By David Matthews. A Supreme Court ruling could pave the way for a "flood" of appeals from private colleges and overseas students against a significant number of government immigration decisions, lawyers have said. On 18 July, the court ruled that the decision in 2009 to deny a visa extension to Hussain Zulfiquar Alvi, a former student, to allow him to continue working in the UK was flawed because it was based on UK Border Agency guidance that had not gone before Parliament, as required by the 1971 Immigration Act. Nichola Carter, head of immigration at Penningtons Solicitors, said the judgment opens legal avenues for individuals who have fallen foul of "guidance-based" changes to the visa rules.
"This could potentially open up an entire flood" of appeals, she said.
Private colleges are among those that could seek compensation after more than 450 UK institutions were stopped from accepting international students last year. They had failed to sign up for highly trusted sponsor status or the "educational oversight" system of inspections from the Quality Assurance Agency, which the Home Office confirmed earlier this week would continue into next year. Ms Carter said that the highly trusted sponsor system was run "primarily under guidance" and therefore the removal of a college or university's sponsorship powers arose from a "questionable legal basis".
The first test case over whether private colleges can be stripped of their sponsorship rights by guidance is likely to involve New London College, which had its licence withdrawn in July 2010. It lost a Court of Appeal case against the decision in February, but is now waiting for permission to take the matter to the Supreme Court. Santokh Chhokar, senior partner at Chhokar & Co, which is instructing the college's case, said that if the Alvi ruling was "indicative of the Supreme Court's thinking", this could be "helpful" to his client.
Helen Smith, an associate in the immigration department at law firm Kingsley Napley, said that the ruling could also open the door to appeals by students who had post-study work visas denied on the basis of guidance, such as the requirement to have a certain amount of maintenance money. She said "potentially anyone" who had been refused a visa "on the basis of guidance" could appeal against the decision.
A Home Office spokeswoman said it was acting "quickly to ensure the requirements of this judgment are met" by putting current guidance before Parliament. But although the government would be able to make the current system watertight by doing so, previous immigration decisions made under guidance could still be contested in the courts. Meanwhile, it emerged on 20 July that the UKBA had suspended London Metropolitan University's licence to sponsor international students. Issues involving data collection, English-language testing information and attendance monitoring had led to the decision, the university said. And the government came under further pressure to remove overseas students from the net migration count after the Home Affairs Committee recommended the move on 23 July.

By Jack Grove. Outstanding lecturers and learning-support staff within higher education have been recognised by the sector.
Fifty-five individuals have been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy, which supports excellence in teaching. The winners will each receive £10,000 to help continue their professional development in teaching and learning or other aspects of pedagogy. More than 180 academics from England, Wales and Northern Ireland were nominated for the sector's most prestigious teaching prize.
The successful nominees, who were backed by their institutions, had to show that they performed well on three criteria: individual excellence, raising the profile of excellence and developing excellence. This year's fellows include academics working in a diverse range of subjects, from neuroscience to photographic art, while a member one university's student affairs team has also been recognised. One of the new fellows is Brendan Stone, from the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield.
Dr Stone left school at the age of 16 with few qualifications. He was in his mid-thirties when he returned to education on a university access course. He was nominated for the fellowship for his work on several innovative initiatives, including the Storying Sheffield project - a degree module in which undergraduates and residents of the city study together.
"It's been incredibly heartening to see how participants on Storying Sheffield have built on and used the experience of the course to benefit their careers and lives," Dr Stone said.
"I have worked a great deal with people who have serious mental health problems, and many people who have taken the course have gone on to make positive changes in their lives, including returning to education, taking up volunteering opportunities and gaining employment."
Craig Mahoney, chief executive of the HEA, said the awards helped to recognise and reward excellence within higher education.
"Students deserve - and expect - the best possible learning experience during their time in higher education, and fantastic staff such as the National Teaching Fellows help to deliver this experience," he said.
"I am extremely proud of the HEA in delivering this programme, and I congratulate all successful recipients."
The new teaching fellows will officially receive their awards at a ceremony in London on 10 October.

Le colloque 2013 de la CPU se tiendra les 15, 16 et 17 mai 2013 à Rennes. Il sera consacré aux politiques de ressources humaines dans les établissements d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche.
Politiques de ressources humaines : le colloque 2013 de la CPU se tiendra les 15, 16 et 17 mai 2013 à Rennes
Le prochain colloque de la CPU se tiendra du mercredi 15 au vendredi 17 mai 2013 à Rennes, à l’invitation de Guy Cathelineau, président de la commission recherche, président de Rennes 1 et de Jean-Emile Gombert, président de l'Université de Rennes 2.
Il sera consacré aux politiques de ressources humaines dans les établissements d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche.
Contact presse : Pôle Communication – 01 44 32 92 45. Lire le communiqué de presse.

The Vatican has stripped one of Latin America's top universities of the right to call itself Catholic or Pontifical.
It says the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru has damaged the interests of the church.
The Vatican has been locked in a decades-long struggle with the institution, which it accuses of drifting from its Catholic origins.
The university in the Peruvian capital Lima has long been identified with liberal, progressive thinking.
It was founded in 1917 and formally established as a Catholic institution by the Vatican in 1942.
However, the university has changed its statutes numerous times over the past few decades, angering the Catholic establishment in Rome.
One aspect of the dispute is that the Vatican wants the university to give the conservative archbishop of Lima a seat on its governing board.
The university refused him a post, despite a Peruvian court having ruled in 2010 that he had the right to one.
Peru's current and former presidents are both graduates of the university.
Gustavo Gutierrez, the priest considered the founder of the Liberation Theology movement, also taught there for years.

By Seema Singh. The university ranking system is getting bigger every year. More institutions are added, more heart burns are caused, more browbeating happens, more student lives are touched, and so on. But the question is: Is it getting better?
The year-on-year rankings have created a race, maybe some sort of an anxiety syndrome, where institutions strive to climb up the charts as several of them spring up from different corners. Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) from Shanghai that has been published since 2003 has emerged as the most cited ranking. Last year SIR World Report 2011, which ranked 3042 research institutions from 104 countries, created some flutter. From India, CSIR ranks 73 and IISc ranks 364 in the SIR list.
Most of these rankings look at research output and select their own variables. As a consequence, the rankings vary. In the latest issue of Current Science, two Belgrade University academics publish another ranking system using a so-called I-distance method which tries to integrate both quantitative and qualitative parameters. What’s interesting is that the authors, Zoran Radojicic and Veljko Jeremic, use the SIR World Report data of 2011 and show a ranking that has disrupted positions of the rich and famous universities. For example, Harvard, Stanford and Imperial College London which rank 4th, 19th and 36th in the SIR World Report, move up to ranks 1, 7 and 18 in the I-distance ranking. I-distance method has been proposed many times in the past. Jeremic says he has extensively published it in world’s leading journals. This time though, he says, he performed the I-distance and evaluated elusively higher education institutions so as to compare results with official SIR rankings and to point out potential inconsistencies with the ARWU ranking.
ARWU method has in particular two variables ‘Alumni’ and ‘Award’ which measure the number of Nobel prizes and Fields medals won by a university’s alumni, or faculty members who worked at an institution at the time of winning the prizes (‘Award’). This is more “glorious past oriented approach”, than SIR’s “current performance evaluation” approach, he argues.
Even though these rankings publicize the achievements of universities in specific ranges of activities, they have clear weaknesses. At a deeper level they foster a culture of spotting success stories which others want to emulate. Many even call it the homogenization race. But I’d argue that these rankings are missing a key aspect: since they do not rank disciplines, they are probably not helping students in selecting the best institutions. What if a university is great in neuroscience but weak in computer science, ranks high in metallurgy but low in mathematics? These ranks shed no light on such aspects.
In his paper, Jeremic draws a comparison between Chinese and Indian higher education institutions. From India, 111 institutions appear in the SIR 2011 list, of which 85 (77%) are in higher education. From China, 285 institutions make the list, and of which 240 (84%) are in higher education. These statistics, says Jeremic, indicate that the Chinese higher education system is nearly three times the size of the Indian system. In total, Indian scientific output is smaller than the Chinese output. (See the table.)
Incidentally, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) tops theIndiarank list in both the SIR and I-distance method. But more importantly, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) which is placed 14th in SIR is ranked second by I-distance.
Given these inconsistencies, the European Commission has devised yet another system – U-Multirank method that is a multi-dimensional, (unlike research based existing systems) user-driven ranking tool that uses yet another set of variables: research, education, knowledge exchange, regional engagement and international orientation. U-Multirank is slated for roll out in EU in 2013.
This has particularly emerged from the growing concern that the current ranking system brings distortion in research priorities and local, or regionally relevant, research gets unnoticed. At the recent Euro Science Open Forum (July 11-15) in Dublin, Ireland, Ellen Hazelkorn, head of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit at Dublin Institute of Technology said these rankings have created a “knowledge hierarchy” in which certain types of knowledge are considered more important than others. She implied that disciplines like life, physical and medical sciences get more weightage over arts, humanities and social sciences.
Many university ranking systems, including India’s NAAC, are flawed as they also give emphasis to input indicators and not just output/outcome indicators, says Gangan Prathap, director of NISCAIR and former vice-chancellor of CochinUniversity. He frequently publishes on this subject and has earlier analysed SIR 2011 data in Current Science in a new X-ranking.
“I’m not convinced that the I-distance is fault-free. It emphasizes the quality indicators over the quantity indicators. I think to evaluate performance, you need both,” he says. He however agrees that it’d be a good idea to do a discipline-wise ranking.
But the director of India’s top-ranking institution, IISc, Prof P Balaram is critical of these rankings. He believes Indian institutions slip owing to their small size.
Prof Balaram is right, says Prathap, as the current ranking systems are based on a composite value multiplying quality and quantity indicators and so favour large universities. Typically, a world-class university in North America or Europe is five times the size of IISc and they have budgets which are 20-100 times IISc’s, he says.
All these arguments aside, I have yet another issue with the ranking system. Why rank, when the world is moving to rating. Why not rate the institutions?
Ranking of universities is a very important issue, but selection of variables is the issue than can hardly get a consensus of all interested parties, says Jeremic. “I completely agree that some form of “rated” universities approach could be an interesting alternative to the quantitative ranking approach.”