15 June 2018: Commonwealth Ombudsman releases issues paper into the administration of the international student protection framework.

Today the Commonwealth Ombudsman, Mr Michael Manthorpe, released an issues paper into the administration of the international student protection framework.

This paper details issues identified by our Office after receiving a significant number of complaints about an education agent based in Queensland, who allegedly defrauded overseas students of tuition and other fees.

As a result of the Office’s investigations and the valuable collaboration and support of other departments and agencies, positive results were achieved for those students who were enrolled but had not been paid a refund of the fees they were entitled to under the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act. However, those who were not yet enrolled (i.e. intending students) fell outside of the protection framework.

Mr Manthorpe emphasised that “while the actions of one agent are not indicative of a system failure, this incident has highlighted opportunities for improvements when it comes to the administration of the international student protection framework”.

Steps have already been taken by the Department of Education and Training and other international education stakeholders to make improvements including critical incident response protocols, strengthening requirements relating to education agents and changes to the ESOS Act to support reporting of agent performance.

It is important that the lessons learned from this unfortunate incident are used to examine what more can be done to protect intending international students from unethical agent conduct as well as safeguarding the reputation of the Australian international education sector into the future.