Why trust in quality is key in transnational education
United Kingdom transnational education (TNE) is at a significant juncture. The UK’s International Education Strategy 2026 places TNE at the heart of the country’s international ambitions, prioritising, for the first time, the growth of educational partnerships and overseas operations ahead of recruiting international students to the UK.
The Education Sector Action Group, bringing together government, industry and representatives from across the education sector, will support implementation of The UK’s International Education Strategy 2026 by identifying opportunities and developing sector-specific action plans.
This is at a time when TNE is the fastest-growing sector for UK higher education, with the number of TNE students now overtaking that of international students in the UK.
At the same time, host countries are increasingly recognising the strategic value of inbound TNE to expand access to high-quality international education at home; reduce brain drain by enabling students to gain internationally recognised qualifications without leaving their country; address skills shortages; and strengthen and internationalise national education systems.
As a result, a range of countries, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and China, are developing more enabling regulatory frameworks and setting TNE growth as an explicit strategic target.
The pandemic further accelerated recognition of what TNE can offer, particularly as a means of widening access to quality international education for students unable or unwilling to travel, as highlighted in UNESCO’s ESD for 2030 roadmap, which calls for supporting forms of internationalisation that are more inclusive and sustainable than traditional international student mobility.
Yet, despite TNE’s socially progressive potential and growing strategic importance, the sector faces persistent challenges. I would highlight three, all rooted in a lack of trust.
The first is trust in quality. TNE is still often seen as a lower quality alternative to home campus provision, a perception reinforced by external quality assurance that remains variable and, in some contexts, less developed than for domestic provision.
The second is trust in purpose. TNE is often viewed as financially driven, just as expectations grow for it to go beyond delivering international qualifications locally and to embrace research, innovation and meaningful engagement with communities and industry.
The third, and arguably a precondition for the other two, is trust between partners. Many partnerships are still perceived as resting on contractual compliance and transactional exchange rather than on shared values, a common vision and a lasting commitment to mutual benefit.
Trust in quality: The recognition challenge
TNE qualifications are still not recognised consistently everywhere. Online provision and franchise or validation arrangements with partners lacking degree-awarding power face particular difficulty, as do qualifications obtained in third countries lacking established regulatory frameworks.
These barriers stem from a lack of trust in provision whose nature and quality can be difficult to assess, particularly as the TNE landscape grows more complex and in the absence of an international quality assurance framework.
Despite international guidance existing in the forms of the UNESCO-OECD Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education and the UNESCO-Council of Europe Code of Good Practice in the Provision of Transnational Education, the international quality assurance landscape remains characterised by variances, gaps and overlaps, with resulting trust deficits towards TNE qualifications and regulatory uncertainty (or indeed duplication) for TNE providers.
An important development in this context is the UNESCO Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education. It emphasises the importance for the international education community to facilitate the recognition of flexible and non-traditional learning pathways, including TNE, as a means of advancing SDG 4, and reminding of the importance of robust quality assurance structures as “a foundation upon which trust can be built and from which recognition is possible”.
The recently revised Council of Europe-UNESCO Code of Good Practice in the Provision of Transnational Education, adopted in October 2025, takes this point further, in a way which could be consequential for recognition practices. It emphasises the importance of evidence that TNE is quality assured on a basis comparable to domestic provision when informing qualification recognition decisions.
This places demonstrable quality assurance at the centre of the recognition challenge. In the context where external frameworks remain absent or underdeveloped, which is still the case across much of the world, including the UK, the burden can be expected to shift to providers’ own internal governance.
This is in fact the direction indicated by the revised Committee of University Chairs’ Code of Higher Education Governance, which sets out the expectation that governing boards should be involved in setting TNE strategy, risk appetite, due diligence and approval criteria and should secure robust, proportionate assurance covering academic quality, scale, risk, finances and performance.
Trust in purpose: From transactional to transformational
As TNE grows in strategic importance for both sending and receiving countries, more is being asked of it than the delivery of teaching and qualifications. Expectations are rising across all the traditional missions of higher education institutions, including research and innovation and community and industry engagement.
A recent British Council report on UK TNE alumni observes that as transnational education expands across borders, institutions and delivery models, the need to understand its impact grows with it, raising the critical question of what difference TNE actually makes on the ground.
Times Higher Education’s TNE 3.0 framework similarly emphasises the need to start measuring the value of TNE by its contribution to host country development, research capacity and industry partnership.
Host countries are increasingly framing inbound TNE as an instrument of national development.
The expectation is no longer simply access expansion and the delivery of internationally recognised qualifications, but a contribution to building future-ready talent pipelines aligned with national industry needs and to fostering research collaboration and innovation ecosystems aligned with national and regional priorities.
This is set out clearly, for example, in the Malaysia Higher Education Blueprint 2026-2035, India’s National Education Policy 2020 and Setting up and Operation of Campuses of Foreign Higher Educational Institutions in India Regulations, Vietnam’s Resolution 71-NQ/TW and China’s recent opening to TNE partnerships.
When we think about impact, research and industry engagement, branch campuses tend to come to mind first, and they are indeed the model that hosting countries most actively encourage. But they are realistic for only a limited number of providers and are inherently difficult to scale.
Validation and franchise arrangements, by contrast, are less resource-intensive and are the UK’s dominant models, yet they face the greatest recognition obstacles.
The UK’s own experience, nonetheless, shows that, when properly quality assured, these models can build local capacity and deliver real local benefit. It will be critical going forward to embed civic mission and opportunities for research and innovation into the design of these partnerships from the outset, and to articulate them clearly.
Taken together, the direction of travel points to a shift from transactional to transformational TNE, grounded in socially responsible internationalisation that takes the needs of host countries and partners as seriously as the interests of the awarding institution.
For UK providers, the current context makes this especially pressing. With mounting obstacles to international student recruitment at home and active encouragement from the UK government to expand TNE, the temptation to pursue growth for its own sake is real.
As they expand and diversify their TNE portfolios, providers must not lose sight of purpose and value creation. In partnerships, that means a shared purpose and a shared value proposition, underpinned by reciprocal trust.
Trust in partners: Aligning values and objectives
Neither quality provision nor broader social impact can be achieved without a strong and well-functioning partnership, based on trust. Critically, trust between institutions must be actively built and continuously nurtured, not assumed from contractual compliance. When planning, delivery and oversight become purely procedural rather than relational, trust between TNE partners risks deteriorating.
Trust starts well before a partnership is formally established. Partnerships are more likely to succeed when institutions define their strategic objectives for TNE and do not react opportunistically to the first proposal that arises. This requires strong internal alignment within each partner as much as it requires reciprocal dialogue between partners.
Close internal coordination across different institutional functions and departments (for example, research, finance, legal, HR and international partnership teams) strengthens both due diligence and the institution’s capacity to negotiate from a position of clarity about its own risk appetite and priorities.
Extensive dialogue before entering a partnership allows both sides to establish mutual understanding and shared red lines, making explicit respective priorities and what each partner hopes to gain from the partnership, as well as expectations regarding operational matters, including what an eventual, orderly exit would look like, before committing to any formal agreement.
That dialogue must continue, of course, after the agreement is signed, for instance, through annual monitoring, periodic reviews, student voice mechanisms and regular contact between academic leads, ensuring that both sides remain accountable to the agreed objectives and ready to review these as circumstances change, creating a joint culture of quality enhancement.
This is key to achieving a partnership built on real reciprocity, backed by long-term commitment, and that goes beyond compliance monitoring on either side.
This is precisely the expectation now articulated in the revised UNESCO-Council of Europe Code of Good Practice, which states that TNE should be grounded in equitable, transparent and mutually beneficial partnerships based on respect and reciprocity. It is also the foundation upon which both the quality assurance challenge and the transformational ambition outlined earlier can actually be achieved.
Can TNE be trusted?
The opportunity for TNE and international educational partnerships is significant at this point in time, with supportive policy environments in sending and receiving countries and a widening recognition of TNE’s social and economic value.
But the pressures accompanying it, on recognition, on purpose, on the partner relationship, are equally significant. They all boil down to one question: can TNE be trusted? Providers that treat trust as something to be deliberately built, nurtured, demonstrated and maintained are best placed to convert this moment into durable, quality, impactful TNE.
Dr Fabrizio Trifiró is the associate pro-vice-chancellor for educational partnerships at Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom. He is an international education expert and practitioner, with over 15 years’ experience in the quality assurance and regulation of international education. Trifiró is a member of the board of directors of the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) and was the former programme director for the Education World Forum, the world’s largest gathering of education ministers.
This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.