Is English language testing still fit for purpose in UK higher education?

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This blog was kindly authored by Professor Susan Lilico Kinnear, Chair of International Communication, University of Dundee.

Across the UK, universities are re-examining their English language entry requirements as questions of fairness, validity and student success become ever more pressing. The pandemic reshaped the global testing landscape, and new commercial entrants have emerged to meet surging demand. But are all these tests, and the ways in which institutions use them, genuinely fit for purpose?

Putting the student back at the centre

The motivation of our three-year study – a collaboration between the University of Dundee, the University of Cambridge, the British Council and Cambridge University Press and Assessment – was simple: to put the student back at the centre of language testing.

We sought to explore the experiences of a variety of stakeholders in the language testing sector amid rising concern from academics and others about the standard of English exhibited by incoming international students during and after the pandemic (Bruce et al, 2025). Our findings, which include data from institutions in the UK, Canada and elsewhere, uncover not merely concerns about English language standards but persistent worries among frontline academic staff for the welfare and wellbeing of students unable to cope with the demands of their course and the environment in which they find themselves. These concerns were coupled with a growing sense of frustration at testing organisations that do not engage with academic stakeholders or understand the impact of language standards on classroom practice.

A misunderstood ecosystem

I would argue that test providers who fail to engage with academic stakeholders demonstrate a lack of understanding about the ecosystem in which they operate. There are multiple parts to this system: the customers of language test providers are prospective students; test providers deliver a service to universities, but the ‘end users’ of this service are academic faculty staff who rely on the quality of language tests once students reach the classroom.

Language testing is therefore part of an ecosystem and not merely a product or service delivered to an individual. Yet few test providers appear to grasp these dynamics. The result is a commercial model in which universities and academics, and by extension, students, are often passive recipients rather than partners in defining standards.

An imbalance of power

What also emerged from this research is a striking imbalance of power. At the faculty level, staff reported extreme dissatisfaction with the language proficiency of many incoming students but felt disempowered to raise these concerns, as they were frequently excluded from decision-making processes on test acceptance.

At the same time, there is a lack of language assessment literacy, or LAL, within the HE community itself.  Our study found that only 19 per cent of UK universities invest in any form of LAL training for staff who make decisions on admissions standards. Many told us they relied largely on the claims of equivalence made in marketing materials provided by test companies, and did not feel confident they were equipped to make informed decisions about which tests to accept.

At the university policy level, there is often insufficient understanding of the distinction between placement tests, used to gauge proficiency for lower-stakes purposes such as identifying support needs, and academic readiness tests, intended to determine whether students meet the entry criteria for degree-level study. Consequently, there is insufficient understanding of the different support and resource costs that students admitted via these distinct routes may require.

Trapped in the middle of these competing forces is the international student.

Yet when test providers were presented with our research findings, their response was telling: rather than engaging with the message, some questioned the methodology. Their response reflects a more ingrained challenge to sectoral integrity; one in which the financial and political imperatives of global testing overshadow the educational mission of universities, and ultimately the experience of students.

The cost of getting it wrong

This is not a niche academic issue. English language testing has become a multi-billion-pound global industry, and its influence reaches directly into the heart of university classrooms. Yet the consequences of using an unsuitable test for high-stakes purposes are rarely measured in economic terms.

Universities invest heavily in international recruitment and agent commissions, but few quantify the cost of student failure, i.e. the staff time spent on support, appeals or mitigation, or the reputational damage that follows, let alone the human cost to students. It is a false economy to pour millions into recruitment pipelines only to admit students who lack the linguistic readiness to succeed.

Reallocating even a modest fraction of this expenditure towards front-loaded language support and staff training would yield far greater returns in student progression, satisfaction and institutional integrity.

Towards a more responsible model

English language testing must evolve from a transactional model to a shared responsibility model. Universities should demand transparency from test providers on validity and comparability data, integrate pre-arrival and in-situ language support as part of their duty towards students and invest in language assessment literacy for those stakeholders who need to make informed decisions.

At the same time, commercial test providers should demonstrate a far more nuanced understanding of the ecosystem in which they operate, engage with academics to focus much more on what universities actually need from language tests and collaborate with universities to create meaningful training for staff, not just more marketing brochures.

Ultimately, the price of inaction is borne not by institutions or test providers, but by students; those who have invested their hopes and futures in a system that must do better to serve them.