Here’s your starter for ten: what is Australia’s third largest export industry, behind coal and iron ore? The answer is education, which contributes the equivalent of around £11 billion a year in foreign exchange earnings, mostly fees from Asian students in Australian colleges. Even during the great commodity boom, education earnings have grown faster than exports as a whole. All those foreign students are also a boost to tourism, because families like to visit; and a diaspora of two million graduates of Australian institutions is a benefit to trade and diplomacy as well as a guarantee that the education income stream is unlikely to run dry for many years to come.
The UK has three times the population of Australia and 1.7 times the economic output. Our education export earnings for 2008-9, according to research commissioned by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, were £14 billion. Not bad, but you might still conclude that this is a sector in which we’re underperforming, despite obvious historic advantages. You won’t hear the subject discussed in those terms, however, because unlike the Aussies we don’t officially regard selling knowledge to non-Brits as an export sector at all. Rather, we see it as an immigration threat — hence the UK Border Agency’s attempt to deport the entire foreign student population of London Metropolitan University — and a potential theft of intellectual property by Chinese cadres at Cambridge and Imperial College London, who are plotting to take our science home with them and use it to wipe out our high-tech industries.
It’s time for a change of national attitude on this one. I found myself recently in the London office of the architects HOK looking at a model of Haileybury Almaty, one of two outposts in Kazakhstan of the famous Hertfordshire public school.
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