How Borderless is helping higher education institutions stay compliant

The compliance landscape for UK universities is shifting.

The May 2025 Immigration White Paper introduced tighter Basic Compliance Assessment (BCA) thresholds, a new public rating system, and increased Home Office scrutiny of student sponsors.

For institutions already managing complex student populations across fragmented systems, this creates real, timely pressure. Compliance teams have made it clear that data consolidation, management and insight is required to ensure institutions remain UKVI compliant. 

That’s why Borderless is expanding into higher education.

Why this matters now

The new BCA thresholds are tighter across the board:

• Visa refusal rates must stay below 5% (down from 10%)
• Enrolment rates must hit 95% (up from 90%)
• Course completion rates must reach 90% (up from 85%)

These aren’t small adjustments. According to the government’s own data, 22 institutions would have failed at least one of these thresholds based on last year’s figures and five of those would have faced licence suspension.

In addition, the Home Office is introducing a Red-Amber-Green public rating system. Compliance performance will no longer be an internal matter, it will now be visible to prospective students, partners, and competitors.

For many institutions, this shift in UKVI handling compliance will pose a threat on their current mode of operation. This is where Borderless can help.

Why we’re building for this sector

At Borderless, our solution has supported over 600+ employers in ensuring they remain UKVI compliant. We’ve built systems that centralise immigration data, automate Home Office reporting, and give sponsors real-time visibility into where they stand.

The problem universities face is very real — and the current solutions on the market don't fix the specific pain points that compliance teams are dealing with every day.

Across the board, we’re seeing consistent challenges:

• Manual SMS data extraction: Compliance teams are exporting data from student record systems and cross-referencing it in spreadsheets. There's no automation and no single source of truth.
• No real-time BCA visibility: Teams are working from lagging indicators, not live data. They often have to do cross-reference reporting, and are not always certain on their BCA metrics.
• Fragmented systems that don't talk to each other: Attendance in one platform, student records in another, engagement data somewhere else, compliance tracking in Excel. Data lives everywhere and nowhere.
• Audit anxiety: Institutions struggle to prove compliance even when they're doing the work. Documentation is scattered, reporting is manual, and there's no clean audit trail.
• Small teams carrying big risk: Compliance functions are often under-resourced, with one or two people responsible for protecting the entire institution's licence, while also being the "bad cop" pushing back on recruitment ambitions.

The systems institutions rely on were built for student records and not for immigration compliance. As the regulatory environment tightens, that gap is becoming harder to manage.

We’re building for higher education because we believe universities deserve the same compliance infrastructure that employers in other sectors now have access to.

How we’re doing this

We’re taking the same approach that’s worked for employers: integrating directly with the systems institutions already use, and surfacing the compliance data that matters in real time.

What does this mean in practise?:

• We’re connecting with student record systems like Banner and SITS. We’re not replacing them, but layering compliance visibility on top
• Consolidating attendance data from wherever it lives into a single, usable view
• Tracking visa outcomes against issued CAS, so institutions can see which markets and agents are driving risk, rather than relying on self-declared refusals
• Providing real-time BCA visibility at any given point, not just when the Home Office reports back
• We sync with the Home Office's Sponsor Management System (direct SMS integration) giving you live visibility into your compliance position without manual checks

We’re working closely with institutions to understand how their teams operate, where the pain points are, and what a genuinely useful solution looks like in practice.

Every university and higher education provider is different. We’re building with that in mind.

What this means for the sector

Our goal is simple: to help UK universities manage student sponsor compliance with confidence.

That means:

• Fewer manual workarounds
• Fewer reactive decisions made without full visibility
• Compliance teams spend less time pulling data from disconnected systems and more time on the important work.
• Ensuring institutions and teams are primed for UKVI audits 

The regulatory environment isn’t getting any easier. But with the right infrastructure in place, institutions can stay ahead of it rather than constantly reacting to it.

What’s next

We’re actively working with UK universities to shape how Borderless supports the higher education sector.

If your institution is thinking about how to meet the new BCA thresholds, or if you’re looking for a better way to manage compliance across fragmented systems, we’d welcome the conversation.

Book a consultation to learn more about how Borderless can support your institution.

Borderless is a UKVI compliance platform that has supported over 600 UK organisations with sponsor licence management and Home Office reporting. We’re now bringing that expertise to higher education, helping UK universities navigate tightening compliance requirements with real-time visibility and integrated data.