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Summary The UK government has planned to develop a new way of measuring student migration.
Universities have been campaigning for students to be taken off immigration totals.They fear the overseas students they rely on for income will be put off coming to the UK.The coalition has pledged to cut immigration - but most incomers are in the UK on student visas.Universities Minister David Willetts told university leaders meeting in Keele that the Office for National Statistics was working on ways to better count students in immigration flows.This is understood to mean that the government will have more detail on the numbers of overseas students leaving the UK - so a more accurate tally can be kept.At the moment, the government only has an estimate of the number of overseas students leaving Britain.It says students are not being taken out of the immigration totals - but that a new way of presenting information on them will inform the debate.London Metropolitan University failed to make proper checks on overseas students, government agencies said, although that is disputed by the university which is mounting a legal challenge.Mr Willetts said a £2m fund was being set up.The government has pledged to cut annual net migration - the difference between numbers of people arriving and leaving - to tens of thousands, but the latest figures put that total at 216,000 and most people who come to Britain from outside the European Union come on student visas.Since 2009, some 500 colleges have lost their licences to bring in foreign non-EU students, some of these because they chose not to apply to become part of a new system of monitoring who is being brought into the UK.
