and security for both international students and agents, pledging to the AQF provides a demonstrable commitment from the UK HE sector towards sustainable internationalisation practices. It also responds to concerns from government around “unscrupulous education agents” by providing a proactive, sector-led approach to agent quality management.

Organisational Behaviour

Our global staff all complete annual mandatory online modules on our policies: Code of Conduct, anti-bribery and anti-corruption, acceptable use of electronic facilities, whistleblower protection policies, and our privacy policies. Our onboarding for all staff includes compulsory modules on our global policies, privacy and data protection, and IDP values.

Ethical Business Practice

We have a global framework and staff handbook that outlines good practice and our global standards at each stage of the student journey. This includes the procedure for detractors in our Net Promoter Score surveys. We have our own destination training for UK counsellors to complete online and encourage all our counsellors to complete the British Council training in addition to IDP’s destination training. Over 400 UK-facing counsellors have now completed the British Council training, which can be seen on the British Council certified counsellor database.

Objective Advice and Guidance

IDP has over 55 years of experience helping students to achieve their international education goals. IDP has helped more than 800,000 students since its inception. IDP is a student-first organisation and we pride ourselves on providing objective advice and guidance. We regularly review the breadth of institutions our counsellors are shortlisting and applying to with students to ensure our counsellors share the extent of quality institutions the UK has to offer.

Even before our students step into an IDP office, we assist them with objective advice and guidance through our websites and app, where they can easily compare and shortlist institutions. We have over 100m visits to our sites each year across 30 websites and have had more than 1 million downloads of our apps.

Our FastLane service helps to match a student’s qualifications and interests to the right institution and course. They can do this in our offices, on our websites, and on our app. We have over 5,000 courses and over 100 institutions live on FastLane globally, and over 39,000 students have received offers through this free-to-use service.

Student-centered practice

We have a global framework and staff handbook (SPWoW) that outlines good practice and our global standards at each stage of the student journey, for all students. We have our own destination training for UK-counsellors to complete online and encourage all our counsellors to complete the British Council training in addition to our destination training.

Organisational competence

Because of our mandatory internal training modules and the additional British Council training , our UK focused staff understand the relevant legislation and regulations relating to recruiting students to UK educational institutions. We also have regular training from UK education institution partners, organised in-market locally, and centrally through the UK Client Success team. From Jul 2022 to June 2023, in addition to local and in-branch training sessions, the Client Success team ran virtual counsellor training with 52 UK institutions, with over 2,000 counsellor attendees in total across the sessions.

In an announcement from BUILA, Simon Emmett, CEO of IDP Connect, and Jacqui Jenkins, Global Programme Lead – International Student Mobility, British Council, expanded on why it is important for IDP to commit to the AQF.

“We really welcomed the work BUILA have been doing on the AQF, as we all strive towards ensuring the highest quality experience for students and universities within the student recruitment process. At IDP we've always aimed for excellence in this area so are delighted to be committing to ensuring all our UK-facing counselling staff around the world undertake the British Council training. We will also make it part of our onboarding process for any new counsellors joining IDP. Our regional staff have all welcomed the opportunity to align to the AQF, to ensure our university partners see our commitment to the high standards they strive to work to.” - Simon Emmett

"We are delighted to see that IDP have now committed to the UK’s Agent Quality Framework by ensuring all of their UK-facing counselling staff undertake the UK’s certified training. IDP have always demonstrated best practice and this is yet another example of how they are best serving both the UK education providers to which they have contracts and the next generation of prospective international students wishing to study in the UK. The AQF relies on all players within the UK’s international student mobility eco-system doing their due diligence and it’s great to see IDP leading the way." - Jacqui Jenkins