ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the UK government has tended to view international students in recent decades, and how its policies have affected international students, both directly and indirectly. It suggests that rather than a unified international student policy, international students are affected by a number of larger agendas, resulting in a disparate, and occasionally conflicting, set of policies which include them, but in which they are not the main players. This creates a framework that constrains more than it enables the individual international student in their experience of UK higher education. It is then left to students themselves to negotiate this landscape successfully.
