Methodology
This site republishes public records and says what they state, on the date they stated it. Everything below is intended to let a reader check our work.
Sources
Register of Licensed Student Sponsors (Home Office). Published most working days and replaced rather than archived — the Home Office keeps no history, so this record exists only because the files were captured at the time. Captured here every working day since 2 Sept 2026; earlier snapshots are intermittent, and every date held is listed below. We resolve the current file through the gov.uk content API, because the published file URL and its naming pattern both change between releases. Snapshots held: 34 (26 Jan 2024, 17 Jun 2024, 16 Sept 2024, 17 Mar 2025, 16 Jun 2025, 15 Sept 2025, 17 Nov 2025, 15 Jan 2026, 16 Feb 2026, 16 Mar 2026, 15 Apr 2026, 15 May 2026, 4 Jun 2026, 1 Jul 2026, 10 Jul 2026, 20 Jul 2026, 7 Aug 2026, 10 Aug 2026, 11 Aug 2026, 12 Aug 2026, 13 Aug 2026, 14 Aug 2026, 19 Aug 2026, 20 Aug 2026, 21 Aug 2026, 24 Aug 2026, 25 Aug 2026, 26 Aug 2026, 27 Aug 2026, 28 Aug 2026, 2 Sept 2026, 3 Sept 2026, 4 Sept 2026, 7 Sept 2026).
OfS Register (Office for Students). Registration category, UKPRN, specific conditions of registration, monetary penalties, registration suspensions, degree awarding powers and university title. The OfS regulates English providers only.
OfS student outcomes (Office for Students). Continuation, completion and progression per provider, with an international split on the first two. Shown with the OfS benchmark — what would be expected of that provider given who it admits — and the regulatory threshold, because the figure alone invites a comparison the data does not support. Progression is produced for UK-domiciled graduates only. English providers only.
National Student Survey 2026 (Office for Students). Positivity by question and theme for final-year undergraduates, with benchmarks. The only measure here that covers all four UK nations, and the only one that reports what students themselves said. It does not cover taught postgraduates, who are the larger international cohort at many providers.
Discover Uni dataset (HESA, for the UK funding bodies). Entry tariffs, the qualifications entrants arrived with, and two graduate salary series: the Graduate Outcomes survey median 15 months after finishing, and the median five years after graduating taken from HMRC tax records. The five-year figure sees only graduates working in the UK, so an international graduate who returns home is not in it. Entry tariff is reconstructed from the published band distribution and is approximate. The dataset contains no fee field — course fees are not published as open data by anyone, and nothing on this site should be read as a fee.
Student sponsor guidance, Document 3 — Student sponsor compliance, version 06/2026. The source for the Basic Compliance Assessment thresholds and the Red/Amber/Green framework described on the overview page.
UKVI sponsorship transparency data, table SC_01. Quarterly national counts of action taken against sponsors — intentions to revoke and revocations, by route. It names nobody, so it can never explain why a particular sponsor left the register. What it can do is bound the whole category, which is how the change log uses it: if three student sponsors were revoked in a quarter and nineteen stopped being listed, then sixteen went for some other reason. Published about five days after the quarterly immigration statistics.
Home Office and OfS material is reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0. HESA material, where used, is reproduced under CC-BY-4.0.
Who each figure is about
This site is read by people recruiting international students, so the single most damaging mistake it could make is to present a figure built only from UK-domiciled students as though it described everyone. Every measure was checked against the publisher’s own population definition rather than assumed, and anything UK-only is tagged UK wherever it appears.
| Figure | Who it covers |
|---|---|
| Enrolments, source countries, level split, trend | Non-UK students specifically — that is what these are. |
| Continuation, completion | All students. A separate non-UK figure is published where the cohort was large enough, and both are shown. |
| Progression | UK-domiciled qualifiers only. The OfS methodology excludes non-UK domiciled qualifiers. |
| National Student Survey | All final-year undergraduates, whatever their domicile. Eligibility turns on course type and stage, not nationality. |
| UCAS entry tariff | UK-domiciled entrants aged 20 and under holding UCAS tariff points. Discover Uni warns this can miss most of the intake where recruitment is heavily international. |
| Entry qualifications held | All entrants, but non-UK qualifications are not itemised — they fall into “Other”. |
| Graduate salary, 15 months | UK-domiciled graduates in full-time paid employment in the UK. |
| Graduate salary, 5 years | UK-domiciled graduates, matched to HMRC records. |
| TEF rating, register record, action plans | The whole institution — no domicile basis. |
The two salary series and the entry tariff are still worth reading — they describe the course and its labour-market value — but none of them is a forecast of what an international graduate will earn, and this site never presents them as one.
What this site does not do
It does not score or rank providers. The Home Office publishes no per-sponsor visa refusal, enrolment or completion figures, and has not committed to publishing them. Any risk score built on public data today would be an inference presented as a measurement.
It does not say why a sponsor left the register. A sponsor may be removed following suspension or revocation, may have surrendered its licence, or may simply have been renamed. The register records none of these distinctions. We report that an entry is no longer listed, and nothing further unless a separate, citable source establishes the reason.
It does not predict licence outcomes. An action plan entry is a fact about the register. It is not a forecast.
How changes are detected
Consecutive snapshots are compared after normalisation. Sponsors are matched on a canonical form of their listed name so that punctuation and formatting differences do not register as changes.
Renames are reconciled by hand. The register carries no persistent sponsor identifier, so a provider that changes its listed name would otherwise appear as one removal and one addition — the most misleading error this site could make. Verified renames are recorded in an alias table and reported as renames.
Change dates are observation dates. A change is known to have occurred between the two snapshot dates shown, not necessarily on the later one.
Corrections and right of reply
If a record here is wrong, or reads as misleading, we will correct it and say what changed and when. Institutions are welcome to have their response recorded alongside their entry.
Corrections log: no corrections issued to date.
Independence
Sponsor Record is published independently of any university, agent, aggregator or membership body, and takes no payment from the organisations it records.
Ownership and any commercial interests of the publisher are disclosed here before launch.