In a decision issued on 5 April 2017 the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration Services) found sixty charges brought by the OISC to be proven against Alpesh Patel of Aaryas Careers Ltd following an oral hearing between 23 January and 1 February 2017. Mr Patel had been registered by the OISC to provide immigration advice and services from 16 September 2011 until 2 June 2016 when his registration was cancelled.

Over the course of 2015 Mr Patel, operating out of offices in Hayes and Brentford located in West London, made Tier 2 visa applications for at least 16 complainants using a fake Certificate of Sponsorship. Mr Patel acted as an immigration adviser and recruitment consultant, introducing the complainants to companies that he claimed could provide them with employment and a Certificate of Sponsorship to allow them to remain in the country.

In each case Mr Patel charged between £3,300 and £13,000, usually demanding payment in cash. There was no legitimate recruiting company. There were no real jobs. There were no genuine Certificates of Sponsorship. On each occasion, the complainant’s Tier 2 application was refused by the Home Office, because the purported Certificate of Sponsorship was a fake. Each complainant lost thousands of pounds.

In its decision, the Tribunal found the conduct of Mr Patel to be “reprehensible” and held that he had played a major role in this deception. It noted that Mr Patel “has sought, serially, to deceive the Commissioner, and the immigration authorities, and to abuse the material immigration procedures, and has deceived all of those clients whose immigration affairs are the subject of these proceedings and in respect of whom the aforesaid sixty charges have been upheld, and dishonestly deprived each of them of a substantial amount of money”.

On 31 May 2017 the Tribunal directed Mr Patel to repay a total of £172,600 to the complainants and £7,460 by way of a penalty to the OISC. The Tribunal also directed that Mr Patel/Aaryas Careers Ltd be prohibited from providing immigration advice and/or services indefinitely.

Speaking about the decision, Deputy Immigration Services Commissioner Dr Ian Leigh said, “Alpesh Patel was entrusted to advise vulnerable people who could not handle their immigration cases on their own… they trusted him and he betrayed that trust by his reprehensible conduct. I am delighted with the outcome in this case.”

Ofqual has today (28 June 2017) announced that schools and colleges in England will in future have a second opportunity to challenge GCSE, AS level, A level and project results if they continue to have concerns about marking or moderation errors. This adds to their existing right to appeal results on the grounds that an exam board hasn’t followed its own procedures.

Starting this summer, those who continue to have concerns about marking or moderation errors in AS and A levels or project qualifications after the exam board has conducted its first review will be able to ask exam boards to look again. This follows the evaluation of a pilot exercise in summer 2016 involving 3 A level subjects (geography, religious studies, and physics), the results of which are published today. It found that this additional grounds of appeal provided a better opportunity for errors in marking to be identified and corrected.

The opportunity to appeal on the grounds of a marking or moderation error will be extended to GCSEs in English language, English literature and maths in 2018, and to all remaining GCSE subjects in 2019.

The period over which the new grounds will be phased in will give exam boards the time needed to appropriately build their capacity to manage the likely increase in appeal requests.

We have updated our guide for schools and colleges to reflect the change.

Commenting on today’s announcement, Sally Collier, Chief Regulator said:

We require exam boards to have procedures in place to make sure exam papers are marked accurately in the first place. However, it’s important that schools, students and teachers can challenge results if they have concerns. We’ve taken steps over the past couple of years to make the systems they use to do this clearer, more consistent, and fairer for all students. Today’s announcement means that everybody can have even more confidence that if a marking or moderation error has been made, it will be corrected.

We have updated our rules for project qualifications to include the new grounds. We have taken the opportunity to withdraw our rules for principal learning and diploma qualifications, as no awarding organisations plan to offer these qualifications in future, and we have also withdrawn the ‘GCSE, GCE, Principal Learning and Project Code of Practice’.