The global trend towards internationalisation in higher education has been endorsed in the UK by the Prime Minister through two initiatives in 1999 and 2006. In response, universities have developed and implemented internationalisation strategies, which have been successful in terms of student recruitment. During 2005-6, a third of postgraduate students (131,580) were from overseas. A growing literature about the educational needs and experiences of overseas students in the UK has accompanied this trend. This paper contributes to the topic but from the context of an established, international, postgraduate UK institution. Cranfield University is unusual, but not unique, within the UK higher education sector in being entirely postgraduate with a focus on applied knowledge in engineering, management and the services. Of 3000 current students, one third pursue research degrees and the remainder follow taught course Masters programmes. Over 100 nationalities are represented on campus with around 1300 UK nationals. The research study was internally commissioned to address a goal of the institutional learning and teaching strategy. The aims are to develop an understanding of the educational implications of the diverse student body and of student needs in order to translate this into practical means of improving the student experience and educational provision. An exploratory, inductive case study was adopted as the methodological model because of the risk that a more deductive approach, based upon predetermined variables, might fail to capture accurately the reality in the setting. Data were collected in two stages. In the first, academic and support services staff were consulted about their views of the influence of diversity upon learning and teaching. The findings from this stage guided sampling rationales and the enquiry process in the next stage in which data were collected from students in face to face and electronic, individual and group interviews. Concurrently, a nested study of disability was conducted in which individual disabled students were interviewed about the challenges they faced and their views on educational support provision. Additional data sources included the results of internal survey evaluation questionnaires and Registry statistics on the student population. The findings from the staff consultation emphasised the different lives and experiences of taught course and research students and the consequences for educational needs. For the former, competence in the English language, particularly written skills, was a major concern. Students’ preparedness for the autonomy and self-reliance of UK Masters studies was another issue which was attributed to cultural differences and the variety within undergraduate education. Although the latter issue arose in relation to research students, staff attached greater significance to research students' isolation arising from the lack of an immediate peer cohort in both social and research community terms. Staff saw diversity as offering educational opportunities and placed a positive value upon it. Disability and diversity concerns intersected on the topic of dyslexia, posing complex problems for the support of language development and disabled students in universities with overseas students.