“Nigerians exploiting student visas to land social care jobs”

[Waleeu]

International students are exploiting their visas to work in social care roles for which they are unqualified, inadequately vetted and legally ineligible, according to a leading charity.

Postgraduate students, predominantly from Nigeria, are enrolling on university courses primarily to gain entry to Britain, before taking up full-time jobs in the social care sector through recruitment agencies.

Journey, a North East-based learning disability charity, claims that many students are failing to attend classes in subjects such as IT, finance and business management, instead working full-time in care settings, often hundreds of miles from the universities where they are enrolled.

In one case highlighted by the charity, a student studying project management at the University of Sunderland is living and working full-time in a residential nursing home in Edinburgh. In another, a student studying human relations at Teesside University claims to have been “operationally responsible” for a care provider based in London.

A student studying international relations at Gloucester University has been working in social care in Hemel Hempstead, 100 miles away.

The arrangements would breach the 20-hour weekly employment limit imposed on international students during term time and, according to the charity, undermine Home Office restrictions on recruiting social care workers directly from countries on the Government’s “red list”, including Nigeria.

Details of the scam have emerged as the Government this week boasted of having “raised standards for recruiting foreign students … amid continued visa abuse”. The Home Office pledged to strip universities of the right to recruit international students if too many drop out, insisting Labour was “tightening the screws

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/09/nigerians-exploit-student-visas-social-care-jobs/

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