This article is authored by Dr Anna Piazza, University of Greenwich.
Today I am delighted to be joined by Dr Natasha Lawlor-Morrison, Lecturer in Strategy and Leadership at the University of Greenwich. Natasha completed her PhD, entitled Understanding and Developing Learning Agility, at the University of Greenwich in 2023 and has since developed an impressive research profile focused on leadership, learning agility, higher education, and migration discourse.
Her recent publication in the Journal of Education Policy, titled “UK Parliamentary Debates on International Students and Migration: A Discourse Network Analysis”, explores how international students are discussed within UK parliamentary debates and the wider implications for higher education policy and migration narratives.
Alongside this work, Natasha has also been actively collaborating with the Knowledge and Learning Special Interest Group (SIG) at the British Academy of Management since 2023 to explore the integration of AI in management education. This collaboration has led to a growing series of events and symposiums, including the Generative AI in Business Education and Research Symposium in January 2025, followed by The Second Symposium on Generative AI in Education and Research in April 2026, organised in partnership with the Research Methods SIG and featuring invited paper submissions. A third symposium is already in development. This collaboration has also strengthened connections between the Knowledge and Learning and Research Methods SIGs, which will now host a joint networking lunch at the 2026 BAM Conference at Royal Holloway.
Alongside her research, Natasha is actively involved in teaching, curriculum development, and student engagement initiatives within the Business School. Today, we will discuss her latest publication, her work on AI in management education, the motivations behind her research, the methodological approaches she uses, and what these findings mean for universities, policymakers, educators, and international students.
Now let’s discuss about your recent publication. I have a couple of questions that I would like to ask you:
What inspired you to research parliamentary debates on international students and migration? Why do you think this topic is particularly important in the post-Brexit UK context?
The interest in doing this research was a response to the announcement of plans to remove the dependents visas for postgraduate students in the UK. I remember being quite outraged. I work closely with a large number of international students and because of this, I know many male students with families back home, but very few female students. In my mind, this policy change would disproportionately impact female students and their social mobility as they would be even less likely to pursue higher education if they were unable to bring their children or husbands with them. Because of this, I really wanted to know what the argumentation for this change was, and whether such impacts had been discussed and this led me to want to analyse the parliamentary debates that proceeded such changes. Spoiler, potentially gendered impacts of the policy were not discussed.
What were the main research questions you wanted to answer through this study?
We wanted to understand what arguments were being made in the House of Commons to justify policy changes which were ultimately hostile to international student mobility, and to understand who was making these arguments and how they were spreading.
Your paper uses discourse network analysis — could you explain what this methodology involves and why you selected it?
Discourse network analysis was a good fit for our research questions, combining discourse analysis (which explores what arguments are being made) with network analysis (which explores the connections between actors, in this case politicians, and how they change over time). This allowed us to see the change and spread in argumentation in the House of Commons and to see how coalitions (groups of politicians with similar arguments) were forming and breaking up over the study period.
What were some of the challenges in analysing parliamentary debates from 2020–2023?
Ideally, with a longitudinal network you would like to see the same actors, so you can see how their position in the network changes over time, however UK politics is very… unstable. There were many leadership changes during the study period, fragmentation within parties, many politicians quit or changed party, we even see whole political parties essentially disappearing. This made the analysis more challenging.
Another challenge is that the House of Commons debates are great because they are transcribed and publicly available, but they do not constitute the totality of conversations between politicians. That is, we can’t capture those ‘corridor conversations’ – the private conversations- that may indeed have had a greater impact on the policy outcomes.
One interesting finding is the broad cross-party consensus on the positive role of international students despite anti-immigration rhetoric. Were you surprised by this?
Absolutely, the almost total positive sentiment towards international student migration was quite shocking- especially given the hostile policy changes that follows. I believe that this is a function of the public nature of the debates. Given how quickly public sentiments can change, politicians may not want to have ‘on the record’ negative comments towards international students, or any group in particular. I imagine that the non-public conversations must have had less positivity for such changes to be enacted.
Which discourse category did you find most dominant or influential?
Much of the debate on international students was about whether or not they should be included in net migration figures. This was somewhat disappointing as their inclusion has been advised against strongly by most authorities for well over a decade. This ‘nexus of international students and migration’ is really the crux of the issue. When international students are included in net migration figures, they essentially become an easy target for politicians to ‘reduce migration’ and gain sway with voters. If they are not included in these figures, then they would not be targeted. And there are plenty of reasons why they shouldn’t be; you can read this 2015 report from the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford if you’re interested International students and the net migration target: Should students be taken out? – Migration Observatory
What do your findings suggest about the future of international student policy in the UK?
Unfortunately, as the political right gain traction in UK politics, it is likely that international students will continue to be targeted despite claims of focusing on economic and social growth- largely because, as I say, including them in net migration figures makes them a target for politicians who want to be seen as reducing migration by voters. The overall positive discourse shows that politicians recognise all the benefits that international students bring, but ultimately, this did not translate into better policy outcomes. There is a tendency, it seems, to choose short-term personal benefits over longer term societal ones.
How do these political debates affect universities and international students in practice?
We have already seen the effects of these debates on universities, with UCU reporting 15,000 academic jobs cut last year. Universities across the country are facing massive financial difficulty exacerbated by reduced international student recruitment as they pay such high fees. For international students, we found in our subsequent interviews that these changes are impacting future study and work plans; undergraduate students who were originally thinking of also pursuing a master’s here report looking elsewhere, and postgraduate students are also changing their plans, preferring to take their high level skills elsewhere to another country who better values them. Ultimately, such hostile policies will have deleterious consequences for the UK in the immediate and in the long term.
What implications does your research have for UK higher education institutions that rely heavily on international student fees?
UK higher education institutions are financially struggling because of these policies changes. UK universities are no longer primarily competing with places like the US, Canada and Australia. Competition for students is really tough, and higher education in the UK is particularly vulnerable to changes in student recruitment because of how the business model works, overall it’s a recipe for disaster and one we are already seeing the effects of. I had hoped that, if House of Common argumentation was somehow flawed, that the higher education industry could react by better informing policy debate; however, what we found is that parliament are well aware of both the benefits and necessity of international students, yet adopt hostile policies regardless.
What was the most interesting or unexpected insight you gained during the project?
Probably the lack of negative arguments against international students, particularly around quality – which featured heavily in the media. That is, this idea that there are really low quality or ghost students that enroll in university but do not attend, using it only as a way into the country. This was not really discussed in the debates we sampled. We were expecting much more negativity than we found.
What advice would you give to doctoral researchers interested in policy discourse analysis or higher education research?
Policy discourse analysis is an excellent vehicle for research and one I would recommend, it can serve as a bridge between the academic and the real world; for example, we examined how academic arguments in papers were (or were not) being reproduced in the political debates that proceeded policy changes. In this way you can see what breaks through academia into common, or political, parlance – politicians tend to mirror the people, it’s in their best interests in terms of their political career to do so if they want the majority vote.
Pursuing higher education research is an excellent way to deeply understand the environment you are in, now, past and future. It also affords itself to interdisciplinary opportunities in ways that subject specific research rarely does- it is a common point of reference that binds academics across disciplines and borders. In doing so, you are exposed to new theories and methodologies beyond the narrow focus of your PhD and beyond, and then you can take this back into your field to make a genuine contribution through the novel combinations of ideas and methods.
Just out of curiosity, I know that you are working on another paper , where you move from analysing parliamentary discourse to exploring how international students themselves interpret and internalise these narratives. What motivated this shift from political discourse analysis to student meaning-making and identity formation?
I think very early in the research project formulation we were interested in what we saw as two sides of the same coin- what was being said about international students on one side (in parliament and media), and then on the other side how this was received by international students. It’s possible that for some who have dreamt of a UK education forever (or whose parents have), the fluctuations of the UK’s friendliness towards international students would have little bearing on their ambitions- after all, the UK has a history of racism and discrimination, it’s not new. On the other hand, given the rising number and attractiveness of alternatives for study, the UK might likewise have run out of it’s ‘good will’ (or colonial heritage) and students may just stop coming here. Therefore, how students experienced and interpreted these narratives is a good question and one that remains to be answered. Much previous research on the influence of politics on international students takes a very broad, macro, quantitative lens. That is, it looks at how changes in policies predicts fluctuations in student recruitment at a country level: not individual responses to statements made by people in power that pertain to the individual.
As we did the research, it became apparent that, somewhat surprisingly, international students themselves could be quite ‘anti-immigration’ and right-leaning. More so, was the fact that when they agreed with negative statements about international students, it was always about some outgroup- students from a different university or ethnicity – and from a social identity perspective this is really interesting and so this lends a good theoretical perspective to understand the results.
Thank you, Natasha, for such a generous and candid conversation — for walking us through your discourse network analysis of how Parliament debates international students, the striking cross-party positivity you uncovered, the ‘nexus’ between international students and net-migration figures that sits at the heart of the issue, and what all of this means for international students and the universities that depend on them. Your reflections on where policy is heading, and on your new work exploring how students themselves interpret these narratives, give us a great deal to think about.
If you would like to know more about this, please use the following link: https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2026.2661053
Anna
Cover Image is from the University of Greenwich
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