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Visa sponsorship question wording change

Since deploying the new question asking about visa sponsorship, we have learnt that it is more complicated than we first thought.

Whilst in the majority of cases, it is likely the provider themselves who hold the ability to sponsor Student or Skilled Worker visas, in some cases this will be a different organisation:

  • if the provider is a school, it may be that the organisation accrediting the Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) is the one who sponsors a Student visa
  • if the provider is school-centred initial teacher training provider (SCITT) with multiple schools in their partnership, it may be that the school where the candidate is placed is the one who sponsors a Skilled Worker visa

In order to account for these scenarios, we have changed the questions from ‘Can you sponsor [type] visas?‘ to ‘Can candidates get a sponsored [type] visa?’.

We also removed the hint text about the type of courses this applies to (salary or fee-paying) and incorporated this into the question itself.

Some further guidance was added before the questions which link to the registers of licensed visa sponsors, and to a page on GOV.UK which explains how providers can become a visa sponsor.

Before

Screenshot of previous visa sponsorship question.
Previous visa sponsorship question

After

Screenshot of new visa sponsorship question.
Updated Visa sponsorship question

Further issues to explore

We are also still investigating the possibility that for some providers, they may only be able to (or want to) sponsor visas for some salaried or fee-paying courses, but not others, leaving them unable to answer the question with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.