English UK Statistics and StudyWorld
StudyWorld agent and buyer recruitment is driven by expert intelligence produced by English UK’s insight partner, Bonard. Our regular, in-depth reports not only help members identify market trends and opportunities, but also guide StudyWorld recruitment and how markets are prioritised for events and campaigns.
Our commercial director, Tim Barker, explores English UK’s intelligence in more detail…
As a bit of a stats geek, I always looked forward to receiving the English UK annual student statistics report when I was sales director for an English UK member centre. From a business performance perspective, we wanted to know in which markets we were performing comparatively well and where we were falling behind. More broadly, I was also interested in which markets were growing and which were in decline.
>View the Student Statistics Report executive summary / May 2019
These stats have become even more sophisticated with the development of QUIC. Over 150 English UK members are part of our quarterly intelligence cohort and provide regular student data in return for comprehensive, robust and timely statistical reports produced by Bonard.
These insights are crucial to help us make sure the right markets are represented at StudyWorld in the right numbers. It helps that we are a UK focused event; we are primarily interested in student numbers to the UK rather than globally.
What do the numbers tell us this year?
Key markets
France replaced Turkey as the fifth biggest market in 2018 due to a significant decline in the Turkish market. Otherwise, the top five markets remained the same.
Italy, China, Saudi Arabia and Spain retained their positions as key volume markets for the UK. These markets will be very well represented at StudyWorld this September.
Growth markets
In 2018, five countries in the top 20 private sector source markets saw double digit growth in student weeks; Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Oman, Argentina and Chile. In the state sector, China, Italy and Eastern Europe were significant growth markets.
I can see the seven agencies from Argentina, nine from Thailand and two from Chile registered for StudyWorld getting a lot of interest from educators looking to take advantage of the growing student numbers!
Asia and Latin America were also identified by Bonard as the two regions with the greatest growth potential for the UK when measured against our competitors.
Commissionable trends
The last three QUIC reports show year-on-year growth in the percentage of commisionable student weeks. All our reports also show a continued downward trend in length of stay, with the average length of stay down for adults and juniors.
This tells me that agents are still crucial to the health of our industry and with average study duration going down, diversifying student recruitment with new agents has never been more important. A successful agent event has a mix of returning agents and new agents, at present we are happy with the breakdown of 42% new agents and 58% returning agents.
A final thought
Returning to the memory of my time as a sales director, there was always an envious glance lower down the list of source markets in reports to try and guess who was doing well in the smaller markets. Who among my competitors was sharing the 1,248 student weeks from Finland? Where were those 422 Slovenians studying? And why didn’t my school have any of the 160 Armenians in 2018?
Doing well in these markets can be the difference between a good and a bad year for a school. In 2018, the markets from 50 – 100 in our private sector source market list contributed 45,971 total student weeks.
At StudyWorld a total of 53 markets will be represented, when considering your appointment requests, work towards being the school that I was always envious of!
You can still reserve your space or add an extra representative at StudyWorld to take advantage of the high agent booking numbers. Book your StudyWorld place now or call one of our team today to discuss the best option for you.
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