FOI_26-161 International student refunds

Date of response: 12 August 2026

We have now considered your request of 17 July 2026 for the following information:

Please provide the following information for the academic years 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26.

Question 1. The number of international applicants who paid a tuition fee deposit but did not enrol because their UK Student visa application was refused.

Question 2. Of those applicants, please state:

a) the number who received a full refund;

b) the number who received a partial refund; and

c) the number who received no refund.

Question 3. The total value (£) of tuition fee deposits retained by the University from applicants who did not enrol following a UK Student visa refusal.

Question 4. The average tuition fee deposit retained per applicant, together with the highest and lowest deposit retained in each academic year.

Question 5. If your records distinguish the reason, the number of refunds refused because:

• the visa refusal was on credibility grounds; and/or

• an Administrative Review was not pursued or was unsuccessful.

If this information is not held centrally, please state that it is not held.

Question 6. Please provide a copy of the tuition fee deposit refund policy that was in force for the 2025/26 academic year. If the policy changed materially during the period covered by this request, please also provide the earlier version(s).

Our response:

We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.

Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to questions 1-5.

We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.

'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.

Information relating to is held within our Admissions, Recruitment and Marketing department.

For the period outlined in your request, we have identified 410 cases/students which may fall into the scope of your request. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual case manually.

To explain our position, there are three separate workbooks and systems all recording slightly elements of the information requested, but not for the purposes of reporting in the way you seek.

To provide the information you seek exactly, would require a manual check against financial records for each case to see the outcome. From the highest recorded list of visa refusals. this is 410 cases; however, we would also be required to cross check against other department sources of information to validate the case numbers. To undertake this work and record the information asked from Question 2 – 5, will then need to go through financial transactions and corporate databases to ensure we are recording the correct information - this will take an estimated 25 hours for the 410 cases. Finally, to ensure that the information is correct for those that have a tuition fee deposit retained by the University we would need to spend 13 hours to check all the systems to make sure that this is also correct. At a total of 38 hours, this exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.

Under section 16 of the Act, and to assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we can provide some data to you, for a more refined period of one academic year only, for questions 1-5.

We are also able to provide a response to question 6 in full.

Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.

We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.

We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.