Provision of services to recruit international foundation students for the University of Birmingham

The University is seeking to appoint an organisation to provide student recruitment services to deliver significant growth in the number and diversity of suitably qualified international foundation students to its international undergraduate pathway programmes on the Edgbaston campus. This is to support the University's strategic ambition to grow and diversify its international student body.

These programmes are delivered in-house through the University's Birmingham International Academy (BIA) which has a prime on-campus location and is already well established and well respected in the market with a reputation for high quality delivery and excellent student experience, as evidenced by the BIA's student satisfaction and progression rates. The programmes currently include three pathways (noting there may be scope to expand the programme portfolio and intake points in the future). These are:

o Arts, Social Sciences, Business and Law Pathway (September and January intakes) o Engineering and Physical Sciences Pathway (September and January intakes) o Medical, Life and Geo Sciences Pathway (September intake)

There are two tender options for services to be provided as follows:

Option one: Services limited to soliciting applications from prospective international foundation students on behalf of the University and screening them to ensure they are suitably qualified before submission through the University's standard admissions processes (managed by the University's admissions office).

Option two: Services which also incorporate the admissions process, employing the University's established admissions criteria for its international pathway programmes and admitting students through the service provider's admissions function.

The successful organisation will have proven experience in successfully recruiting and admitting cohorts of international foundation students at scale, from multiple overseas markets across different regions, to pathway programmes at partner institutions. This will have been achieved through a developed global infrastructure of marketing and recruitment channels, and will ideally have been undertaken on behalf of other Russell Group universities and potentially other top 100 global institutions. Please note that our preference is to contract an organisation that has experience of pathway delivery as well as marketing and recruitment, even though we are not seeking to contract an organisation to deliver the programmes.

The key deliverables will be the achievement of pre-agreed enrolment targets, in line with University's published admissions criteria. These targets, commencing September 2021, are to be proposed by the tenderer on the basis of the information that is specified in this tender. The tenderer should specify total annual enrolment targets as well as a breakdown of annual targets for each of the University's three pathway programmes and intake points. They sh...

Additional information: Is a Recurrent Procurement Type? : No