PLANS ALREADY IN PLACE As set out in published guidance, licensed student sponsors are responsible for all students they sponsor. This includes taking all reasonable steps to ensure prospective students are genuine, capable of complying with immigration rules, and able to enrol on and complete their course. The BCA framework is designed to ensure sponsors meet these responsibilities and can be held accountable if they fail to uphold the required standards. The BCA does not prescribe who sponsors may recruit or where they may recruit from. Decisions about recruitment markets remain a matter for individual sponsors’ judgement. Instead, the BCA changes align the metrics to existing expectations around recruitment and admissions practices across all cohorts. Where sponsors have robust processes to assess student credibility and capability, they should be well placed to recruit confidently from a wide range of markets (except where specific restrictions such as visa brakes apply). In practice, the tightening of BCA metrics is expected to encourage sponsors to adopt more risk-aware recruitment strategies. This may in fact support diversification, rather than restrict it, by reducing some sponsors’ historic over-reliance on particular markets, particularly markets where emerging risks could otherwise lead to BCA non-compliance.