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According to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, there are over 1,000 essay mills in operation in UK universities. The government announced that offering essay-writing services to students for a fee will become a criminal offence under plans to tackle cheating. Universities welcomed this decision and introduced codes of conduct with severe penalties for submitting work that is not a student's own.

The “proliferation” of essay mills over the past 5 years has led to an increase in the number of plagiarism cases. Last year, 338 cases were reported by universities in the North, with the majority of cases at Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon University. 1,000 essay mills companies are currently operating across the UK. Some are allegedly involved in exploiting graduates overseas where they are forced to work 12-hour shifts producing essays for as little as $1 an hour.

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) reports that the pandemic has demonstrated how innovative and adaptable essay mills marketing could be” by advertising discounts and “suggesting they could fill a gap resulting from a lack of supervision, or even offering essay writing to help students stay safe”. According to QAA, universities must look at how to prevent or catch cheating in the physically distanced assessment.

According to the Head of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), essay mills have become “public health and safety issue”, affecting all of society. As a result of students cheating in their degrees, there will be people entering into professions who are not qualified to carry out the work that is required. This practice is spreading now to the sixth-formers going to essay mills to get through their coursework at school.

YouTube stars are being paid to sell academic cheating, a BBC investigation has found. More than 250 channels are promoting EduBirdie, based in Ukraine, which allows students to buy essays, rather than doing the work themselves. YouTube said it would help creators understand they cannot promote dishonest behaviour. The BBC Trending investigation uncovered more than 1,400 videos with a total of more than 700 million views containing EduBirdie adverts selling cheating to students and school pupils.

The number of students caught cheating at the UK’s top universities has shot up by a third in three years, with experts warning that institutions are ignoring the problem. A senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London and one of the UK’s leading experts on essay cheating, said: “A growing number of young people also feel more pressure than ever before, often turning to cheating to help them get through their degrees. It’s also easier to access websites that offer paid-to-order essays”.

It is estimated that the ‘professional essay writing industry’ – services offering to quickly complete any assignment, to any standard, for a fee – is now worth over £100m, providing completed assignments to tens of thousands of students at UK universities every year. And where once it was mainly international students looking to produce work with a better standard of English, it’s a growing trend among stressed native speakers too. One of the largest companies, has seen the number of UK customers increase by a fifth over the last two years.